The events described herein took place during the period of February 8 - May 30, 2011. Attendant observations occurred between May 30, 1975, and the moment these words are read.
It is difficult to begin without borrowing. When it is genuine, when it is born of the need to speak, no one can stop the human voice. When denied a mouth, it speaks with the hands or the eyes, or the pores, or anything at all. Because every single one of us has something to say to the others, something that deserves to be celebrated or forgiven by others. Any starting point is arbitrary. Here seems good. 11 days from a flight around the world. Again. 489 days since You and I weren’t You and I anymore. It’s easier for autobiography to be about itself than fiction is, because by its very definition, autobiography is concerned with the consciousness of its creator in the process of creating a self...the autobiographer is allowed and even expected to surrender to the unfathomable phenomenon that is his own life. Is any artistic endeavor not a vanity project? Maybe writing was a form of bitching. Some just bitched better than others. All I know is this. Art is Art, or it’s shit. Our words are always someone else’s words first. What resembles nothing does not exist. How can you have a single text and not keep editing it? A text is evolutionary by its very nature. That is, the three epigraphs are: Art is theft; All great works of literature either invent a genre or dissolve one, and when you are unsure, you are alive. To Davids Markson, Shields, Eggers, and Foster Wallace. These are the Daves I know. I've never had the courage to want the world. I've always let it come to me, which is a rather negative approach to existence, but the funny thing is, inevitably, it comes. Sooner or later, whether you want it or not, the world comes to you, it comes at you.
Why should I give my Readers bad lines of my own when good ones of other People are so plenty? I’m not that interested or good at creating amazing narratives. I'm not really that interested in creating other characters or setting scene. I have almost no interest in the visuals of place. Feeling like, if this was an arthouse film, the moment where guy meets girls should be happening any day now. Any day. We come too late to say anything that has not been said already. Be influenced by as many great artists as you can, but have the decency to either acknowledge the debt outright, or to try to conceal it. Look I'm standing naked before you Don't you want more then my sex I can scream as loud as your last one But I can't claim innocence. Semantic satiation. Einmal est keinmal. Mother died today. Actually, that's not true. Mother died nearly 22 years ago. When it came, it came as no surprise. She lived with leukemia for nearly 6 years, and I vaguely remember it being said that she could expect 5-9 years when she was diagnosed. She was a nurse. I recall averting my eyes when she self-administered daily doses of interferon via injection into her thigh. I, who, like many children, would swoon and gag at the sight/thought of a needle, could not imagine how a person could give herself an injection in the leg every day with no apparent concern. Whatever I can bear, I will bear; whatever I cannot will kill me, thereby removing me from the pain. I don’t write or speak about her much. I haven’t in quite some time. When the topic of parents comes up with someone new to my life, I offer a simple “my mother died when I was 14” in a tone designed to preclude further questions. The response is usually a hasty and poorlyformed apology. As if the person were somehow guilty of something. Sometimes, now, I even joke about it, which might make me seem
callous.1 But how long is one supposed to mourn? Would it seem less strange if, after two decades, I broke down in tears at the mere mention of a woman about whom I now remember virtually nothing? Objectively 2 , losing a parent at the cusp of adolescence would have to be about the worst time in one’s life to experience such an event. If she’d died five years earlier, my father would have remarried quickly and that woman would have become my de facto “mother”. I wouldn’t have remembered much of anything about my biological mother at all. If she’d died five years later, I would already have been at college, something of an adult, more preoccupied with my place in the world than my place in the home and the family hierarchy. I would already have had my first experiences with substances and romance. I would have been able to internalize what had happened as opposed to avoiding it. Alas, choice in these matters is a tricky thing. As such, my psycho-sexual development was entirely arrested. I read somewhere that most boys have a few wet dreams each month when they reach puberty. I have never had one. Not even close. I’ve had dreams about sex, then woken up and masturbated, but I’ve never gotten one on the house. Common consensus seems to be that boys start formally enjoying themselves at around 9 or 10 years old. I was well past my fifteenth birthday. I remember having no clue about what exactly had happened the first time I did it. The exhortations of a portly 8th grade Sex Ed. teacher did nothing to prepare me for the fact that my penis was leaking white. That’s what I remember thinking at the time. Looking back, there were girls who would have kissed me. 3 But I was entirely lost. I made it all the way to college, into my twentieth year, before I kissed someone, and by that time I not only had grown into a person for whom sexuality was best thought of in the hypothetical, but also one who had no confidence that any woman would take a genuine interest in what I had to offer as a partner, physically or emotionally. They’re called ‘formative’ years because that’s when everything important crystallizes. The end result: From the outset of the period in which I could have been sexually active, I almost never have been. I have always been alone. Solitude is as much a character trait as my sense of humor, my cynicism, or my intellect. Sometimes I feel that if there had been one girl, any one girl, who had simply taken charge and initiated physicality in a way I was not capable of on my own, then everything would have been different. 1
By saying “testicular”, when asked what type of cancer it was, for example. If objectivity is not an impossibility in these matters. 3 Though many men would probably jump at the chance to relive their high school days possessing of an adult male’s sense of self and sexuality. 2
The odds were, overall, pretty bad that things turned out the way they did. Even now, it only takes one person to make you not single anymore. That person, however, seems in no hurry to appear. In high school, everybody eventually found somebody. I could name names of kids who paired off, even ones I wasn’t friends with. These were the secrets everybody knew, even before Facebook. Who was with who and where, who had had an abortion, something absolutely inconceivable to me, a boy who hadn’t even had a proper hug from a female peer. Everyone found someone to touch and grope, in the backs of cars or on parental sofas while mom and dad were out. Almost everyone. There were also the strange kids and the recluses and the sexually confused. Which group was I? I remember a girl named W_____ from the next town over who became part of our circle at some point in my junior, and more actively in my senior, year of high school. This was around the time when we’d decided that marijuana was the locus of existence, the social fulcrum around which all else resolved. Utterly lacking an identity, I was eager to embrace the title of ‘stoner’. I still belonged to the National Honor Society. I still got a 1420 on my SATs, and a 1390 the second time I took them, when my father requested I take them again, “just to see” if I could do better than 99% of the country, again, and I’m fairly certain I recall going to that test high. But I digress. W_____ was tall and willowy and pretty and had a sizeable mole above her eye, which is one of those details that shouldn’t still be on the internal hard drive 20 years later, but is. She was aggressive, sexually, and would talk openly about the sex she’d had, and I’d play along and pretend like I understood what she was referring to. W_____ was somebody’s senior prom date4, and we all ended up in a hotel room doing some things which wouldn’t be legal to us for 3 more years and others which wouldn’t be legal to us anywhere outside of Holland. At one point, sitting on the bed, sitting on me, with friends in various states of intoxication/consciousness all around us, she took my hands and shoved them down her pants. I pulled them out again like what was down there had burned my fingers. I am painfully aware that there was another stoned night later that summer when I could have, with any effort whatsoever, probably orchestrated a threesome with her and another friend. But I was only 19 at the time. Years away from knowing what to do in such situations. Still waiting. 4
Not mine, I took a cute red-haired beard who didn’t even think to come down to the Jersey shore – yes, that Jersey Shore - with us for the post-prom bacchanals.
My past is so littered with clear missed opportunities it’s almost hard to imagine how I could have fucked up that many times. It’s not even like I swung and missed. I just stood there in the box, with my bat in my hand, watching perfectly good pitches sail by. How many people from my high school class would be surprised to learn that I’m not gay? Now, I have recollections of times when masturbation was particularly enjoyable. I have, on occasion, fantasized about times I’ve fantasized, in what must represent the most pathetic feedback loop conceivable. There are memory.
lots
of
people
who mistake
their
imagination
for
their
A rocket going to the moon finally has to jettison the engines, and it has to get to the moon. In collage you’re going to the moon in every paragraph. Whereas in a conventional story you’re on this long journey to the moon and you finally get there. I’m more interested in going to the moon in every paragraph than the long, slow, patient journey. The strength of the work is that it is unbelievably compressed, dense, and I hope deep and significant. The weakness is that it’s all highlights. I even got acne late. I remember a particularly bad outbreak, living in Australia while in college. Several large pustules erupted on my face for which doctors gave me various cremes and unctuants. Washing my face compulsively and then applying them and then looking in the mirror every 20 minutes did little to ameliorate the condition, and much to exacerbate my perception of its importance. It seemed as though the more I washed, the more likely I would be to see new sores in other places. After several weeks, I finally gave up. I stopped applying the prescription products. I stopped looking in the mirror. The spots quickly went away on their own. I ended the condition by not caring about the condition. What isn’t psychosomatic? Patients given a placebo to treat IBS were told that it was a placebo and still experienced significant reduction of symptoms of the ailment. I don't wear the white coat for me, I wear it for you. Things I've Tried to Be at One Time or Another • • •
freelance journalist radio DJ club DJ
• • • • • • • •
bartender theatre producer stage actor professional voice actor party promotor concert planner editor spoken word poet
I spend the afternoon in Brooklyn making educational recordings for my college's online English Composition classes. I’ll be teaching people I don’t even know. A few more seconds of my 15 Minutes. My Last Lectures. From now. I’ll be in Australia for a year at least. Topics I cover include proper APA citation and how to avoid plagiarism. Afterwards, the Russian cameraman who was recording the session asks me to have a cup of coffee with him, and in the Au Bon Pain around the corner from the Jay Street station, he asks if I would consider helping him write his master's thesis. "I don't want you to write it", he says, "but I want you to do everything but write it." I fear he was not paying attention to what he was recording. I can't help feeling that I have a very specific and valuable skill set for jobs that will never provide me with any real amount of money. I will never earn six figures in a year. Unless you count the ones after the decimal point. “It's not what you make, it's what you spend.” One piece of useful advice received from my father. "Always order whatever they have as a special – you know it’s fresh,” the only other one that comes to mind. Money is like sex. It seems more important when you don’t have any. Wrote a book about it, like to hear it, here it go. In Barcelona, I dated an alabaster Rubensesque Norwegian girl for a while who didn’t like to be touched. She liked to be fucked, and with coke and ecstasy and hash and weed there were some sessions of that on frequent replay in the Wank Bank during the dry period after our break up. But when we slept together, she didn’t like me to come into contact with her. She wanted her own side of the bed. No spooning. On the street, she wouldn’t hold my hand. She told me I was being “clingy” if I tried to touch her in public. We broke up when she had a nervous breakdown and moved back to Norway. Five months after that, she moved back to Barcelona, and was fine, emotionally. She even lost weight, I heard. But by then, I was living in Poland, reinventing myself for the fifth
time.5 I have not been introduced to the parents of a lover in over 10 years. I dated a Polish-American girl in Poland for the entire year I was there, and when her parents came to her house, she introduced me as a friend. They came over early and unannounced one morning after I’d spent the night there. She hastily ushered me into a spare room and told them we’d been out drinking and I’d slept there on the sofa because I lived far away. I’m no one’s trophy wife. The world consists of everything that gets on my case. If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention. Things I Do Not Miss About Living in Korea6 • • • • •
• • • • • • • •
devout Christianity, from adherents who do not understand the religion lack of drugs lack of live music lack of a counterculture lack of a vibrant foreign community – everyone is either an English teacher or a soldier, and two less interesting professions it would be hard to combine in an expat community trains so crowded as to be dehumanizing the rank stench of kimchi garlic emanating from the pores of the masses7 style as substance women who have nothing to say because they are trained to look pretty, smile, and not cause any problems if they want a man both the worst beer (name any Korean one, they are all the worst) and the worst alcoholic beverage in the world (soju) the fact that no one is doing anything that everyone else isn’t doing the fact that, as a foreigner, it’s not a place you want to go, it’s a place you end up Jim Crow racism
Korea, metaphorically, was what I became for You literally – a bad relationship that went on too long. At least We had a good year or so first, though. I hated Korea from the day I got off the plane.
5
Latest update, version 6.0, 2.1 due for release in T-11 days. Version 7.0. 7 KO, Kimchi Odor, the term I coined when it accosted you through an open subway door. TKO, Total Kimchi Odor, for when it was especially bad. 6
“I moved to Korea for this girl I was seeing. An American girl,” I hasten to add. “But things weren’t the same when I got there.” How I now frame the last two years of my life, to people I meet. Things I Will Not Be Packing For My Life In Australia • • • • •
A winter coat Gloves A thick hat Bath towels An excessive amount of toiletries such as toothpaste and deodorant. When I moved there in 1996, I had my father send products to me, ridiculous, heavy things like tomato paste and canned sauce, things which cost 5 times their weight to ship. He sent them because I was young and away from home for the first time and that’s what you do when your only child goes for his Semester Abroad. Now, 15 years and 6 countries later, I realize that relatively, there is very little you can’t get there and that, if I can’t get it, I don’t really need it.
I’m so flexible that I’m shapeless. 8 days till another plane ride around the world. Most novels are basically transfigured autobiographies. Basically what happened last year to the author. He or she recaps it as fiction, essentially a life narrative. Over a buffet lunch of Indian food, I try to explain to my father the thesis statement of my adult life: The obtainment of any one thing negates any desire I may ever have had for that thing. I am fundamentally incapable of feeling satisfied with anything that I have, and fundamentally incapable of not losing interest in anything shortly after i've started doing it. A lot of people will say, hyperbolically, “I’m never satisfied.” But I am not satisfiable. With anything. With anyone. And I feel it’s vitally important to mention that at the outset of any relationship, work-based or personal, into which I enter for the rest of my life. I don’t know when this started. Additionally, I feel now the same way about life that I did at 21 there are myriad paths which interest me on various levels. But there's not one that makes me want to pursue it at the risk of not also following my heart in other directions as well.
Additionally, I treat friends like a 16-year old girl treats shoes – the newest pair is the best. Older ones get tossed to the back of the closet. There is little correlation between time and worth in my personal friendship ontology. Here, I thought to insert a list of close friendships which abruptly ended for no reason at all. Though I don’t see the point in dragging the innocent into this. And if there's an antidepressant which will make me not see the world in that way, then I'd consider taking it.* * may cause drowsiness, bloated sense of self-worth, and inability to pontificate.
It goes without saying that, as a child, I read Choose Your Own Adventure books from back to front. The first time I picked up a book by David Markson, in Strand Books on Broadway, just south of Union Square, I remember thinking, “I don’t know what this is, but I like what this is.” "There are secrets that everyone knows". My favorite line from any of the fiction I have attempted to pen. Selected Secrets of My Clan I heard at some point during my time overseas that my Uncle A_____ fathered a love child with a Peruvian woman. The child had a mild learning disability, and my Aunt P_____ ended up taking partial care of it, because that’s the kind of person she is. 8 One Christmas, about 5 years ago, I went to my grandmother’s house and saw a girl who looked like a younger version of my cousin sitting on the floor, playing with a toy. She had dinner with us. No introduction was made of her besides her name, which I cannot now recall. I never saw her again. My cousin J_____ had/has a wife who did/does not like her in-laws, my Aunt K_____ and Uncle J_____. The mutual distaste was so strong that, after some time spent in counseling with a priest 9 , J_____ just disappeared. This happened around 9 years ago. He’s still gone. “I don’t have no son,” my uncle will say at times towards the end of an Easter or Christmas dinner. He’ll laugh like he should be holding a beer, even though he doesn’t drink. I heard J_____ had a second child (they’d had a first before his disappearance). Supposedly, he went to my grandmother’s house one day when he knew his parents would be there, with a photo of the child, to show it to them because they’d never see the kid. Aunt P_____ told me about this. 8 9
Whatever kind of person that is. Which seems about as logical as asking a chef for advice about your plumbing.
My cousin K_____, J_____’s younger sister, had a baby 11 years ago. He was born about a year after J_____’s son, and it seemed as though she wanted one just to keep up. She had no boyfriend at the time, and she told everyone she’d been artificially inseminated. I was home for a few months between my life in Japan and my life in Spain10, and I remember asking her in earnest about what was involved with the process. “Oh, you just go in, and you tell them what you want, and they just fix you up,” she’d said to me. Even at 24, it seemed to me as though there was probably more to it than that. Years later, my younger cousin, R_____, told me that one day when she was working in my aunt’s pastry shop, a man walked in who looked exactly like K_____’s son. He went in to talk to K_____ and see the boy. It was her boss, who was (and, I imagine, still is), married. K_____, a graduate of fashion college and now a furrier who once defended the moral rectitude of her occupation by saying “Well, the animals wouldn’t be alive if we didn’t raise them for fur, and we kill them humanely – they don’t suffer” - was never that smart, so perhaps she just confused the words “artificially” and “accidentally”. It goes without saying that none of these things are discussed. I have been out of the family loop for the better part of the past 15 years. I have dropped in and out of these people’s lives, but on the whole, I don’t ‘count’. I am not involved. My mother’s sisters both live within one mile of their mother. They call her multiple times each day. I’ve spent more than 12 years overseas, many of which have passed without any correspondence between me and my kin at all. There are now so many things we don’t talk about that in the end, there’s not much to say. I don’t know who I talk to about what’s important anymore. Sometimes, whoever listens. Sometimes, no one at all. I have now, for the better part of the past two years, only been able to see the prurient side of sexual activity. I’ve only been able to see the fact that nothing is without consequence, and that no consequences are good. You, with Your babysitter. A_____, with her uncle. C_____, with her stepfather. etc. etc. etc. A sad truth is that it is quite difficult to find a woman who has never engaged in a sex act at least partially against her will.
10
Versions 3.0 and 4.0, respectively.
Women – you can’t beat ‘em. Well, actually... I cannot even witness men and women in public engaged in the act of ‘picking up’ without something close to a triggering of my gag reflex. If I see people on a date, I wonder what lies are being exchanged so as to further both parties’ respective aims. If I meet a girl I might like, I can only wonder what she’s hiding. I like my women like I like my fish – fresh, hot, and lightly battered. Not only did You cheat on me, but You told me that the man You'd done it with gave You the first orgasm You ever had. You told me this, because at that point, I was still Your best friend. And that’s what friends are for. If you're still single at 35, it's like going to a garage sale at 4 in the afternoon. Yeah, you might be able to find something worth buying, but it's not likely, and even if you do, it's going to have a few dings in it. After 30, a man wakes up sad every morning. "Hi, my name is ___, I'm from New York, do you know where I can get some weed?" How I introduced myself the first time I moved to Melbourne. After two arduous, drug-free years in Korea, will this time be the same? The body, after suffering a physical injury, displays a wound which will gradually scar and, in most cases, eventually disappear. Likewise the psyche, when confronted with a painful experience, will make fuzzy the edges of memory. It will forget details, circumstances, and words shared over time. We are remarkably, fortuitously bad at remembering the true nature of past pains, both physical and emotional. If we weren’t, there wouldn’t be many women having more than one child. There wouldn’t be many people engaging in more than one relationship, either. There are days, now, when I don't remember exactly how You smelled, how You sounded. There are days when I don't remember things We said to one another while lying in bed. There are days when I don't remember what I loved about You at all. But not enough of them. If the service provided in the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind were real, how much would willing clients pay for it? And how long
would you have to wait to get an appointment? Your laugh, Your smile, the shape of Your sleeping form nestled into mine. Some things stay with you. Y como se explica el hecho de que, todavía sigo pensando en español, a veces. que hay momentos en los que así las palabras me vienen aunque he pasado casa 7 anos fuera del país en lo que hablaba el idioma, y encima, mientras estaba allí, ni siquiera me gustó conversar en español. I heard, because I couldn't not hear, that You are now in Spain. I wonder how Your Spanish is, or who You practice it with. But also I don't. I don’t need more to unlearn. It is no surprise that there is an “Eternal Sunshine” app on Facebook. It was a considerable effort to remove all photos with you in them, and subsequently, it’s made my albums of the past few years look like something akin to ‘Garfield Minus Garfield.’ It also took some time to find every image in which you appeared and move them to a different folder on my laptop, so as not to see Your face when the ‘slide show’ screensaver turns itself on. I put those photos in a folder labelled ‘corrections’. Sometimes I am more pleased and confused by the fact that someone could like me than the fact that they actually do. What about me inspires attraction? Whatever it is, it would seem to be contingent upon not knowing me intimately. Ten years ago, I thought I was physically unattractive. Now I realize that, on the outside, I’m just fine. But on the inside, well, it’s hard to get on board with what’s on the inside. In dramaturgical terms, my front region holds up to scrutiny pretty well. But my back region, well, you don’t want to know what’s happening back there. You emailed me Your phone number when Our course together ended. I would never have contacted You had You not so entreated. You told me You liked my hair. You told me You noticed the muscles in my arms, while I was wearing a shirt in class one day which I no longer fit into properly. You made me feel lucky to make someone feel lucky. Every beloved object is the center of paradise. How to rationally defend the persistent and ludicrous notion that it's
better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all? For there were certainly many days near the end, and many more days after, in which I felt far worse than I would ever have felt otherwise. In relationships, all the good stuff happens at the beginning, and all the bad stuff happens at the end. Just like life. In the days leading up to yet another international departure, I wonder what should be addressed on the home front. To wit: How to explain to my father that his inability to understand me, literally, his inability to understand the words that I say, has made me significantly less likely to share things over the years? I am thinking about this now because it’s affecting me now, but it’s nothing new. In my teens, I was always repeating myself to him. Now it’s even worse. He has always told me I mumble. I don’t think anyone else has ever said the same. I don’t remember anyone else, including students in my ESL classes who were struggling with the language, ever telling me I don’t have a clear voice. When I tell him this, his response is, “Well, this is not something that people would say to you.”11 The sting of the word ‘oblivious’, too, stays with me. It was used to describe me when I was a child, an epithet hurled at me by both my mother and my father, one which hurt more than ‘stupid’ or ‘selfish’ simply because of its imposing alliteration. And perhaps because, even then, I knew it was true. Today, many years later, it still applies to me dishearteningly well. At least as regards the feelings of others. Maybe I have Asperger’s. If it’s so serious, why don’t they call it meningitis? It is natural, innate, to bemoan the passing of time, to long for bygone eras, to want things to be “the way they were”. It is natural, but foolish, for time is not static, epochs do not last, and the same river cannot be entered, by koanic definition, twice. Though what place in the evolution of the species is served by the sale of a coffee beverage which is larger in volume than the capacity of the human stomach? The Port Authority smells like melted butter. Machine gun-holding militiamen mull about the concourse, disinterested. The terror alert level of the day is beige. This is the New York that all people who only know New York now now know. 11
The same rejoinder he attaches to his long-standing assertion that I have bad breath, something which no partner/friend/acquaintance has ever told me. And I have asked.
Only in New York do you have to apologize for sitting next to someone on the subway. Partially this is because the seats are designed for bodies 60% smaller than those which are squeezed into them on a regular basis. They seem smaller than the ones in Korea, or Japan. Why? I spend my last days in the city soaking in everything, even the things I don’t really like. I suppose that’s how you know you love a place. The farts of our lovers smell like roses. 4 rats to a person. $1 a day, unlimited chirp. When it rains, it rains 40 feet beneath the ground on the subway platform at Utica Avenue, too. Except, after filtering through 40 feet of underground construction, it isn’t really ‘rain’ anymore. It’s something you don’t even want to get on your umbrella. You remember the remember yours?
name
of
your
first
grade
teacher.
Who
will
We live on in the hearts and minds of those whose lives we’ve affected. Sasha and Damani. 900-odd trainees. 3000-plus students. And this, ‘only’ 13 years into my career. The most important thing about being a good teacher, and how can I intimate this to you without sounding arrogant, or unhelpful, but the most important thing about being a good teacher is, being a good teacher. Art is Art, or else it’s shit. Things to Laugh About Today • • • • • • An
the low number of abo-digitals in modeling. the love of lamp Kenny fucking Powers Lay Z Boy and the Recliners, the name of the ska/reggae outfit I never bothered to form We Rock Soft, the title of our first nonexistent LP Maybe don’t wear a bra next time. Irishman,
a
German,
two
Russian
soldiers,
and
a
one-armed
Chinaman with a monkey on his shoulder walk into a bar. The bartender looks up, and says, “What is this, a joke?” “The woman you're about to marry has acute angina,” the doctor warns the 82-year old of his 78-year old bride-to-be. “Don't I know it,” the man smiles in reply, “And have you seen her tush?” I went black. I came back. But I have always been contrarian. The darker the berry, the closer it is to spoiling. Perhaps the adage would finish better that way. Me at the Rosh Hashanhah dinner in the Galicia Museum in Krakow, circa 2004: “There haven’t been this many Jews fighting over this little food in the Kasimierz in 60 years…” “_______!” “Oh, so because I say what everybody else is thinking, I’m the evil one?” ”No, not everybody else was thinking that Jews fighting over food in Krakow was funny.” ”Oh get off your high horse.” Who am I? I thing which tweets. The compulsive public hypergraphia of the contemporary internet user. I blog, therefore I am. It seems that more people want to write than to read (not realizing that you need to read in order to write anything that is worth reading or hasn’t already been written). But this is the inevitable result when a culture prizes self-expression over learning. Mojito ergo sum. The truth may change, but my opinion never will. Guy 1: What’s short, nerdy, and says “What the fuck, man?” Guy2: I don’t know. (Guy 1 slaps Guy 2 in the face) Guy 2: What the fuck, man? Guy 1: You, Dude. You. Life is 10% what happens and 90% how you react to it. So there's a 90% chance that I'm screwed before I even start.
I believe that every action has an equal and negative reaction, so if I just don't do anything, then nothing bad can happen. I don't blame You, for what it's worth. I wouldn't belong to any club that would have me as a member, either. There's no way to tell a story, even a true story, without it being a work of fiction. He said, She said. Already there are two conflicting narratives. If my life were distilled into a highlight reel of images and scenes, a “Best Of” compilation, what would be the sum total of its contents? March 15, 1995. Simulating masturbation and the subsequent ejaculation with milk fired from a well-obscured Super Soaker in front of an audience of 750 students at my college during a sketch comedy show. Lying down behind the table we've positioned to hide the gun, I don't see the standing ovation which followed. June 1, 2000. A love hotel in Kawasaki, then another in Shibuya. 36 hours before I leave Japan, simultaneously falling in love and trying to take out 10 years of post-pubescent sexual frustration with a very willing partner, a girl I’ve known for over a year and never really seen in that way, even though we’d already slept together once. It only got good when I knew I couldn’t have it. April 4, 2003. 3.10AM DJ Bizzee B puts on the final track of the night, "Fire" by The Prodigy, and jumps into the crowd to dance. The dance floor is so packed that the walls are sweating, but the revellers part to allow him room to move. And when the track finishes, they all chant his name. June 9, 2004. The feeling of the water of the Atlantic Ocean on my feet, 32 days and 842 kilometers after I walked out the door of an albergue in Roncesvalles, in the Pyrenees on the border between Spain and France. There isn’t a dry eye on the face. The summer of 1995, when I became a Phishead for a little while. March something, 2003 - A Zero 7 concert, where a deep-voiced soul singer exhorted the crowd to "hug somebody", and I did. October something, 1998, the first Air concert in New York, at the Hammerstein Ballroom, when I feel something resembling a true transcendence is achieved 30 minutes into the set.
August something, 2002, a Radiohead set at 1AM on the second day of a 3-day festival in Valencia, pills interspersed with kisses from yet another woman I should not have fallen in love with, when making out was better than making love, though we only ever did the former. The The The The The
first first first first first
time time time time time
I I I I I
was high. ate mushrooms. took acid. smoked ice. did coke.
The first spring I spent in Europe, when I wanted to tell everyone I met that the synthesis of MDMA was the most wonderful accomplishment that the human race had yet to achieve. Dates, lost to posterity. July something, 2001, sitting Indian-style, smoking Moroccan hash on the lawn in front of the Torre Eiffel. A windmill field in Kinderdijk, where metronomic swoosh of the mills' blades.
the
only
sound
was
the
The approach to Machu Picchu at dawn. Sitting atop a temple at Tikal as the sun slowly sank below the rainforest horizon. Watching it come up again from the peak of Mt. Fuji. My first drive along the Great Ocean Road. Nara. Kamakura. The stretch I walked on the Great Wall. Getting yelled at by a clutch of spider monkeys on the descent from Chiripo, the tallest mountain in Costa Rica. Getting caught in a street parade in Paris on a June afternoon after a long drive in from Spain. Carcassone. Figueres. The Prado. The Alhambra. Entering the medina in Fez, drunk on life and nothing more. And various other travel postcards. I'm sure I've forgotten something here.
February 26, 2009. I take a train to another train to a bus to a tired, towering, grey flat block in Dobong-San, in the northeast corner of Seoul. I ride an emphysemic elevator up to the 11th floor. I walk down an open-air corridor. I left two jobs and a perfectly good life and travelled 9,800 miles to be with You. And I ring Your bell. And You open the door. And You smile. And I say "I did it." Though I may be paraphrasing here. And You shake Your head, and smile. And You kiss me. And the credits roll. But sadly, the film doesn't end there. Or happily, at that. Here I thought to include a list of the names of women upon whom I've had a crush, but felt that it would be a violation of their privacy, not mine. Suffice to say, however long said list would be, it would remain incomplete. Notable in its absence from said list, though, would be Your name. You emailed me. You started this. Let that, at least, be known to posterity. Einmal est keinmal. What happened once, may as well never happened at all. 39 days into the Year of the Rabbit. 110 days until the completion of my third cycle of the Chinese calendar. Warning: Dates in Calendar are closer than they appear. 5 cycles, 60 years, being what was traditionally thought of as a full life for the Chinese. A sexagenary cycle. It would seem fair, with medical advances and life expectancy now what they are, to add one cycle to the five. I have no proof of this. It is just a feeling and, like many feelings, it isn’t based in anything. I am simply 110 days away from what might reasonably be expected to be the midpoint of my life. And were it a symmetrical mountain, I would be 110 days away from the summit. The apex. As far to or from the Void as I will ever be. With no way to stop and catch my breath. Time being a moving sidewalk in slow, perpetual motion. Contemplation often makes life miserable. We should act more, think
less, and stop watching ourselves live. Growing old is not a problem if you begin on time. If knowledge is power, how can ignorance ever be bliss? Our repugnance to death increases in proportion to our consciousness of having lived in vain. When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. An only child, but still a Gemini. You are a Gemini, too. At the other end of the cusp. Like two peas in a pod neither of Us believed in the existence of. “Geminis have two personalities,” I am, on occasion, told. “Only two? That seems to shortchange me by a couple,” my reply. Insert Whitman quote about being vast and containing multitudes here. The silent joy I recently shown to that I harbored personality traits fact-starved mind.
felt in reading that the entire zodiac system was be one sign off. As if to prove, beyond a doubt (not many), that the notion of star signs influencing is nothing more than celestial homeopathy for the
"That's such a Gemini thing to say". What sign are you? Stop. I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual. I'm not honest, but you’re interesting. At 13, I was 5'3" and weighed 88 pounds. I was convinced that every food would make me ill. I was an anorexic teen. With a cancerous mother and a post-bypass father, there was much in my life I couldn’t control. But what went into my own mouth, over that, I had complete dominion. A knish Little Caesar's pizza Saffron rice from Aunt K's kitchen Roasted lamb All things which made me vomit as a child. Though years later, at 31, I trekked a full day in the deepest canyon
in the world in Peru while suffering from salmonella. The least one can do, it seems, is survive. Haverford, Pennsylvania to Melbourne, Australia July 14, 1996 Melbourne, Australia to Tokyo, Japan November 29, 1998 Tokyo, Japan to Barcelona, Spain July 30, 2000 Barcelona, Spain to Krakow, Poland August 25, 2004 Krakow, Poland to Brooklyn, New York February 21, 2006 Brooklyn, New York to Seoul, South Korea February 26, 2009 - with extended layovers in Montville, New Jersey, in between, growing fat on junk food and stupid on reality television. Times when I feel uncomfortable, because I am between places, between episodes, and I feel like I have to see everyone in a short time but I can’t. And I don’t belong in my father’s house, where I can’t cook and if I leave a glass in the wrong place it will be duly noted. I don’t belong in New Jersey, where I have no friends, no car, no job, and no purpose. I am only ever there while emotionally unwinding from one overseas experience and mentally and physically preparing for the next. Even when I’m there, I’m not there. And these are the only times I see my father. My oldest penpal and erstwhile patron. Easier to keep changing your life than to live it. To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be. Realizing without realizing that there was a moment when the present continuous changed to the present simple to describe my career path. I’m not doing this. I do this. USAF pilots flying unmanned drones to drop bombs on insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan exhibit many symptoms of PTSD. What about jet lag? “Do you think that you may have harmed innocent people, civilians?” one was asked. “No, I'm pretty sure I haven't.” “How do you know?” the reporter pressed. “The technology, it's, it's very good,” the reply. “How was your day, honey?” “Good, everything fell in the right place.” July 1995, the last time I had red meat, not counting a few accidental bites here and there. I gave it up to align my diet with that of a girl who I was dating at the time. We broke up three months later. I stuck
to the diet. I bear scars from things which didn’t even hurt. Though the ensuing years have given me many reasons to reinforce my decision – environmental, moral, and social, among others. I'm a vegetarian. Funny, you don't look like a vegetarian. An atheist, I maintain a diet that would be amenable to the adherents of all major religions. Except for the occasional shrimp. Time. See also, passage of____ See also, regret over wasted _____ See also, impotence over powerlessness to stop the march of ________ We cannot waste time.
We can only waste ourselves.
The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time. The time you enjoy, wasted, is not wasted time. I would I could stand on a busy corner, hat in hand, and beg people to throw me all their wasted hours. What separates us from the animals besides the ability to hypothesize, to dream, to lament? There are times I find I am already regretting not ultimately doing the things I still have it in my power to do. Even the future perfect tense causes remorse. Preemptive anxiety. The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly one you can never have. Each day is an opportunity to travel back into tomorrow's past and change it. Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils. We ain't never gonna be as young as we are tonight. Do you ever get the feeling like you already know the entire contents of the universe somewhere inside your head, as if you were born with a complete map of this world already grafted onto the folds of your cerebellum and you are just spending your entire life figuring out how to access this map?
18% of Americans suffer from anxiety in any given year. The average Sunday newspaper contains more raw information than people in earlier eras would absorb over the course of a few years. Americans are 3 times as likely to express symptoms of general anxiety than Mexicans. The average college student in the 1990s was more anxious than 85% of college students in the 1950s. Mental and emotional problems have topped physical ailments as the #1 reason for worker absenteeism for more than 10 years now. He would have reached, all by himself, the final destination of every immigrant's journey: a better home in which to be unhappy. Love, Death, God, or Not-God. Everything else is just flipping channels. God, in his infinite wisdom, didn't bother to spring for two joints heaven and hell. They're the same place, but heaven is when you get everything you want and you meet Mummy and Daddy and your best friends and you all have a hug and a kiss and play your harps. Hell is the same place - no fire and brimstone - but they just all pass by and don't see you. There's nothing, no recognition. You're waving, "It's me, your father," but you're invisible. You're on a cloud, you've got your harp, but you can't play with nobody because they don't see you. THAT'S hell. If you have 400 channels you can only watch each one for 2 minutes a day – there’s no time to make favorites. Rationalism was meant to diminish fear, but ultimately, it has managed to do nothing of the sort; instead, it invalidated meaning, which merely served to heighten our dread. I pass my last days in the country consuming culture. As though American culture is at a premium outside of the hegemon. “I realize I should take a day off, go to the beach, fall in love or something,” the television executive acknowledged, “because you have to experience things so you can think, ‘Wouldn’t that be nice to get on television.” The big triangle bullied the small triangle out of the frame. We want to see humanity in the inanimate. We seem determined to give human qualities to objects and content to treat each other as things. When Animal Kingdom opened in Disneyworld, the first visitors complained that the live animals were not as ‘realistic’ as the
animatronic characters in other parts of the theme park. Sometimes an apocryphal story is too good to stay that way. Nothing is more real than whatever you want to be real. What is history but a fable agreed upon? You say perception, I say reality. Let’s call the whole thing off. What if I were to tell you that God's mental states, too, were all in your mind? That God, like a tiny speck floating at the edge of your cornea producing the image of a hazy, out-of-reach orb accompanying your every turn, was in fact a psychological illusion, a sort of evolved blemish etched onto the core cognitive substrate of your brain? It may feel as if there is something grander out there . . . watching, knowing, caring. Perhaps even judging. But, in fact, that's just your overactive theory of mind. In reality, there is only the air you breathe. We expect more from technology and less from each other. We build a lifetime of perceptions and experiences and loves and frustrations and theorizing and worry and laughter and confusion. And it ALL comes from the same perspective. It's all seen from the same set of eyes, heard from the same set of ears. Every mountain you climb is scaled on the same feet, every passage you read is intuited with the same mind, every mouth you kiss is kissed with the same mouth, every person you meet meets the same face, the same voice, the same set of preconceived notions, biases, uncertainties. We talk of knowing the world, but we only know one body's version of it. At one time, and in one place, at that. It is impossible for man to go outside himself. We can really perceive nothing in the world except ourselves and the changes that take place in us. The unshakable feeling that, after a relatively young age, you can change what you do, but you can't change what you are. How odd, the thought of not being a self-centered, or, to be generous, a self-focused, individual. When I do things for other people, it's because I force myself to. If it doesn't come naturally, does it count? The Ring of Gyges. What Ifs?
When I was in middle school, I was friends with Danny Fogelman. He was a good kid – everybody said so. Parents liked him, kids liked him. He was cute. He had a cowlick sometimes, and that was cute. He had a lisp, and even that was cute. He liked the Mets, which was something of a divide, but for some reason most of the Jewish kids in my town did. He was a fan of Kevin Elster.12 His dad was a vice-president of Toys R Us, which has to rank, arguably, below astronaut, Willy Wonka, and shortstop for the Yankees, as the coolest job that a father could conceivably have in the eyes of his children’s friends. Our friendship was nothing out of the ordinary. Time spent playing Nintendo and basketball. Time spent trading baseball cards. Kid time before kid time had any possibility of not being innocent. One time, he took his parents’ clunky video camera and we made a funny (to 11year olds) film about gladiator battles for a social studies class. When I got further into high school, Danny and I grew apart, as friends sometimes do. 13 Partially this was because Danny stayed clean. By the time most of us were smoking weed in each other’s back seats and back yards, I didn’t see him much anymore. I went to a college just outside of Philadelphia, and he was at U Penn. One time I tried to coordinate a reunion with him. We got as far as the phone call. Never did hook up, though. After college, after I started to be a Traveler, I heard little more about him. He’s not even a Facebook friend. I heard he moved to LA – he wanted to get into films. I heard he wrote a sitcom for the WB that ran for a year. Today, I IMed for a while with another forgotten friend from high school, who’s also made the move West. I don’t chat with him much, but I think he wanted to talk to someone, as he’d just found out that he and his wife are going to have their first child, a boy. It’s hard for me to say ‘congratulations’ for something I don’t want to do. Though by that logic, I’m not going to say congratulations to anyone, ever again. The friend mentioned Danny Fogelman, apropos of not much. Said he was doing very well out there. Said he was “still a great guy”. Google tells me Danny Fogelman is directing the next Steve Carell film, which he also wrote. He’s getting $3 million for it, according to one 12
The facility with which I remember such minutiae versus the difficulty I have in remembering a profound passage from a book I’ve just finished reading is both confounding and frustrating in equal measure. 13 Though I do remember a group of us driving around town and filling the trunk of my Cadillac with orange traffic cones, which we then took to his house and positioned both around and on top of his car. In suburban Generica, this was how we passed the weekends in a town where the bowling alley and the diner were the only things open past 9PM.
film site. I then found and watched an interview of him on the carpet of another big film he helped to write. He doesn’t have a lisp anymore. He is six months younger than me. I was in his first film. I went to his Bar Mitzvah. What must it be like to become more famous than the people you looked up to as a child? What must it be like to be richer than the people on TV? What must it be like to have a dream when you are young, then follow through on it, and succeed? How does that feel? I suppose that’s what I’d like to ask him. And if his mother still has the Cutco knives I sold her when I was in high school. She bought the whole set, even though all of us kids knew she never cooked. A few years ago, I considered writing a piece called “Dad, Would You Love Me More if I Was Derek Jeter?” Only a few months separate us, too. And five World Series rings. Though we are both past our primes, at least he had one. Would you love me more if I was Danny Fogelman? In Ron Currie Jr.s book, Everything Matters, the protagonist is born with the foreknowledge that life on Earth will end 36 years hence, on June 15, 2010, at 3.44 PM, when an asteroid collides with the planet and wipes out the human race. In addition to this foreknowledge, he also happens to be possessing of a prodigious brain, one which allows him to not only identify the asteroid threat and alert the world to its fate, but also to help those in power create a means of escape, via a huge spacecraft, which will let millions survive and continue to propagate the race on another planet. But he loses all interest in surviving when the one woman he has ever loved dies shortly before they are to board the ship and move onwards into their future together. He is then given a deal by the gods, or whatever powers have it in them to give such choices: He can go back in time to any point of his choosing, and live out the course of his life from that point. But he can only do it once. A Divine Do-Over. And the same asteroid will come and wreak the same destruction on the same date as before. So he chooses to go back to the moment when, at 17, he lay in bed with the woman he loved, then just a girl, and confessed to her what he knew of the world's eminent destruction. He chooses to live the years between that moment and The End as
though he knows nothing more than anyone else. And on June 15, 2010, he sits in his home, on his bed, with the people he loves, and he hugs them goodbye. Spoiler Alert. Either nothing matters, or everything matters, the eponymous quandary faced by the protagonist. Either the little things matter, or everything is just a little thing. It’s no big deal. Buddhism, summed up in 4 words. April 2, 2008. Easter Sunday. We are sitting at a long table in the back of my uncle's Peruvian restaurant, and my entire family is there, or what passes for my entire family. You are drunk on sangria and I am stuffed to capacity with yucca frita and ceviche de corvina. And You look at me, and in a low voice that the others cannot hear, You say "I won't go to Korea if you don't want Me to." "Don't be silly," I reply. "It's what You want to do.” Don't be silly. A divine Do-Over. Now, just another earworm. Semantic satiation. The first time I downloaded and used Google Earth, I was six months into my repatriation as an American, living in an apartment in a squalid part of Brooklyn and working a junior college adjunct professor’s job that felt neither financially nor emotionally rewarding. I panned back and forth across the virtual globe, centering in on homes from lives past. The place I grew up in North Carolina. The house we moved to in New Jersey when I was 10. My college dorm building in Melbourne, and the house I moved to in my senior year there. Tokyo was too fuzzy to zoom in on closely, and I didn’t remember my address there anyway, as it was comprised of words too foreign to remember. Barcelona, Krakow, Brooklyn, though – I found them all. At some point, overwhelmed by the crystal clarity of it all, by the fact that you can zoom in so close that you can see cars parked in the road, I began to feel like this would be what it’s like when you die. If you believe that anything happens then. You’d look down on all the lives you lived, look into all the windows of humanity where you’d loved someone, hurt someone, met someone, left someone. And you’d know that you were just a very small part of something immeasurably large. Somewhere, hovering a few hundred meters in the sky over Courtney Street in North Melbourne, I started to cry, dripping a few tears onto
the screen I was, by then, hunched over. To the people in the street, it probably felt like rain. In the afterlife you are invited to sit in a vast comfortable lounge with leather furniture and banks of television monitors. Upon the millions of blue-green glowing screens, you watch the world unfold. You can control the audio coming through your headphones. With a remote control, you can change the angles of the celestial cameras to capture the right action. So although you're not a part of life on earth anymore, you can monitor its progress. If you think this could get boring, you're wrong. It is seductive. It is spellbinding. You learn how to watch well. You become invested in the outcome of your descendants' lives, dozens of intriguing details need to be kept under surveillance. Once you've sat down, the monitors command your attention completely. In theory, you could choose to watch anything: the private activities of single people in their apartments, the unfolding plans of saboteurs, the detailed progress of battlefields. But, instead, we all watch for one thing: evidence of our residual influence in the world, the ripples left in our wake. You follow the successes of an organization you started or led. You watch appreciative people read the books you donated to your local religious group. You watch an irrepressible girl with pink shoes climbing the maple tree you planted. These are your fingerprints left on the world: you may be gone, but your mark remains. And you can watch it all. You may as well get comfortable: the stories play out over long time scales. You may choose to monitor the video screen showing your grandson, an aspiring playwright, deep in thought on a park bench, scribbling notes for a scene. You'll be able to follow him for years to track his success. In the meantime, waitresses drift by you with carts of sandwiches and coffee, and you only need to leave to sleep at night. When you return in the morning, you swipe your membership card at the security gate and choose a nice seat for the day. But here's the rub: everyone's membership card expires at a different time, and expiration means no more entry into the video lounge. Those who are excluded mill around outside the building, grousing and kicking the dirt. Weren't we good? they ask. Why should we be locked out while others watch? They, too, want to discover how their contributions guide the course of the world, want to see their grandchildren develop, want to witness the proud future of their family name. They grieve and commiserate with one another. But they don't know the full story. Locked outside, they miss seeing their organizations lose members. They miss watching their favorite people melt away with cancer. They miss seeing the aspiring playwright amount to nothing and do not have to watch his solitary death as he tries to drive himself to the hospital but draws his last ragged breath on the roadside. They miss the drift of social mores, their great-great-
grandchildren changing religions, their lines of genetic descent petering out. They don't have to watch as Moses and Jesus and Muhammed go the way of Osiris and Zeus and Thor. Meanwhile, they kick the dirt and protest. They don’t understand they've been blessed with insulation from the future, while the sinners are cursed in the blue-green glow of the televisions to witness every moment of it. A conundrum: The impossibility of writing and thinking at the same time. Even if I am in front of a keyboard when I have my most poignant insights, even if I type 75 words per minute and correct the errors later, pure thought is invariably distilled as it passes from mind to page or screen. Even the most honest introspection is heavily filtered and subjected to practical physical limitations. Further: What are we remembering when we reminisce? Are we remembering an event, or are we remembering the way in which we’ve framed it? Are the two even separable? Does the language we use to remember effectively become the memory itself? Are all our memories nothing more than stories that we tell ourselves, and refine over time? Consequently, when we endeavor to write about an event, we are at a loss, as all writing is ex post facto and subject to faulty recall and/or the innate desire to place some things as more important than others. Rousseau, Wittgenstein, Searle, and Ayer were troubled by this. How could anyone not be troubled by this? We tie an event indelibly to the language which we use to describe it. We choose what to remember and what to forget. We choose nouns to populate the memory, and adjectives which color it.14 Then we store it into our internal hard drives as is, where it is susceptible to further degradation as brain cells cease to function and newer, more vivid experiences premiere as new memories to replace the old. It does not matter if a detail is ‘correct’. If we remember it in a certain way, that way becomes true for us. Ultimately, then, when we reminisce, we are just remembering memories of memories. It’s the ultimate feedback loop, and it doesn’t require original veracity to selfperpetuate. We create our own narrative and then continually revise and revisit it as suits us. Our simulacrum is reality. In South Korea, a service provides those who want to kill themselves with an opportunity to write a suicide letter to their loved ones and lie in a coffin in a deserted clearing in the woods. A prayer is read over their inert form. Some emerge from their pseudo-coffins with tears streaming down their faces and a new resolve to live each day to the fullest. Others, however, 14
And every adjective is a judgment, by definition.
feel nothing. Life is the dress rehearsal for life. I buy used books from online vendors to defer the costs of my reading habit and to reduce my carbon footprint. But also because I like to have pre-read works, to see what they made someone else think, to see if the passages that affect me are the same as those which affected someone else. Oddly enough, 90% of the time, all markings are finished within the first 50 pages of the book. What at first sight merits a comment, later on becomes unremarkable. A metaphor lies in there, somewhere. What’s the point of a journal if it’s going to be kept under your bed? In America, there’s no shame in shamelessness. You get to an age where every new day merely reminds you of one already lived. Even a letter of the alphabet is now tainted with the memory of You. I had You in my phone’s contacts list with a one-letter appellation. In the beginning, I thought, “If this continues, I’ll put in her whole name.” I didn’t want to jinx things. There is an odd comfort I feel in returning to familiar places where I once lived but no longer belong. Barcelona, Tokyo, Dad’s house, Seaside Heights, NJ. And now, Melbourne. Again, not wanting to be a member of any club that would have me until it won’t anymore. Central, though, to the bonhomie I feel in revisiting recent prior haunts is the fact that my feet have been planted firmly in the “Just Visiting” square the whole time I was there. One week before the plane. I have lunch with a man my father’s age who I trained in a TESOL course which finished last week. The old guys always love me. The son they never had. I’m very good in small doses. It’s easy to put forth an air of professionality when they only see you for 6 days. During a course I always pick up a few ‘fans’. I’m so much more impressive if you don’t really know me. Though I suppose the same could be said of many people.
I give him my two cents on his plan to offer high-priced ESL tutelage to foreign businessmen. He tells me about the time he met the Pope. For what it’s worth, I had to shift lunch plans with a comely, smiling Korean girl in the group to meet this guy. “I’m now at the point where a lunch date with a 60-year old man is more intriguing than one with a 25-year old woman,” I say to a friend on the phone after we’ve parted. “Because I’m not looking for love from anyone, and it’s a safe bet that the 60-year old man will have a lot more interesting things to say.” A few months before I moved to Melbourne, the prefix to all landline phone numbers in the city so as numbers available.15 A few months before I moved to Barcelona, the prefix to all landline phone numbers in the city so as numbers available. Or perhaps just to make things easier for me.
‘93’ was added to make more ‘93’ was added to make more
The undue psychological importance we place on coincidence. We don’t notice the 150 times someone we meet doesn’t share our birthday. “What’s your name?” said the comedian to a person sitting in the front row of his audience. “Bob.” “Bob? That’s funny, my uncle’s name is Tom.” pareidolia – the ability of the human mind to perceive visual patterns in randomness. It wasn’t until I’d bought a car in Melbourne, a neon yellow 1978 Celica hatchback with bucket seats and a simulated wood-grain gear shift, that I noticed the license plates proudly proclaiming Victoria “The Garden State”. As a New Jersey boy, I felt at home again. You have discovered these traits together ten times, but have you also counted the times you have not found them together? When prompted for the last 4 digits of my social security number by a human interlocutor (as opposed to an automated service), I am occasionally met with disbelief, as my answer is four 3’s. My student ID in Australia, a perfect descension, 44332, and my zip code in Brooklyn, its near inverse, 11233. The unyielding permanence of 05/30/75, and the mild frustration that, in drop-down menus, the ‘30’ usually requires a brief scroll to become visible. 15
An aside: I’ve never understood how this works – if you add the same two digits to EVERY number, how does this make more possible numbers?
The great and small ways in which numbers inform and influence our lives. 1420, 760 math, 660 verbal. 141, though I was tested officially only when I was young. 187, but it should be 170. And I list it as 180 in online personals. 27, but I paid for 3 of them, so I don’t know if they count. 36 in 108 days. I can’t alter the story of my life to conform to some archaic theory of dramatic structure. How do you feel about working as part of a team? Depends on the team. “Inspired by real events.” What isn’t? The tautological superfluity any literary analysis which mentions that a story begins in medias res. What story does not begin in medias res? Besides the Book of Genesis, who begins at the beginning? Is there any more blatant delusional wish-fulfillment fantasy than the Christian conception of the afterlife? “What would you like to happen when you die?” “Well, I’d like to see all my loved ones who died before me, I’d like to sit on the banks of a golden river, I’d like to feast on divine foods, and I’d like it to last forever.” “Done. Just don’t take God’s name in vain. Or steal things. Or kill anyone. Or lie. But if you do, just say you’re sorry. And that’ll be enough.” Quite the deal, really. There are so many things I wish I believed in. The irony of calling it “The Greatest Story Ever Told”. Even those who wrote it knew it was a fabrication. Further, isn’t it arrogant and insulting to adhere to one religion while disavowing the merits of others? Because what you’re saying, really, is “this book, these stories – these are what happened. But your book? Those stories? Come on, man – that’s just Harry Potter. That’s some Narnia shit over there.” And isn’t this what being an adherent almost requires you to do? If you believe that Jesus was the son of god, and not Muhammed, but I believe the opposite, that’s a pretty major fucking disagreement re: our respective world views. How can we even communicate if we see the world and its history from such wildly different angles? Maybe we’re all speaking in tongues, but magically endowed with the powers of mutual intelligibility.
Or, maybe no one really believes what they say they do. They’re just scared. All firm belief is a sickness. Religious fundamentalism is a form of OCD. Pray at 5 pre-determined times a day. The left hand is unclean. Don’t let the meat come into contact with the dairy! Touch the wall-mounted scroll every time you walk into or out of the room. How to Pray the Rosary: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.
Make the Sign of the Cross and say the "Apostles' Creed." Say the "Our Father." Say three "Hail Marys." Say the "Glory be to the Father." Announce the First Mystery; then say the "Our Father." Say ten "Hail Marys," while meditating on the Mystery. Say the "Glory be to the Father." Announce the Second Mystery; then say the "Our Father." Repeat 6 and 7 and continue with Third, Fourth and Fifth Mysteries in the same manner.
Put it this way: if you weren’t doing these things “in God’s name”, wouldn’t they seem a little creepy? The modern usage of the adverb ‘religiously’, most often meaning “done without thought.” degeneration – the theory, popular in the 19th Century, that our psychoses are passed along genetically to our children. “I was raised an atheist.” “Are you kidding me? Who raises their kid to be an atheist?” A persistent small-town rumor in my childhood corner of Generica was that the fathers of many of my upper-middle class friends – doctors, dentists, lawyers – liked to do cocaine. At the time I could neither believe nor understand it. 16 Twenty years later, though, it makes a good deal of sense. Weed makes you lazy, lethargic, forgetful, and, in sufficient quantities or when of sufficient quality, can produce psychosis. LSD and mushrooms open doors to worlds that aren’t fun to enter once you’ve already obtained awareness of your own mortality. 16
Though at the time I could neither have believed nor understood what cocaine was on any level.
Ecstasy is a party drug, best set to music and with a pretty significant hangover effect. But for 20 or 30 minutes after you do a line of decent coke, you are not only lucid and bulletproof - you are also the most interesting person in the room. And so is everyone else. I smoke a cigarette after getting off the F train, while walking back to my friend’s house, where I’m staying during my final nights in the city. It is the first cigarette I’ve smoked in perhaps 10 years. Part of me just wanted to use one more from the pack I’d only bought to mix with the weed I smoked while here. I can’t finish a third of it. I toss it into the snow in disgust. One of the great paradoxes of my life at present – I love to smoke weed, but I don’t enjoy being high. A joint that doesn’t work, how I’ll always think of tobacco. Falling in love is a conscious decision not to play by any of the rules you’ve set for yourself. I don’t love many people, but I do love NY. New York City without a job is greatest city in the world.17 Something’s always happening. Additionally, weather notwithstanding, New York is the ultimate walking city. It is flat and safe, has measured, numbered blocks, and every 15 minutes you are in an entirely different neighborhood, with new buildings/people/life to observe. I walk from Union Square up Broadway to 62nd to get an international driving license from the AAA office there. I have left the country so many times that I’ve developed a routine. There is a checklist of things that need to be done. By this point, if I forget any of them, I’m pretty disappointed in myself. The street level of 5th Avenue between 37th and 38th Streets is entirely For Rent. A Zales Jeweler, the last functioning business in The Mall White People Used To Go To, sits on the corner of 38th, devoid of customers. New York rents have priced themselves out of the market. Or the recession really is that bad. Passing the Empire State Building, and then walking through Times Square, none of the touts addresses me. I was a New Yorker before I ever lived here, and I’m still one after I’ve left. Or perhaps I just look entirely unapproachable. Or poor. 17
Provided, of course, you aren’t poor – in that case, it probably isn’t much fun at all.
Ironic processing. You got me nothing for the last birthday I had when We were together. Nothing. If it’s the thought that counts, how much is nothing worth? “I can’t get you anything, because whatever you want, you just get it for yourself,” You told me. That is the exact line my father’s wife uses when she doesn’t buy things for him. And You knew that, because I’d told You. You couldn’t even muster an original excuse. On Your Facebook page, You wrote “Favorite Books: are books I like. If you want to know more, please ask. Favorite Movies: are movies I enjoy. If you want to know more, please ask.” Jesus, at least play the game a little. These are thoughts that, unbidden, enter my head on a regular basis. A friend told me of a friend who had recently spent $80,000 on his wedding. He is a banker and the money was not much of a financial imposition. This angered me, but not because I don’t have $80,000. It angered me because how could you marry someone who would rather spend $80,000 to say “Look at me! It’s my special day!” than actually do something with the money? Why would anyone spend money on a ceremony when it could be used on a vacation, an acquisition, an activity, a charity? There are many things about America I do not understand. There are many things about money I do not agree with. A List of Traits and Conditions Which Would Exclude a Woman from Consideration as a Dating Partner • • • • • • • • • • •
Any devout religious adherence or beliefs, including inchoate notions of ‘spirituality’ Desire for children Strong attachment to family and a desire to remain geographically close to them Conservative political views Bad breath Bad skin Refusal to drink alcohol, at least on occasion Refusal to use drugs, at least on occasion, or negative judgment passed on me for using the substances I do Bad taste in music (to be fair, “dissimilar” taste would be more accurate, as taste is entirely subjective) Too carnivorous Vegan
• • • • • • •
• • • • • • • • • • • •
• • • •
•
•
No desire to travel and live in other countries Overly materialistic, or materialistic for ostentatious things such as jewelry, shoes, bags, and cosmetics Disinterest in the outdoors, or refusal to walk on occasion instead of driving or taking public transport Someone who is always physically cold Large hips Bad teeth Very small breasts (by which I only really mean “smaller than mine”, and I do not have Bitch Tits. I have seen many women, especially in Asia, though with Mosquito Bites, which is a complete turnoff) Stupid, uneducated, or both Measurably smarter than me Too girlish – unwilling to get dirty, or to sweat Too much of a tomboy – a professional rock climber would be intimidating Inexperienced sexually – I have never had sex with a virgin, and I don’t intend to now Too experienced sexually – I know that all women lie about how many partners they’ve had by underestimating18 Uninterested in monogamy Uninterested in reading Uninterested in cooking, or eating Too wishy-washy Too strong-willed Able to realize and accept that it is not racist, sexist, or elitist to acknowledge that all people are NOT created equal, and it is perfectly acceptable, at times, not to treat them as such Unwilling to engage in debate Too interested in fighting Unable to understand sarcasm Unable to laugh, at least occasionally, at herself, at me, at the misfortunes of humanity in general (and able to realize that virtually no joke is inappropriate if said in the right way) Possessing of the belief that ‘Men’ and ‘Women’ are fundamentally different creatures, mutually unintelligible except through the framing of ‘Rules’ or blanket quasi-logical statements of the nature “Men are X”, “Women are Y”, “All Men want X”, and so on Possessing of any book which purports to shed light on understanding the opposite gender in terms defined by pop psychology, unless said book is owned ironically or in jest
There exists a list similar to this one which I wrote while living in Tokyo in 1999. I cannot find it, but I am fairly confident that most of 18
You, however, too this to a new level.
the items contained therein would be the same. And that, had someone told me in 1999 that I’d still be single in 2011, I would have been incapable and unwilling to yield on any significant points mentioned above to change that fact. Really I’m looking for someone who espouses the Aristotelian mean in every way. Except physical beauty, in which she would exemplify a Platonic ideal. But even if I found someone who somehow epitomized everything I wanted her to be and eschewed all that I didn’t, I would probably not date her. At most, I’d want her as a friend. Advice for love-seekers in the internet age. "If you want to know 'is my date religious?’, ask ‘Do spelling and grammar mistakes annoy you?'" If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for me. For a long time, I have collected bad English translations from signs, menus, and other printed materials. Four years in Asia have made this an easy pursuit to maintain. That which is unintentionally comical is also often unintentionally poignant. “Most things are never meant” on a pencil case from Japan being my all-time favorite. As I have not been in the country for two years, I am obliged to catch up with the family, at least once, before running off again. The longer I stay away, the more it feels natural to keep staying away, so it feels something of an imposition to work this into my predeparture schedule, even though I can make no claim to being ‘busy’. None of my extended family use email, and I don’t bother to call when I’m overseas. I don’t begrudge them anything – they have never done anything wrong to me, and they welcome me gladly whenever I am around. I just don’t feel anything at all. I said this to my father, a few days ago, while we were in the car. I enunciated the words slowly, like Don Draper, as if trying to convince myself of their veracity this way. My father has been pressuring me to go and visit them since I got back to America.I try to explain to him that I would prefer to have them as a good memory. Even though they are still here. I come from a very small family, by anyone’s measure. Two parents, one child. There would have been a younger brother, which was how my mother
found out about her cancer. A check-up during pregnancy revealed an abnormally low white blood cell count. Or perhaps it was abnormally high. Whichever was worse, cancer-wise. The decision to terminate was posed as an “it’s you or the baby” Hobson’s choice. Though if pressed, I imagine my mother would have been pro-life, at least in theory. Anyone is ever only pro-life in theory. Both sides included, there are 3 sets of aunts and uncles, 3 first cousins in total. I imagine many people my age no longer have any living grandparents, but I still have one, after losing two in a six-week span before I got the first stamp on my passport 15 years ago. Dad’s father died of a heart attack a decade before I was born. His father, too, suffered the same fate at a relatively early age. And my father had a massive coronary at 35. The age I am as I think these thoughts. In the ambulance on the way to the hospital, he wrote my mother and me a good-bye letter, which was ultimately left undelivered. Though he needed a triple bypasss surgery to keep on keeping on. At the age I am as I think these thoughts. There are no alcoholics in my family, no one who is physically abusive of his or her spouse or children. There is no one incarcerated, and no one who has ever been committed. Every family’s façade, though, upon inspection, will show some cracks. Selected Secrets of My Clan, Part 2 I am fairly certain both of my mother’s sisters have a time-hardened distaste for their spouses on a fundamental level which borders on disgust. This manifests itself in brief theatrical, tragicomic displays. I have seen my Aunt K_____ and Uncle J_____ call each other “fucking idiots” with untheatrical sincerity in their voices. Today, I am eating at the dining room table of my grandmother’s house, where the majority of my Easters/Thanksgivings/Christmases have been held. It’s the closest thing to ‘home’ that I have. My Aunt P_____ fixes my Uncle A_____ with a look of such pure vitriol that her anger is almost tangible, as though she has created and excreted a heaping plate of it onto the table before us. I am not connected to these people in a significant way any longer, and I still feel uncomfortable being here. The cause of this display? He has prepared two pieces of salmon from his restaurant instead of four to bring over for me to eat. That is the entire gravitas of their discord.19
19
That, and the aforementioned love child, one would surmise.
R_____, P_____ and A_____’s daughter, is a few months away from 30. She is, in fact, 6 weeks older than You, and that always seemed odd to me, because, in the absence of siblings, she played the role of younger sister to me when we were in frequent enough contact for that to be plausible. As children, as only children, we would stage battles of physical and verbal intensity aided by the fact that we were both spoiled little solipsists incapable of being either wrong or denied. At any rate, R_____ now lives in Los Angeles, where she has been on and off for the past 5 years. She has a duplex with floor-to-ceiling windows and a view of the “Hollywood” sign, P_____ tells me. She has a dog and a cat. She has a BMW, courtesy of A_____, in a failed attempt at trying to bridge the divide between himself and the gynocratic heads of his petit household etat. But what she has never had, in 30 years, is a job. Never. She has been living off parental largesse for the entire course of her existence. It is not uncommon, in our day and age, that twenty- and thirtysomethings cohabit with their parents. It is uncommon, though, that someone would be allowed to live in lodgings costing $30,000 a year while sending all bills to the Parental Home Office without a passing concern for what this means or why it might be wrong. Uncle A_____ and Aunt P_____ are not rich. He has a restaurant, she works as a school administrator. For a time I remember other family members trying to talk to P_____ and R_____ about the situation. Evidently, it was about as fruitful as discussing The Origin of Species with a creationist. And creationism as an analogy would be apt here, because Aunt P_____ will enter into no discussion about her daughter and the financial decisions which concern her, nor admit that it’s not in anyone’s best interests to play the role of enabler to whatever delusional rich girl fantasies R_____ is living. R_____ is like a Paris Hilton whose parents only own a run-down Motel 6.20 She also knew I would be at my grandmother’s today, so she calls me after I’ve finished dinner. It’s difficult to ask someone how they are doing and how their life is progressing when they have no vocation and no plans. What I want to say is, “Hey, even if you want to set yourself up so you never have to do anything, realize that if you blow through all of your mother’s money now, you’ll have nothing left later on when you actually need it. They will leave you a house in Hackensack, New Jersey, and that will be all you’ll have.” But instead I let her tell me about the improv classes she’s taking, even though she doesn’t want to become an actress. “I’m really interested in production,” she tells me. “Maybe it’s time to produce a paycheck,” I could, but do not, respond. One surprise: Cousin J_____, now in his mid-40s, previously MIA for nearly a decade, is now back, living upstairs from his parents’ bakery, 20
She also, I truly hope, has not made a sex tape.
around the corner from my grandmother’s house, once again existing within the very small microcosm of my maternal family’s northern New Jersey existence. Evidently, he may be getting a divorce. K_____ doesn’t really want to say, or doesn’t really know. She still is not allowed to see her own grandchildren. Even if I weren’t an outsider to the more intimate goings-on of the family, I doubt I would be able to engage them in a discussion of any of these things. I can’t talk about R_____ destroying her family’s finances to satisfy a very warped sense of vanity. I can’t talk about J_____’s divorce and the fact that he doesn’t let his parents see their grandchildren simply because he is powerless to stand up to a woman who may no longer even be his wife. I can’t talk about the origin of K_____’s only child and the reason why she is able to maintain a very lucrative job at the furrier with what is likely one of the securest positions in Manhattan. And when there are so many things you can’t talk about, what is there to say? Further, it is not a very big stretch to say that I, single and nomadic at 35 years of age, five days before my seventh international migration of the past 15 years, have turned out to be the most ‘normal’ of the four grandchildren that the family produced. At least I don’t have anything I can’t talk about. I just don’t want to talk about anything. Somehow that makes me sadder than if I were a Black Sheep. My grandmother, at 91 and now several strokes over par, confounds her nouns and pronouns. Linguistically, it is fascinating to watch the verbal production of someone whose brain kitchen is being run by a sadistic chef with no desire to prepare the dishes being ordered. She has long confused names, once staring at me and calling me “J_____” four times in succession, and getting angry when I didn’t respond. But now “aunt” becomes “niece”, “my daughter” becomes “your husband”. And any attempt to follow what she’s trying to say would involve a descent into a shifting private language the likes of which would make Wittgenstein raise an eyebrow and offer a finger-wagging “I told you so”. And she knows what she wants to say, and she knows she’s saying the wrong thing, and at 91, there’s no amount of speech therapy and no medicine and no way to reverse the cruel and debilitating tricks that time is playing upon her. On one or two occasions during our short chat, she laughs and raises her hands, saying “You know I don’t know what I’m trying to say.” I wonder what my mother would have felt, seeing her like this. My great aunt T_____ lives downstairs. She is 99 years young, 95% deaf, and 92% blind. Up until I went to Korea, she was still taking
care of herself, as she had done for the past three-quarters of a century. But evidently now her equilibrium is fading, and a few spills necessitated the hiring of a part-time assistant to sit with her during the day, a woman who, I’m told, she fails to recognize on a daily basis. Grandma’s assistant is full-time, and sleeps at the apartment. K_____ and P_____ have installed a baby-crib video camera in her living room so they can keep tabs on her at night. P_____ works a full-time job and then comes home to run up and down the stairs to take care of her invalid mother and her invalid aunt. While providing 100% financial support for her 30-year old indigent daughter. Ayn Rand would throw up in her mouth. T_____ sits watching a TV she can neither see nor hear. However, I am told her mind still works remarkably well. Somehow, that makes her situation even worse. When Al Roker calls her name, she won’t even know it. But she sure plays a mean pinball. Perhaps I wanted to stay away from the family because I wanted to remember things the way they were, instead of seeing them the way they’ve become. Perhaps, considering this, You shouldn’t worry that I’ll contact You ever again. K_____ called You Tiffany. P_____ asked if You were married yet. I had to confess I didn’t know. Though I have my hunches. In the six weeks I’ve been home, I’ve seen five girls in New York who looked very similar to You. You weren’t all that special. I wouldn’t have picked You out of a crowd, and in a few years, I probably wouldn’t be able to pick You out of a lineup. You did, however, call me. And for someone who’s never been capable of making an effort with women, that was something. It was enough. On the bus to my grandmother’s house from the Port Authority, I passed through a long stretch of businesses entirely owned and operated by Koreans. The signs were all in Hangeul. On the 7 train, everyone was speaking Chinese. Literally everyone. If I hadn’t lived in Asia, this might have seemed odd to me. At some point in the not-too-distant future, Asians will rule the world. Asians will be the world. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
It’s still not a bad time to be a white male, though. “So I won’t see you again before you go?” Grandma asks me when I bend down to kiss her cheek before departing. “I – don’t – live in America,” I answer, with a short laugh that comes out like a nervous cough. I feel this is the most honest thing I can say that won’t be rude. I take a bus back to New York City and wonder which of the people I’ve seen today I won’t see alive again. And if I’d actually fly home from Australia just to attend a funeral, if it comes to that. I feel now that seeing my relatives is akin to seeing an ex- with whom things ended badly. Though even hard feelings would be better than no feelings at all. Over drinks with friends, I find myself defending the recent exploits of Charlie Sheen. He’s an actor of negligible talents who is starring in an unfathomably popular sitcom and making $1.3 million per episode. But he is 45 years old, and time is passing. And all he’s doing now is living out fantasies that 90% of American men would like to fulfill. Fuck porn stars, do drugs, have a massive party at your place every night, because you can. What if he’s not a cerebral person? What if he’s not a philanthropist? What is he supposed to do with his time and his money and his thought? Fuck porn stars and do drugs. We branded Tiger Woods a “sex addict”. How many men wouldn’t be “sex addicts” if they had the health, the financial means, and the good fortune to be in a situation where the vast majority of women they met wanted to have intercourse with them? Stability is great, but so is new pussy. It’s easy to take the high road when the low one is closed due to construction. Most men don’t have the opportunities to be bad in the way that famous bad boys can. And who are we supposed to feel sorry for – the ex-wives living on $50 million divorce settlements and $35,000 monthly allowances, who now don’t have to endure a brutish, philandering spouse anymore? Let’s not try to create villains in situations of victimless crime. Besides, Men at Work was pretty funny. You are guaranteed nothing. Not even the end of this sentence. The most apt analogy I have yet to encounter regarding the passage of time and the pains of mortality is that of Wile E. Coyote, chasing the Roadrunner: He runs out far past the edge of the cliff. But he does not fall until he looks down. I don’t know when I looked down, but I remember, as a kid, driving on winding mountain roads where I lived with the headlights turned off. At night. “For fun”. I remember jumping out of a plane that had taken flight over the Great Barrier Reef. I remember having unprotected sex
with several people I really didn’t know that well at all. I have definitely looked down now. This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened. A significant percentage of those growing up with internet access in today’s world may think that “like” is something you click to show support, and not something you do. That “friend” is a verb. I watch a computer defeat two all-time champions at Jeopardy. I watch Lady Gaga enter the arena for the Grammys encapsulated in a giant egg held aloft on a sedan chair guided by 6 nearly naked, androgynous bearers. An Entertainment! Television reporter Scarlet Johansson: Va-va-va-voom!
uses
four
words to
describe
3 days before departure. “You have to realize that it is a religious event”, I tell the two friends with whom I go to my last NY warehouse party for, perhaps, ever. “And this is coming from the most nonspiritual person you’re likely to meet. But when you have thousands of people dancing in unison, bowing to the DJ who is on an altar – this, this is our religion.” There’s a certain value-added to a crowd all cast under the spell of the same music at the same time. Drugs do help, though. But the party we go to, sadly, isn’t all that religious. More like 100 people dancing in a way that belies the overwhelming ordinariness of the DJs, in a big, cold, half-empty room. The kind of party that makes you feel like you shouldn’t be going to parties anymore. My two friends eat mushrooms; I do coke. We share a few joints. I dance with my eyes closed and try to imagine I am somewhere else. Somewhen else. There is no age which is ‘too old’ for techno parties. It’s just that, the older you get, the more picky you get. You need the right crowd, the right venue, the right music, the right drugs, and if any one of these variables is out of sync with the rest, you just feel like you want to go right back home, put on the music you know you like, smoke a joint, and call it a night. Long gone are the days where I’d go out and stay out till dawn even if I didn’t like what was happening, just because it was the weekend, and that’s what you do on the weekend. Long gone are the nights when I went out with the hopes that something magical was going to happen. Even a good deal of the ‘fun’ stuff feels obligatory now. I’ve seen so much pornography, and for so long, via the anonymous confines of the internet that the thought of an actual physical encounter seems as foreign and perverse as the images which I watch habitually on my small laptop screen.
And I’m not even looking at the raunchy stuff. 37% of internet sites are porn. You can find the sex tape We made online. Just google Your name, and the courtesan term for what it was We did. Or Your name and the word “sucks”. Which does, I admit, make me laugh. It's on the first page of results. But really, with the way things went down, You had to know I was going to do at least that. I never knew how many people saw You naked when We were together. And now You don’t know either. Does that make us even? Sometimes, the clip is for me the scrap of newsprint Mersault finds underneath the mattress in his cell as he awaits death. The most frightening truths about sex rarely exist in the physical, but instead live in the intangible yet indelibe wounds created in the psyche. Go try to find that on the internet. He’s had sex with her. Well, that doesn’t mean he’s kissed her. There’s this moment, about five minutes in, where We’re both already naked, and We’ve just done something, and We’re about to do something else, and You’re looking at me, and You smile, and with Your eyes, You’re saying “this person, I want to do whatever with this person. I want to be what this person wants me to be”. And that’s the part I replay, again and again, in my mind. “If I wouldn’t want to do it, I wouldn’t want to watch it,” having always been my axiom regarding the medium. Though now, to be fair, I don’t want to do anything, and I’m still watching it. A quarter of all internet searches involve porn. Google is The Oracle, and we can type in literally anything and find the answer in microseconds. And the ‘answers’ we want are ‘3 girls, one guy’. And ‘amateur Asian’. And ‘bukake ebony’. emotional ambivalence – the simultaneous love and hate of the object of one’s sexual affection. As per Freud. They are not the stars – their orifices are. Let them open. Sometimes
now,
when
I
masturbate,
it’s
about
relationships
that
weren’t even good in the first place. To wit, the sex You and I have had in my mind is far better than any We ever had in either of Our beds. The language of the events was at least as erotic to me as the events themselves. Real physical contact now, not sex, but hugging, kissing, hand-holding – it creeps me out a little bit. In public, when I see lovers carressing one another, or even a parent kissing a baby, I reflexively avert my eyes. For what it’s worth. Departures. I’ve spent a bit of time online in the past few weeks searching for accommodation in Melbourne. The university doesn’t help to arrange anything for international students which, when you are paying $23K for a course and flying in from the other side of the world, seems to be at least a small dereliction of duty, at most somewhat offensive. Rental prices have gone up considerably. I remember in the 90s being considered ‘posh’ by some of my friends because my flatmate and I were paying $110 a week each to rent a house in North Melbourne. 21 Now it seems as though a room in that area is $200, if you can find one. I quickly realize that it doesn’t make sense contacting people offering rooms until I can see them in person. An email from a person 10,000 miles away saying he wants to move in with you is about as worthy of a response as one from a Nigerian businessman in neeed of someone to help him distribute his substantial funds. I book 10 days in a shared room in a hostel. I can’t justify paying $80 a night for a shitty hotel when I won’t be on vacation. I have no problem spending money on something, but I have a big problem spending money on nothing. It’s remarkable how little money you need, though, when you’ve realized you don’t want anything. I earn and have a fraction of what most of my friends in NY do. But it still seems like I have more than enough. No human thing is of serious importance. A man is wealthy in proportion to the things he can do without. It’s not what you make, it’s what you spend. If a man is not an oligarch, something is not right within him. Everyone had the same starting conditions, everyone could have done it. 21
Well, our respective parents were paying $110 a week, which, in retrospect, somewhat ‘posh’, since a lot of other kids I knew didn’t have the financial support.
was
We are much less place-based than we used to be. We are the people who know airline flight attendants better than we know our own wives. Besides being neither rich nor attractive, I identified strongly with the protagonist of Up in the Air, played by George Clooney. It now feels like any place is as good as any other. I've chosen a career path which makes it very easy to espouse that attitude, and the older I get, and the more I do it, the easier it becomes. When I look for jobs online, I'm primarily concerned about conditions and responsibilties, not geography. Though there are a few countries on my personal 'no fly' list. There has been a 44% increase in New York Times articles mentioning the world “uncertainty” from 2007 to 2010. 15-19 year olds in the US self-reported that they’d spent 5 minutes a day reading in 2009. In New York City, there has been an 82 percent reduction in homicide, 77 in rape, 84 in robbery, and 94 in auto theft since 1990. Perhaps there's just nothing worth stealing anymore. But two-thirds of people still feel there's an increase in crime. Perception is Reality. New York would be good for me if I wanted it to be good for me. It was good for me while I was here. It would be good for me again, if I came back. But I don’t want to. The days leading up to an international departure are always imbued with introspection. Which, for a person who lives entirely within the confines of his own mind, is saying something. I was born with an arrhythmia, and a hole in my heart which my parents and doctors feared would require surgery. Fortunately, by the time I was two, it had closed sufficiently to make the operation, which would have left a visible scar down my chest to this day, unnecessary. My earliest memories were of hospitals – distinctly I remember, at the age of three, being encased in a plastic tent when, still weak, I was suffering from bronchitis. My father brought me a Starsky and Hutch movie reel toy. In the absence of siblings, only children tend to connect with their toys.
We moved when I was 2, and 6, and 10. My mother was diagnosed with leukemia when I was eight, and my father suffered a massive heart attack when I was nine. However, it would be both facile and disingenuous to point the finger at one event in my childhood and say “That was where I veered off the path of normalcy”. Rather, these are some things that happened, and here I am, now. Causality vs. constant conjunction. I didn’t grow up against the backdrop of war. I wasn’t beaten, or sexually abused. Both my parents displayed the banal temperance of the teetotaller for as long as I can remember, and probably for some years before that. Besides the sickness and the dying, everything was ok. But even before the sickness and the dying started, I wasn’t. Anxiety has always featured prominently in my mental landscape. As a child I would cry after getting one answer wrong on a spelling test. I would cry when anything at all was out of the ordinary, when mom left the room, when I didn’t get what I wanted. I would throw things, hit things, break things, when they didn’t ‘work’. I’ve always reacted very negatively towards things which don’t conform to my view of how they should be. When I was five, my parents decided that I should learn how to swim. I hated the idea, I hated the water, and I genuinely hated the instructor, whose name is lost to posterity, but whose frilly one-piece bathing suits and curly brown hair remain indelibly etched in my mind. She would dunk me under water (with warning, of course), in an attempt to get me used to being there. I would scream and cry. I still remember the taste and the smell of the pool’s chlorine which would invade my eyes, my nose, my mouth if I did not properly close them. I still remember the feeling of water going down my throat when I didn’t want it there. On the last day of my scheduled lessons, I had learned nothing, except that the water was a place to fear (something I have kept with me to this day). I did not want to go in again. I cried, I screamed. My mother was there. Finally, I had become so frightened and shocked by the prospect of being drowned by this evil aqua-Nazi who clearly wanted me dead, I vomited onto the concrete ground beside the pool. My mother, a nurse, recanted and took me in her arms, and there was no lesson that day, or ever again. Point, me. I remember countless instances of evasive reasoning growing up, to avoid pool parties and invitations to “Come on in!”, because the water was definitely not fine for me. I told people that I was allergic to chlorine, and, while I did experience red eyes and a scratchy throat when near a pool, that wasn’t the main reason I wasn’t allowed in the deep end.
The apocryphal gets real enough after a while. I suppose, with the benefit of hindsight, that this was also the beginning of a lifetime of never doing anything that I didn’t want to. Soon after, when we moved from suburban New Jersey to rural North Carolina, I began the habit of vomiting in the morning before school. I didn’t stick my fingers down my throat – the nerves inside me simply bubbled up and the results spilled outwards, usually into a toilet or the bathroom sink. Ostensibly I did this to get out of going to a place that engendered in me an inarticulable paranoia, the genesis of which I could never explain. Some days it worked, but I also remember that, after a relatively short while, it didn’t do much of anything at all, because I couldn’t stay home every day, and it didn’t correspond to any real physical ailment. There was a series of visits to gastrointestinal specialists. There was a test run where I had to drink a tall glass of chalky barium so that I could be x-rayed for nonexistent ulcers. At some point around the second or third grade, the vomiting stopped. I don’t remember why. Perhaps because it wasn’t achieving what I wanted it to anymore. I suppose, had I been born 20 years later, there would have been one or more DSM syndromes ascribed to me by teachers, relatives, and psychologists. In the early 80s, I was sent to a psychologist, who had me draw pictures and play with toys and probably cost my parents a small fortune to conclude nothing consequential. Nerves have been an issue throughout my life. When I played baseball, in the on-deck circle, a sneaking pain would radiate upwards from my gut and downwards to the pit of my anus. If I struck out, I would either cry, slam my bat into the dirt, or a combination of both. With two strikes on me, I was gearing up to weep, not bearing down to hit. Hey, batter batter batter. Cry batter batter batter. Soccer was marginally better because I wasn’t put on the spot as often. Though I would trip people whenever they took the ball from me, which, in retrospect, is far worse than crying after a strike out. At least the tears didn’t hurt anybody else. The odd thing was, I wasn’t a bad athlete. But I probably never wanted to play nearly as much as my father wanted me to want to play. Evidently, I was a (marginally) better sportsman than he had been, and he saw something in me that made him want me to succeed. I have always been a horrible competitor, a miserable loser and a notmuch-better winner. It took me until my twenties to realize that the only way to minimize the ill effects of this trait was simply to avoid all
competitive endeavors, both sporting and non-.22 In school, I was intelligent, but no genius. I expected to get ‘A’s’, and when I didn’t, I would break down. I don’t remember whether my parents put more pressure on me than I did on myself, but I do remember that perfection was the default until high school, or, in other words, until my mother died. In social interaction, too, I remember always feeling ill-at-ease inside, regardless of how many friends I had. I distinctly recall that knot of pain in my stomach, down to my ass, which often manifested itself as clandestine flatulence I would rush to pin on someone else. I remember so many times that I was nervous without any real reason at all. And the therapists I saw as a child and was forced to endure as a teen, both before and after my mother died, never got anywhere near the root of what this unease was. I think the later ones simply (and logically, to them) pointed the finger at her sickness and death, and how I was internalizing it. But even today, if I am tempted to direct culpability at her passing, or at any number of other, less significant events in my life as ‘The Moment’ when things ‘turned’, I simply recall the time when I threw up next to the pool, at five years old, and remind myself that I was a fucked-up, neurotic little mess before anything really bad had happened to me at all. A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory, anyway. Today, I am 48 hours away from moving halfway around the world, to live again in city which regularly ranks among the world’s most liveable, a city where I spent arguably the best two years of my life. I’m going not to work, but to study, for 6 hours a week, at my alma mater, and get a degree which will help me advance my career, a degree for which I had the money to pay up front. Despite not having any savings as recently as 5 years ago, I now have a sizeable chunk of money in the bank, and I am in no financial hurry to look for a job when I arrive in Australia and begin studying. I will be reunited with the girl who was my best friend then, and with the girl who took my virginity and was the first person I romantically loved. Likely I will also be able to see other people from my college years, reopening a period of my life which closed 13 years ago in a way that many people would find it a dream to do. And still, when my father asked me this morning if I was excited to be going, I answered “As excited as I am to do anything”, and that was being generous. It makes me even sadder that I’m not happy when I should be. Funny feedback loop, that. Stimuli overload. I’ve seen too much. 22
THC also does wonders re: allowing one to put things in perspective.
My ‘been there, done thatitude’ is off the charts. And I am still anxious about things I can’t explain. I pack. I will be gone for a year, but I’m not going to a country that doesn’t have the products I’ll need. I don’t need proper winter or formal clothing. I don’t need much at all, but I still manage to fill two huge duffel bags and my backpack – all the luggage I have.23 For a person who isn’t that interested in things, I still have a hard time leaving many of them behind. In my head right now I’m writing a story about a future in which one day, the people of the world begin to realize that everything is fixed. All the elections – determined ahead of time by politicians and economists. All the market fluctuations – decided in advance by bankers and tycoons. All the sports events – fixed by bookies and complacent athletes. What would happen if we found out that nothing large scale happens ‘naturally’ whatsoever? Optimistically, I’d end the story by saying it makes people stop caring about bullshit they can’t control and turn back to their families, their loved ones, the things they know can’t be controlled by some outside forces. Pragmatically, I’d end the story saying that, collectively, everyone in the Western world loses the will to care, because once free will has been wiped out by determinism, there isn’t much reason to go on pretending like what you do can effect a change. The mass of men spend very little time in the abstract. Where the intellectual sees a guilty pleasure, the mass of men see no need for the guilt. The average person makes no attempt to quantify, qualify, or defend his enjoyments, he only knows where to find them and that they are intrinsically good to him. It is only the intellectual, full of onanism and a self-imposed mandate to 'do more' with the time that he has, who would shun a product merely because it is of ‘no cultural value'. But perhaps the value of entertainment is nothing more than its ability to entertain. When I found out I wasn’t going to be very good friends with my roommate in Brooklyn was two nights after I moved in. She was watching Sex and the City, and we started talking about the show. I told her I wasn’t a fan of it because I feel it causes the women who watch it and identify themselves and other women with one of the four overly simplistic tropes, a lá “I’m really just Carrie on the inside” and “That girl is such a Samantha” instead of allowing personality 23
Notable in its absence is a hard suitcase. Owning a hard suitcase is saying "I don't backpack". It's saying, "When I travel I go from the airport to the hotel room I reserved, in a taxi. I don't speak to natives. I don't use public transport. And I most certainly don't do ‘adventure tours’.” It is quite possible that I will never own a hard suitcase.
assessments to be made independently without a reductivist Hollywood rubric. She answered “Well, I don’t see why you have to analyze everything, I just watch it because it’s funny and I don’t think about things like that.” Sister, the only reason I watch, read, or listen to anything is to analyze it. Isn’t that the job of a viewer? There is an arrogance, though, of referring to a movie, book, or television show as a “guilty pleasure”. As if you would be composing viola concertos or updating the translation of Being and Time if only they didn’t keep making new reality shows involving the Kardashians. I spend my penultimate night in America downloading episodes of Jersey Shore. Gotta take a bit of home with me. For nothing is more common than to call our own condition the condition of life. We are all special cases. The Hawthorne Effect - people in an experiment will behave differently because they know they are in an experiment. Consequently, nothing seen is natural. Conversely, perhaps if no one were observing you, you would have behaved differently, but since no one would have known, it wouldn’t have been ‘real’ anyway. If reality does not exist without a perceiver, then nothing exists when unobserved, thus the observed state is the natural one, because it is the only one. Or rather, falling trees in forests no one frequents don’t make a sound, because they aren’t even there. The code-switching started before I even got on the plane. In the kitchen of a house party in Manhattan last weekend, I referred to a liquor store as a 'bottle shop'. “Where are you from?” the pretty girl I was talking with said. “I'm not sure,” I answered. You know that part in the modern-day love movie, right after the protagonist bottoms out, where he meets the girl who changes everything? That part needed to have happened, like, a good half-hour ago. At this point, the audience is losing interest. However, what great emotional effort we expend on bringing about such a miniscule difference. If T represents the number of people in the entire world, being in a relationship only means that you are still not
in a relationship with T-1 people. You were my -1. My only significant character points exist in opposition - anti-religion, anti-conservative, anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment, anti-40hr work week, anti-children. I'm not for anything. Though Bourdieu and many other social philosophers would call this tautological, at best, as the Self only exists in opposition to an Other. “You shouldn't have children,” my father says to his only son in the car on the way to dinner. Not that his son has any intention of disagreeing. “You are the last person who should have children,” he adds, for emphasis. My Last Supper. At a Korean restaurant, I half-order in Korean, and am half-answered that way by the bemused adjumma who takes our order. The bus boy is Latino. If I had to address him, I would speak to him in Spanish. I understand a little bit of everything, but not much of anything. I feel less uncomfortable than most people would in most situations, but never quite at home. “Your grandmother,” dad says, “got a raw deal.” I concur. Of her four grandchildren, the first is embroiled in what now seems to be a divorce with a woman who took her husband away from his family for the better part of the past decade. The second was knocked up by her employer and won't admit it, so now raises her only son as a single mother and will never, ever date again. The third is 30 years old, living 3,000 miles away, and costing her parents somewhere in the neighborhood of $5000 a month because she has no desire to work and no pressure to do so. And the fourth has lived out of the country for 12 of the past 15 years, and regards his family as a relic of a period which he now considers 'closed', and not worth visiting again. That would be me. The last few nights, I’ve been unable to sleep. Lately the only emotions I’m capable of feeling seem to be negative ones. At least they’re still there. In times past, I would spend my final days in the country eating the food I knew I wouldn’t be able to get while I was away, or watching the TV shows I knew I’d miss. But globablization, the Internet, and my increasing alienation from anything worldly have combined to make even these pre-departure rituals unnecessary and unfulfilling. Now I’m just waiting to get on that plane and hoping I haven’t forgotten anything. What I want to say to my father, but probably won’t: “I'm sorry for being such a fuck up. I'm sorry for giving you such a poor return on your investment. I'm sorry that I don't feel like I want to do anything
to change things, even though it's not too late.” But I only feel these pangs of guilt when I’m not near him. Distance is a great promoter of admiration. Lots of people tell things. I feel like I as though they are sidewalk that takes
me how lucky I am, to be able to do all these want to tell them how lucky they are, to not feel trapped on a moving sidewalk in life, even if it is a them past some pretty impressive views.
Every international move is a rebirth, an occasion to start anew, to try to be the me I want to be. Whoever that 'me' is. But each rebirth requires a dying, and I spend my last afternoon in the country grieving. The tears don't come out too strongly, but they do well up at times over the course of the afternoon, as I move up and down the stairs of my father's house, packing and cleaning. It's natural but mistaken to feel as though when you leave a country for life in another, time stops there in your absence. But it doesn't. And when you return months, years, later, you see its passage in the new wrinkles and greying hairs of those you loved. Children grow into adults, adults stoop slowly back to the earth from whence they came. Time makes you bolder, even children get older. I’m getting older, too. The problem, like so many problems, exists only once you are aware of it - you can't be in two places at once. Each decision to do something is simultaneously a decision to not do something else. Each path taken closes off those which were neglected in its favor. Everywhere I go, I leave some place behind. And I can't help but posit what would have happen had I stayed. In life's Choose Your Own Adventure book, you can't flip through the pages and decide which endings you want, working backwards to get there. Einmal est keinmal. Packing proves difficult. Every time I want to pat myself on the back for how unmaterialistic I am, how I could just be off to any corner of the world at a moment’s notice with nothing more than a good pair of shoes and a 50-liter backpack, I am reminded of every international move I’ve ever made, and the days leading up to it, spent at the post office sending boxes of Life back home to the US via boat, or madly jamming duffel bags to capacity and hoping they don’t tip the airport scale when I check in. I don’t need real winter clothes, so I thought that might save me some space. But I do need hiking boots, because I hike, and Doc Marten’s,
because they are my dress shoes, and running sneakers because I will use a treadmill in the uni’s gym, and Campers, because sometimes you go out and want to walk a lot but still look good, and nice sandals, because it gets hot sometimes, and rubber sandals, because I will likely travel somewhere warm and/or Asian at some point on this trip. And I need a few long-sleeve shirts and sweaters because it’s cool at night sometimes in Melbourne. And I need several pairs of slacks because if/when I get a job I will not be able to wear jeans, and jeans because when I’m not working that’s what I wear. And quick-dry tshirts because I sweat a lot, and regular t-shirts because I don’t sweat all the time. And short-sleeve button-down shirts because sometimes it’s good to look halfway decent, and vintage shirts because I should wear them now and again, and not just collect them. And the more socks and boxers you bring, the less often you have to wash them. And books, well, without books, what do you read? And when you’re packing for a year in a country, how can you know, how can you really know, what you’ll need and what you won’t? And sure, it’s not like I’m going to some Third World country without products, or some Asian nation where my 34” waistline will preclude me from buying pants and size 10.5 shoes. It’s Australia – they have everything. But I have everything, too, and I don’t want to buy it again. On the phone I ask an artist friend if he knows how to shrink matter. He’s good with his hands, so I figure there may be a shot. No dice, but he does ask if I want to go to a film festival in Byron Bay as his representative. It’s in two weeks. “I’ll be in class,” I tell him, “and Byron’s like, 20 hours’ drive from Melbourne.” It’s a common misconception, due to its negligible population, that Australia is a small country. It’s actually 2/3rds the size of America. It’s just that “flyover country” really is nothing more than that. Imagine if all the Red States were barren, and not just socioculturally. 24 Imagine there’s the Eastern Seaboard, and then out West, you’ve got one tiny LA, and up North, you’ve got one mini-Chicago, and other than that, nothing. That’s pretty much Australia, geographicallyspeaking. On the phone, I talk to my Oldest Friend, but there isn’t much to say. We each struggle to leave the other something meaningful, but do not succeed. This has all happened before. We haven’t lived in the same country for 12 of the 17 years we’ve known each other. The last time I went to Australia, there was no Skype. The world was bigger, and I was smaller. A semester abroad seemed inconceivably long. Now a year seems like a few downloaded TV series and a couple of nights out drinking. 525,600 minutes. 24
Zing.
On my last afternoon in the country, I mail packages full of things I’ve sold on ebay in an effort to clean out my father’s basement. I take care of matters at the bank. I try, unsuccessfully, to get four suitcases worth of clothing into a duffel bag and a backpack. Epic Fail. It is better, however, to pay for an extra bag on the plane than to mail the clothes to myself down there. In 2007, the USPS discontinued surface mail for international shipping. Probably had something to do with terrorism. Every parting is a foretaste of death. We drive to the airport. This is probably what it feels like for people in the armed forces, shipping out for a tour of duty. You don’t know what’s going to happen, and you don’t know when you’re going to be back. The last time, flying to Korea, flying to You, I was gone for two years. And that was to a country I didn’t like. I tell dad a watered-down version of what I want to. I cry a little bit. “I just hope you can find somewhere to be happy,” he says. Mate, if only you knew. At the departure gate, I tell him, “I went to Korea for a reason, and that reason disappeared right after I left, and then I stuck around because I didn't know what else to do. With Australia, I know I'm going to finish the degree, and even if that's the only thing that happens, it was worth it, and if I get out, if I extend myself there, then–“, but here I start choking on something that comes up from within me and my words trail off. “You should be happy,” my father says, “You deserve it, even with fucked up genes.” There's not much else to say after that, so we don't. I cried my way through the passport control on the way out of Australia in 1998, and I cry my way through the passport contol on the way back in. Born in blood. The first time I took this flight, it felt so long I lost track of where I was. This time around, the prospect of back-to-back 13-hour flights 25 isn’t really an issue. I’ve got two books, five movies on my laptop, a 30GB Ipod, and a handful of lorazepam. I’m worried I won’t have enough time to get through a fraction of it. Globalization: An Indian woman yelling at a Nigerian stewardess as she boards an Emirates Airline plane. 25
Dubai’s not really on the way from New York to Melbourne, but it’s half the price if you go that way...
We all want someone browner than us to look down on. On the plane, I sit down next to a jovial, heavyset woman who happens to be the vice-principal of an international school in Bahrain. I tell her what I do, she says “we need people like you”, and we exchange business cards. Any place is as good as any place else. The plane has a selection of 60 movies and I fall asleep after watching one, then wake up periodically to be fed and watered and the 13 hours pass as quickly as 13 hours in coach class could hope to be passed. In Dubai, I get a bottle of water at the same franchised shop that I got a bottle of water at in JFK 13 hours earlier. The world is getting smaller, and flatter, and the venti threatens to become a standard unit of measure. In Dubai, you can get a facial with 24-karat gold leaf for 650 US dollars. "She turns to me and she goes, 'you know, the thing about 20,'" - by this she meant $20 million a year - "'is 20 is only 10 after taxes'. And everyone at the table is nodding." I clear customs without a problem. I collect my bags. I find the university-sent driver waiting for me at the gate. 26 He takes me to my hostel and we share an appropriate amount of small talk. I live in Australia. Again. Version 2.1. Wherever you go, there you are. The first time I arrived here, July 14, 1996, it was the middle of winter and I laughed off the cold and my lack of preparation for it. “I didn’t know you had winter here,” I may have said to whoever the Study Abroad office had sent to get me. I went to the driver’s side door of the van that picked me up. “Are you going to drive?” the woman asked me. When I’d dropped off my bags at Ormond College, my home for the semester, and stared out the window into the quad below and up at the belltower for a sufficiently long amount of time, I ventured out into the city. I walked down Swanston Street, feeling very much like I was on a foreign planet. I breathed slowly, checking if the air was safe. I tread softly, like a dog walking on snow for the first time. I ate a baguette at a café on the street, and fumbled through the transaction with foreign coins and brightly-colored plasticene bills. There was no one to email, even if I’d had access to a computer. My first semester, I wrote letters home to people. Letters, on paper, and 26
As free pickup was literally the only service the university provides international students, I felt it almost incumbent upon me to take them up on their ‘generosity’.
mailed them back around the other side of the planet. Sometimes old memories don’t even feel like they happened on the same planet. Now, the world’s not only a lot smaller. As a traveler, I’m a good deal bigger. 28 hours in transit and at the other end, the people still speak the same language, the same shows still play on the television, and if the cars drive on the other side of the road and there are a few extra u’s and s’s in place of z’s, well, that I can handle. It is warm and crepuscular and I don’t know if I’m tired or not. The climate change is probably affecting me as much as the difference in time. I am aware that the hostel should be pretty close to the house I lived in during my last year here, so on some level I should be familiar with the area, but staying in a hostel is never going to feel comfortable. It’s never going to feel like home. The girl behind the hostel desk in North Melbourne refers to a matter as “not urgo”, and I am reminded that in its Australian iteration, anything can be abbreviated, even if it doesn’t make the word shorter. The hostel doesn’t offer a place to store baggage besides your room. I jam my two duffel bags under the bed and hope they won’t suffer much from the effort. The good thing about having little of value is that you don’t have to fuss greatly over its protection. I meet two young German guys who are sharing my room, and we have a few drinks down in the common area, their box wine and my duty-free Jameson’s, before curiosity gets the best of me and I go outside to confirm that, yes, the hostel is about 50 meters away from my old house on Courtney Street, where, jet-lagged and mildly buzzed, I stand in front of number 67 for so long in the darkness, staring at it in disbelief, that if someone were watching they may have become suspicious. I go to a 7-11 and get a chocolate bar and a bottle of water, which costs me $6, and I am drunk/disoriented/confused enough not to balk at how absurdly expensive this is. Day 1. I wake up before dawn and look out my window to see an armada of hot air balloons slowly gliding across the sky. I put on my shoes and head straight for the university campus, which is only a few minutes away. Muscle memory remains remarkably intact, no map necessary. It smells like Melbourne. It isn’t a smell of anything specific, just clean and fresh and damp, but unmistakably it’s the same as it was. I want to tell someone, but I don’t know who. Naughton’s, our old college pub, sits vacant, though apparently its demise was relatively recent, as the ‘For Rent’ signs look fresh in the windows and inside there are still old wooden tables and drink specials scrawled across the wall behind the bar. Ormond College, my erstwhile
home, has a new sign on its locked gate, but the belltower still remains the highest point in the immediate area. The Clyde is still on Elgin Street, though it seems that Carlton has replaced VB as the beer which sponsors everything. Walking across the empty university campus on Sunday at dawn is almost difficult to do, emotionally. Memories peek out of the shade beneath trees and from around blind corners which I navigate without pause. The Student Union is largely unchanged, though there is a Mac shop selling product lines which didn’t exist when I was here last. I pass the Prince Alfred, where I drank on many an afternoon and got my ass handed to me in many a game of pool. I walk down Swanston Street, straight into the CBD. Melbourne is still Melbourne. RMIT is where it was, the Lounge Bar shocks me by still being there, as 15 years for a bar/club is a remarkable tenure. Crossways, the Hare Krisha lunch spot, now charges $5 for its all-you-can meals instead of $3. It now appears that everyone in the city is Asian. Literally. Asian girlfriends have replaced upturned collars as the inappropriate thing all Australian guys carry around with them. I don’t remember immigration being this severe, but then again, I probably wasn’t paying attention. Walkman World in Melbourne Central, where I worked before leaving in 1998, has become a trendy clothes store, and the Grand Prix Arcade below the Capitol Theatre, where I worked before leaving for Christmas Break in 1997, has become a ratty one. I see some language centres that I probably should solicit for jobs. There are Starbucks, but not an excessive amount of them. Oddly, this is comforting. Prices have changed. 7-11s are Ballpark Expensive, Movie Theatre Expensive – a bottle of water costs $3 and a bar of chocolate not much less. Vitamin Water is $5. The cheapest beer in a bottle shop is $12 for a 6-pack, and the wine isn’t much better. Absolut is $50 a litre. It’s almost inconceivable. After passing pubs with menus of main dishes starting at $15, I begin to wonder whether or not I’m going to be able to last a year here, job or no. then I duck into a Coles and breathe a bit easier, because supermarket prices aren’t all that bad – in fact, the disparity between them and the servos 27 is almost conspicuous – who would ever go to a 7-11 unless they had to? There’s no wi-fi anywhere. The hostel charges $4 an hour for service, $10 a day. That’s what it should cost on an airplane or a place where internet access isn’t expected. I don’t see people in cafes using laptops. I don’t see wi-fi signs in any bar windows. For everything else here that seems so similar to everything in the US, that is a bit odd. The university has to have something better. It feels as close to being in a dream as one could reasonably expect to feel in life. And by this I don’t mean living something I’ve always 27
Code-switching begins immediately.
wanted to do. I mean it is literally difficult to feel as though I am really here, 13 years later, walking the same streets on a Saturday morning, alone, silent, mouth slightly agape. It feels as though I have crawled into my own dream, like John Malkovitch walking through the door into his own head. However, it feels good, to breathe in this air, to be among Australians, to be in this city that isn’t quite a city again, and to force myself to calm down because it’s not like I’m here on holiday, and I don’t have to do everything at once. I may actually be able to be nice to people here. I don’t know for how long, and I don’t know how well I’ll do it. It’s been a while. But I may try it. In New York, people generally take to the street each day in the hopes of being able to go off on someone about something. 28 If you walk around giving out stink-eyes like publicity flyers there, it doesn’t really put you on the outs, because everyone else is doing it, too. However, if everyone around you is nice, and you aren’t, well then, you really are a dick. And I’m remembering now that everyone here is kind of nice. I may have to follow suit. Maybe. The average woman here seems better than average. I see a girl who looks just like A______, my last Australian girlfriend. I wonder again what it will take to make me do something about someone. If not for You, I would now have been single for over six years. I don’t know if that would be better or worse. You download enough porn, you distance yourself enough from actual physical interaction, and it’s all just parts rubbing and slapping against each other. It’s all just meat and bone. I don’t know the names of 3 of the last 4 people I’ve had sex with. Money was exchanged after 2 of the last four interactions. I wore a condom 3 of the 4 times, and couldn’t perform twice. Two times I used a sexual stimulant. Once, even that didn’t help. “Your English is very good”, said the journalist. “Yes”, the teacher said. “Where did you learn it?” “Yes.” “What is your name?” “Yes. No. Twenty-two.” 28
On the rare occasion that you hear a thief mid-robbery, someone turning think that, on some level, the ‘hero’ ass today, and get commended for it.
news of a vigilante act in the City, someone stopping the tables on a would-be attacker, it is hard not to was relieved, because he/she got to kick someone’s This is what it feels like to live in New York.
“Well, that’s real good,” said the photographer, “that’s real nice. Do you know what the word ‘pussy’ means?” In Southeast Asia, half the girls have bodies see on a girl in the West. And you can rent three of them, for $20 a night, give or take. thereof needn’t concern you if you treat her
like one And with
you would hardly ever of them, two of them, morality or lack a modicum of respect.
What do you get when you put together six Asian women? About two-thirds of a personality. “Tell her she is prettier than a flower.” She said, “a flower that is smelled too many times begins to wilt.” “You didn’t wear a condom?” “We were filming a Wild West-themed porn. It would have been anachronistic.” Day 2. The Dark Passenger arrives 32 hours after I do. I figured he’d come, I just didn’t think he’d get here before my jet lag wore off. He wakes me up at 3.30AM, opening the door to the hostel room and tossing his backpack casually into the corner. He leaps right up onto the bed next to me, ignoring the young German sleeping in it. The long flight hasn’t done anything to dampen his energy. He tells me my father is my only friend, and that I have AIDS, and that it was stupid to come back here because I don’t have the money for it and it’s not the same river. He tells me I am going to die alone, and that I am not going to find a job here. “Have you been saving this shit up for me on the flight?” I ask, softly, so as not to wake the other kids in the room. I listen to him patiently, but his schtick has been old for a long time now. I turn on the tiny bunk bed light and try to read, try to make him go away, but he’s not having it. At 6.30AM, I give up and leave the hostel, while it is still half-dark, to see if I can lose him on the street. The city is still asleep. Basically, if there is a building I still recognize here, it’s either a national landmark or it’s almost fallen into disuse. Melbourne has also grown. What used to be tall buildings now lurk in the shadows of new skyscrapers, which stare down upon them scornfully, like the nouveau riche appraising the fixed-rent tenants who cling on in a neighborhood they should’ve vacated years ago. I eat at a bakery restaurant I used to frequent, a place where I once ordered a jam donut while on acid. It is bigger than before, and now apparently run by Chinese people. I walk myself into the ground.
On a Sunday night, the city is still closed – I walk uptown along streets I recognize in name only and realize that one thing which hasn’t changed is that, unless it’s a Friday or a Saturday, Melbourne is a ghost-town after dark. Things at which I succeed on my first day back at campus: Getting a student ID Opening a bank account Getting a phone Things at which I fail: Getting my health card Seeing my course advisor/professors (though I didn’t try too hard) Not staring at college girls in a way that wouldn’t make me seem like a slightly creepy old guy When I get my ID card I don’t recognize the photo on it. It depicts a sweaty, middle-aged man with a disorderly thatch of hair spilled atop his head. I still carry my uni ID from 1996 in my wallet. Holding the two side by side, it is hard to believe they are the same person. Perhaps they aren’t. In the bank on campus where I held an account fifteen years ago, I exchange conversation and money with a friendly teller. He asks me about the mortgage rates in the US. We talk about the downfall of the world’s superpower. “What’s happening now, this downswing, I feel, isn’t a period,” I tell him, “it’s just the way things are.” Non-Americans love to hear Americans talk about the downfall of America. Australia has taken a horse-sized dose of economic steroids and is now flexing its heft like Ronnie Magro. Everyone seems wealthy, and the economy is healthy. Perhaps that’s what happens when you are a resource-rich, spacious, underpopulated nation at the ass-end of the world which couldn’t get involved in an international conflict if it tried, a place whose greatest fears are bushfires and the occasional typhoon. Again, everyone is Asian. Even on Lygon Street half the old Italian places are now Malaysian and Thai. I re-meet my Ex-Flatmate. She is standing on the corner in front of the Clyde, holding a baby. She’s blonde now and heavyset with the weight of a pregnancy recently brought to term and perhaps just the extra baggage of incipient middle-age. She hugs me, and kisses me on the cheek, and I am reminded how weird it feels to make physical contact with people now, though she and I were never all that tactile anyway, even when on drugs and at the end of the night.
We go to her house in the suburbs and catch up. Within the space of two hours, she’s filled me in on 15 years of status updates. I suppose when you don’t leave the country and stop talking to everyone, it’s easier to know what’s going on. It always felt like I had a lot of good friends here. At least that’s how I remember it. However, the more people she mentions, the more I realize how little I knew them, how tangentially their existence was to my own in Melbourne. Everyone, though, seems to be doing well. Everyone, it seems, is kind of rich, and paired off, and relatively happy. The Ex-Flatmate herself left a pretty lucrative job to have her child. Her man, a guy I knew vaguely from my time here, owns another house in addition to the one they are living in. Everyone is now an adult. In contrast, I still feel like a child. Perhaps there’s a reason I’ve never wanted to go to a reunion. The only way I’d compare favorably to my classmates would be in terms of hairline retention. If you change countries every two years, you’re always stuck on an entry-level salary. They have three chickens and a three-bedroom house, but she still drives the same car she had when I left. It’s a car I drove while drunk, and high, and maybe on acid. She was on her learner’s permit then and didn’t want to risk it. I was 22 and immortal. A ceiling lamp in their living room is cracked. Somehow this makes me feel slightly better. At some point, most people decide to make a decision in life and stay with it. Most people. To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be. I realize that, to her and whoever else I reconnect with from my past here, I will be viewed as somewhat more normal than what I’ve now become. I had two girlfriends here in relationships which encompassed the majority of my 2-year stay. I had never had a period like that before coming here, and I’ve not had one since. 29 I want to explain to her that I’m not right anymore, I want to tell her about the Dark Passenger, and about You, but there doesn’t seem to be any point. Why not try and be the person I was the last time around? Really, why not? If you don’t keep changing the person you are, you end up staying the 29
I ended one relationship and was in another one 4 weeks later. I imagine that’s what it must feel like to be a normal, single twentysomething.
person you were. “We’re at the age when you either have baggage, or you don’t and it’s suspicious that you don’t”, she tells me. I tell her about my wife, though that’s not really baggage in any genuine sense. My baggage is that there’s a gaping hole inside where the Me should be. I suppose that’s easy enough to hide, though. I hid it from myself for a long while. Wisdom is learning what to overlook. I’m married. I suppose it bears mention, but equally it doesn’t, because it doesn’t affect anything. I can think of many inappropriate reasons for marriage, but none moreso than love. Usually, I forget about it, because it is largely forgettable. I told You about it before We even kissed, because it’s really that insignificant, and Your stupid jealous friends wouldn’t believe that it was what I said it was – a British housemate who needed a passport, and me thinking I could get one in the exchange. Her half worked out, mine didn’t. So it goes. The tax benefits are useful. We aren’t even friends now, and I don’t know why she hasn’t put in the papers for the divorce, but at the same time, I largely don’t care – it’s not like I need to be single for anything. In a way, it’s fitting – just one more permanent condition that isn’t really an issue but would serve to make me much less attractive to most potential partners. One of many. The Ex-Flatmate says a few times in our brief conversation that she didn’t expect to have a child, almost as though she is apologizing to me. “You don’t have to feel bad about doing what everyone does – if you don’t do what everyone does, then what do you do?” I ask. It doesn’t seem like she is unhappy at all, and even her surprise seems only to be present because she’s now confronted with someone she wants to bond with who’s at a very different stage of life. A lot of me is glad to see her. But a little of me kind of wishes it stayed 1998 in Melbourne and I never came back to see it otherwise. Not that this surprises me. I wish it was still 1982. We coulda won State that year. You depart while others, unamazingly enough, stay behind to continue doing what they’ve always done – and, upon returning, you are
surprised and momentarily thrilled that they are still there and, too, reassured by there being somebody who is spending his whole life in the same little place and has no desire to go. If the past has nothing to say to the present, history may go on sleeping undisturbed in the closet where the system keeps its old disguises. We’ve been coming to the same party for 12 years, and in no way is that depressing. Each person shines with his or her own light. No two flames are alike. There are big flames and little flames, flames of every color. Some people’s flames are so still they don’t even flicker in the wind, while others have wild flames that fill the air with sparks. Some foolish flames neither burn nor shed light, but others blaze with life so fiercely that you can’t look at them without blinking and if you approach, you shine in fire. At one point, I was someone people wanted to meet. At one point, I wanted to meet people that people wanted to meet. Most things are never meant. The past is not what it was. The great grandfather is happy because he has lost his memory. His great grandson is happy because he doesn’t yet have any memory. This, I imagine, is perfect felicity. I want no part of it. The problem with loving and losing is that the bad part comes at the end, and usually obscures the joy of the good part which came before it. If you could live a relationship with its emotionality felt in reverse, feeling horrible about someone, promising never to speak to them again, trying to purge all memory of them from your conscience, then gradually increasing your love for them, from the comfortable period, back slowly to the moment of unbridled lust and that feeling where the two of you live in worlds which are inextricably entwined, where you start believing in things like Fate and the words to pop songs begin to make sense. And finally, culminating in that first kiss, the moment when you realize “Yes, this is going to happen,” and you are dizzy and sick with the possibilities of it all. If you could live a relationship emotionally in that order, well then, that might be something. Fear of knowing condemns us to ignorance, fear of doing reduces us to impotence. If you’re careful enough, nothing good or bad will ever happen to you.
There’s three things that can happen when you throw the ball, and two of them are bad. “Kids are now at raves texting each other instead of paying attention to what’s going on,” the Ex-Flatmate says. “There are a lot of online photos of parties which haven’t even finished yet”, I add. “If it’s not on Facebook, it didn’t happen!” Smiled a young Chinese kid I met at a party in Seoul, after I took a picture of him and his friends. I never bothered to post the photos. Day 3. Up at 6.30 today, coming closer to living on the schedule of the time zone I’m in. I look for a place to live. I collected several names and numbers off the walls of the uni housing board yesterday. At a reasonable hour I begin to call them. The semester is starting in a week. I do not want to be in a hostel when I have to go to class. I do not want to be in a hostel even now, in a room with two nice boys who do not wash their clothes enough. I probably do not want to be in a hostel ever again. I have spent so long traveling in poor countries where I am relatively rich that I forgot that in the First World, I am not. I need a bed and a room with my own door. Pero ya. I call one place, leave a message. I call another. No answer. And another. Sorry mate, room taken. Next. Old man answers, Call back in an hour. After that. I leave a message. Then. Sorry mate, room taken. And. Room taken. Not even sorry, mate. I look online, and everything is either far away from campus or far out of my desired price range. I send SMS messages where requested, I send emails trying to paint myself in a positive light. I avoid the temptation to refer to myself as ‘laid back’, ‘no drama’, ‘fun-loving’, or any other adjectival phrase that would be an outright lie. I call back the old guy and another old guy answers. Having no other options, I go to visit the place, a 10-minute walk away, in Carlton. The house is at the end of a row of brightly-colored old Victorians with second-floor balconies the likes of which made up much of the
Melbourne I knew but, sadly, far less of the Melbourne that now exists. The house itself is deceiving – single-storey frontage, unassuming. A thin, smiling guy meets me at the door and shows me the vacant room directly opposite it. It fronts the street directly, and as such, is dark because the wood slats over the window are closed. But it’s quite big and looks very much like a bed and breakfast room in a home run by upper-middle class Goths. The bedspread is black. The fireplace is immaculate but non-functioning. The house itself, despite its humble frontage, opens up down a long corridor which leads to a large, openplan kitchen and lounge area. There is a courtyard, and a lounge and bedroom upstairs. The guy who answered the door veritably floats about the place – I remember going to San Francisco when I was nine and seeing gay people for the first time. I remember a man who walked down the street, stopping to twirl around the lampposts. Even kids have Gaydar if the target’s big enough. This guy is in his early 50s, slim and with close-cropped white hair. At some point, he says to me “We’re gay, I hope you’re ok with that.” “I’m straight,” I reply. “I hope you’re ok with that.” His partner is a bit older, a bit thicker about the middle, and walks with a limp. He is also slightly hard of hearing. He looks like a tough old queen, the kind of bloke who wouldn’t have let you get away with throwing a slur at him back when it was probably more common to refer to homosexuals with a derogatory term than a proper one. He is a hair dresser who sees clients in the lounge, Wednesday to Sunday. The younger guy is a paramedic. Campy erotic art adorns the walls, along with linens, starting at burgundy and getting darker from there, draped down from the ceilings, making the entire place feel as though it needs a higher wattage of light bulb. My initial response was simply to exit as politely as I could, but after I start talking to the two of them, I find myself sitting down for a cup of tea and a discussion which lasts for about an hour and a half. As I buy myself time, I weigh my options mentally. This is the only flat I’ve been invited to see. It costs $200 a week, but it is fully furnished. There is a cleaning lady who comes in twice a month, and it is about as close to campus as I could have imagined getting in the 90s, let alone now. I’m also at the point in my life where the prospect of living with a pretty meticulous gay couple 20 years my senior is more intriguing than that of living with a few sloppy college kids 15 years my junior. Older people have connections. Older people know how and where and when to get things done. Living with homosexuals would quite possibly mean I won’t have to worry about access to drugs, even if the two of them probably ended their party careers before the last time I was here. The Hairdresser tells me he used to go to the warehouse parties at the docks. So we have something in common. The Paramedic tells me a girl who had come to look at the room asked if she could have people over to pray. I tell him I’m an atheist. He gives me a very awkward, but somewhat
genuine, high five. I try hard to sell myself on the prospect of living with these people, because it is clear that they would be happy to have me. I don’t know why they advertised at uni – I’m not sure what they hoped they’d find. It would take a very special kind of 20-year old to be down with this type of atmosphere – even a young queer might be off-put by being around a pair of old bulls. But I’m so far removed from sexual relations that I can’t pretend like whatever they might do will bother me. Additionally, my way of thinking aligns about as completely with a gay one as you could imagine. I don’t believe anyone should judge the sexual practices of another person. I don’t believe that the government has a right to legislate what happens in your bedroom. I don’t think anything between two consenting adults is morally wrong, because really, how could it be? I don’t think a religion has any right to enter any discussion of the sexuality of people who aren’t its adherents. And I most definitely believe that sexual preference is anything but a choice. Other than the part about putting my cock into another guy’s ass, or in having somebody else put his cock in mine, pretty much, I am gay.30 My current bookmark is a black and white photograph of myself in drag, prancing around in my high school gymnasium in front of the entire school. I’m so gay-friendly I might consider giving you a reach-around. I pretty much say I’ll take the room when I leave – the phone rings at least 3 times while I am there, and I hear whichever of them answers it saying “There’s just someone here now, can we ring you back?” They seem like decent guys and I think they are going to have a hell of a time finding the type of person they’d want to live with. And I can pretend like I’m going to find a house full of people that are young and fun and simultaneously clean and responsible before the semester starts. But I’m not. Disappointment is the bastard son of expectation. I text the Ex-Flatmate to tell her I am taking a room with two old queens. I decide to stop looking, then, and just have lunch. And the Paramedic calls 15 minutes after I’ve left to ask me if I am moving in, Additionally, and I am certain I’m not alone among straight guys in expressing this (only)half-mocking lament – wouldn’t it just be easier to be gay sometimes? I mean, guys have guy desires – they are so much more transparent, so much easier to read. We talk about homosexuals being promiscuous, as if that should come as anything of a surprise. It isn’t a moral shortcoming – it’s the fact that they are men, and men like to fuck, and if you go out, and get a few drinks in you, you can just walk up to someone and say, “Hey, wouldn’t it be better if we go home and suck each other off than just going home alone?”, and not have to worry about being slapped for saying it. How is it possible that any gay guy goes home alone, like, ever? But no - I’d probably be a bitchy, uptight, foible-riddled little fag. 30
because if I’m not, he wants to keep the door open for other people. I tell him I’ll be there on Thursday. I eat at a Portugeuse chicken joint that had just opened when I was last here. It’s fast food, but it still costs $17 for a meal. Is everyone here rich? “When it’s jeans and t-shirt weather every day, it is 73% easier to be happy,” I say to my Oldest Friend when I call him. I use ‘Oldest Friend’, and not ‘Best Friend’, because ‘oldest’ is fixed and objective, whereas ‘best’ is subjective and fluctuating. Some days I don't want to talk to my Oldest Friend, so he certainly can't be said to be my ‘best’ friend at those times. My mobile calls the US directly for 3 cents a minute. I don’t even know how that’s possible. In the nineties, I had to dial a special number from my landline to access a US dial tone and make calls for 20 cents a minute. We had one friend here who had a mobile phone, and the rest of us used to laugh at him because we all thought he was too self-important.31 On campus, I meet the head of my department. I meet a guy who’s going hopefully to be my first creative writing professor. He tells me even the honours level courses only do 50% workshopping and 50% literary critique, because the quality of writing isn’t there. He tells me he’s a big fan of Bruce Springsteen. He seems openly scornful of both the effort and the skill level of the kids enrolled in his department. He tells me he welcomes international students and people who audit the courses, because they take it more seriously than the regular students. I realize that now, as a professor, when I’m studying, it’s kind of like me and the teacher are on the same team. Like a chef taking a cooking class. Like a DJ going out to dance. My Ex-Girlfriend calls, and we talk like it hasn’t been 13 years since we’ve talked. I connect with another old friend on Facebook, the third (and final) of the erstwhile Melbourne friends with whom I can reasonably hope to reconnect. 32 I’ve been here 72 hours and it feels like I’ve never left. I just woke up from a 13-year coma. “I decided to flip a coin,” he said. “Heads would be life, and tails
would But I again, and it 31 32
be the other. I went and flipped the coin, and it came up tails. figured I’d released it sooner than I meant to, so I flipped it and it came up tails. I decided to try one more time. I flipped it, came up tails. So I decided the coin was wrong.”
Which he was, phone or no, but that’s beside the point. Not counting random encounters, which may well happen. It’s a small town.
The hostel common room bustles at various times of day, but often it is full of people engrossed in their own virtual narrative. The room is full, but silent. Millions upon millions upon millions of people around the world now have as the focal point of their lives the illuminated screen of a computer. You chat, you play, you learn, you love – there’s nothing that can’t be done within the safe and intermittently anonymous confines of cyberspace. As a result, people don’t need people. At least not in the flesh. You sit down at a café with a laptop, and no one knows what you’re doing. You could be working. You could be changing the world, or plotting its downfall. You could be stalking an ex-, looking for photos of a man sodomizing a goat, or tending a virtual garden. It doesn’t matter what you are doing, because if you look like it’s important, then it is. And no one has any way to know. More and more, I just feel like I want to be an invisible observer. At night, I come upon a bustling street fair in the Vic Market. Bands play, people shop and drink. I walk through it with a little knowing smile – well done, Australia. But I don’t want to interact with anyone. All the places I’ve been where I couldn’t speak to the people around me, and here I can, but now I don’t want to. I sit down at an al fresco table at a Korean place next to four Chinese Australian teenage girls. Their cigarette smoke stings my nostrils and their insipid conversation is an affront to my ears. My eyes, however, don’t mind their alluringly short skirts. As I eat my bibimbap, I listen to them discuss their parents (who are probably around my age), spout expletives, and exhale smoke. One girl talks about a guy on the tram who was looking up her skirt. “He was hot, be he was a geek, you know?” she says to the group. “I think you were letting him look at your panties,” one of her friends said. And I’m like, whatever. The DP sits across from me, oggling the girls without shame. “Dude, give it a rest,” I tell him, but he waves me off and keeps on, like a dog wagging its tail next to a butcher’s cutting board. I realize I don’t like anything, and I don’t like to do anything. I don’t like most people. I’m annoyed by how many things annoy me. I find ways to pass the time but there is no one thing, nor even a small group of things that, together, comprise a complete person. When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. When the heart stops, the mind finds it indecent to reflect.
How bad was I when I met You? I had been single roughly as long as I have been now. Reality is 90% perception. Day 4. I drop off CVs at language schools all around town. One of them calls me 15 minutes after I’ve left – I have an interview tomorrow. That, I can fake. That, I can make it seem like I’m someone I’m not. At least within the context of an interview, I can make a good impression for myself. I have become good at the only job which I’ve ever had, but it’s a job I openly mocked for the first 5 years I had it. And the next time I wax intrepid, boasting that I am able to switch lives on a moment’s notice, I have to remind myself that I’ve never left the only field I ever entered. I am living a life guided by attrition. And I’m not sure if I genuinely like what I do or I’ve just ended up convincing myself I do because I’ve been doing it so long I’ve lost the opportunity and the imagination to do anything else. “If you don’t hate what you do, you’re better off than 80% of the people out there.” A particularly sad thing my father told me, not that long ago. You don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps! There is a get-together for the university’s Mature Age Students Association, which I joined online a few days before leaving. A meet and greet. A soiree. I RSVPed, but by the time I walk up to the bar where the reunion is and see roughly a dozen people sitting outside on a pleasant patio, drinking and eating, I already know what I am going to do. I keep walking right past it, without breaking stride. It would be tempting to say that I’m still convalescing, that I’m still getting over Korea, that I’m still thinking about You. But that would be disingenuous and dismissive of the real problem, which is that I only want to do the bare minimum to set myself back up with a life, and then hang out until I get sick of it, and then trade it for a new one like a dance partner at a cotillion. Unsurprisingly, the DP is there, at the get-together, with a pint glass in his hand, schmoozing, chatting to a few people who could either be professors or Star Trek convention attendees. He catches my eye and waves me over, theatrically, but I pretend not to notice the gesture or his subsequent loud cries of my name. You want bizarre? On more than one occasion, I have gone to a party looking for a specific girl, then seen her there and decided, in the moment, to avoid her. And this happened a while ago. Before things got bad.
Loneliness is failed solitude. I suspect I’ve now taken to staring at people, at women, long enough that it’s almost noticeable. I am not that many years away from being someone a mother would cross the street with her child to avoid passing. I’m not that many years away from being a person who girls talk about scornfully, not quite out of earshot. I’ve found myself smiling sheepishly at people in the street, just to see if it engenders some sort of response. Usually, it doesn’t. Loneliness is solitude with a problem. I would ask what You saw in me, but I know. You saw me at my best, on stage, on the stage where I shine the brightest. You didn’t like me because I was attractive. You liked me because I represented the life You wanted to live, and getting to know me was an easy way to help bring that life about for Yourself. It was a case of mimetic desire – You didn’t want me, You wanted to be me. And being with me was the best path to get You there. For all the talking I’ve always done, I don’t have much to say anymore. At least not to other people. I’ve been spending hours walking circles and circles around the city, reminiscing, laughing to myself. Though even before I arrived here, it had been getting to the point where it’s odd to eat a meal, to see a movie, with someone. To the point where the running commentary in my head seems to be the best companion I have. It is, at least intermittently, pretty entertaining. I do make myself laugh sometimes, in a way that I used to do for others. And there’s always the DP. It’s not uncommon to see an old man talking with himself animatedly. I’m thinking now that those men probably reached the summit in the same way that I’m reaching it, and in the descent, they’d already lost the ability to meet people with whom to have the discussions they ended up having alone. They didn’t have chat rooms, either. It doesn’t necessarily make them unhappy, though. Tomorrow I’ll move into a new house, interview for a new job, and reunite with the girl who took my virginity 15 years ago. Things which, on the surface, should make me quite happy. One must change to stay akin to me. Just like every departure is a little bit like death, every arrival is a small rebirth. It’s easy to be ok during the part where everything is new. Because for a little while, there’s still some hope that things will
be different this time. Though at this point, I’m not sure why such hope continues to exist. I know too much about life to have any optimism. Because I know even if it’s nice it’s going to lead to shit. I know that if you smile at somebody and they smile back, you’ve just decided that something shitty is going to happen. You might have a nice couple of dates, but then she’ll stop calling you back, and that’ll feel shitty. Or you’ll date for a long time, and then she’ll have sex with one of your friends, or you will with one of hers, and that’ll be shitty. Or you’ll get married and it won’t work out and you’ll get divorced and split your friends and money and that’s horrible. Or you’ll meet the perfect person who you’ll love infinitely and you even argue well, and you grow together and you have children and you get old together and then she’s gonna die! That’s the best-case scenario, is that you’re gonna lose your best friend and then just walk home from D’Agostino’s with heavy bags every day, and wait for your turn to be nothing also. Voltaire, on his death bed, was asked by a priest if he would like to let god into his life. “Now is not the time to be making enemies,” his response. I'm fundamentally incapable of not being fundamentally incapable. In my wildest dreams, there are no wildest dreams. If you let me have whatever I wanted, anything in the world, to be with any person, to have any job, to live anywhere, I would just not want it again after a little while. I have no interests besides the pedestrian. I have no imagination. No ambitions. Most things are never meant. 93 days from the midway point, and standing in a place where I’ve been for so long that my footprints remain like steps in a just-ebbed tide, from which it has become quite difficult to extract my feet. The return of a round-trip journey, a hike, a car ride, is always shorter than the trip out. Empirically, it isn't, but psychologically speaking, it seems like it takes far less time to get back than it did to get there in the first place. Unless you get lost. I feel quite lost, though, and I still think the moving sidewalk of my life path is speeding up, little by little. You get to a certain age, and every 15 minutes, it’s time for breakfast again.
Life gets easier as the time goes by. There is so much less of it. I work hard to avoid hard work. I go to my job interview. Evidently, I dropped off my CV the day that one of the other teachers put in her notice. The Director of Studies is tall, pale, thin, and strangely distant in a vaguely Mormon way. He asks me questions which don’t really have an answer, like “How’s your pride?” He talks slowly like I don’t understand him, even though I do. He tells me I can start the next Monday, and that the pay will be between $38-41 an hour, or roughly 60% more than you’d get for doing the same job in New York. After I leave, I call the Ex-Flatmate because I want to consider her a friend again. It's odd picking up again after 13 years, but if anything, trade being a uni student and not going to class for being the mother of a newborn and not being able to have a job, and the end result is still that she's free most afternoons. We talk like it’s 1997. The other shoe will drop, but I'd rather not think about that right now. Melbourne is a walking city, and I'm a walking person. Anywhere is walking distance if you have the time. While I was out, my new flatmates left a towel and soap on the bed for me. Sure, there's a framed photo of a naked Adonis on the wall next to the bed, but I can trade that for the fact that there is a bed, and a dresser, and a clothes rack, and everything else I didn’t want to have to buy. I can bear to look at some bulging man muscles in exchange for a bunch of free furniture. As long as my masculine pride is the only thing they ask me to swallow, I’ll be fine. I get the feeling they haven't lived with anyone they didn't know before, and that, if I do this right, they may end up treating me a lot better than I deserve. Mental Shorthand Phrase of the Day: “It’s an IMAX theatre.” I coined this last time I was here, after they opened an IMAX theatre in Melbourne a few months before I left. I got high and saw every film they showed there. To a 23-year old stoner, it was pretty awesome, and I was sad that it hadn’t been there earlier so I could have enjoyed it the whole time I lived here. To be fair, though, it paled in comparison to other reasons for which I was saddened by my departure. Ever since, when I discover something positive in a place shortly before I am to leave it, in my inner monologue I refer to it as an IMAX theatre. As in, “good, but not worth sticking around for.” I now live
across the street from the eponymous IMAX Theatre. I won’t even have to drive home high. Australia? It's like a warm Sweden, but with aboriginals. You’re like a miniature Buddha, covered in hair. 'This business was constructed on a spot owned by the Wurundjeri tribe...' read a sign on the front façade of the hostel. There are similar plaques on several businesses around town. I’m not sure what purpose they serve. Do the displaced aboriginals care? Does that plaque feed them? Does it make them feel better about having been ostracized and marginalized, chased off their land and killed? Or does it just look good to a few politicians who actually thought that having a national ‘Sorry Day’ could be seen as anything more than large-scale lip service to a people who are still completely disrespected and ignored. At least the ones who are left. Not that it’s my country, or anything. Sorry doesn’t put the Triscuit crackers in my stomach, now does it? Mental masturbation. Spending time with online personals is akin to planting seeds in a virtual garden, and about as likely to yield real fruit. Still, I pass the afternoon with my laptop at uni, sowing away. Is there any way to talk about the relative merit or morality of a decision without regard to its eventual result? Isn’t every action, every decision, only able to be judged after the fact? You could jump out of a plane without a parachute and land in a tree before you hit the ground, walking away unscathed. In that case, your decision wouldn’t have been a ‘bad’ one, because it ended with no bad result. You could have unprotected sex with multiple partners and never impregnate anyone or catch an STD. In that case, you’d be ‘right’ to say that the decisions you made were not bad, because they were free of repercussions. Conversely, you could get killed by a piece of debris falling from an airplane passing overhead while sitting in your living room, watching TV. In that case, you might say it was a bad decision to live in the neighborhood you chose. Kant, perhaps, would disagree. 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, 12 seconds. If you know what’s going to happen, it will change the way you act. But would you really be ‘acting’ at all, or just reacting? Every time I decide to pack up and move to another country, have I achieved ‘success’ by finding a place to live and a decent job, by making new friends, by seeing new sights? Would I have had more
success had I not left a particular place? What if I came to a place and couldn’t find work or accommodation? What if I had to leave with my tail between my legs and nothing more than the clothes on my back? Would I then say I’d made a bad decision in coming? I wagered I’d be able to find a job in a language centre when I got here because I knew there would be a lot of schools and I thought I’d be qualified enough to find work at one of them. The fact that I received a phone call 15 minutes after I dropped off a CV, an interview the day after, and a tentative job offer on the spot proves that notion was correct. But it’s a shitty conversation school job. It’s the kind of job that I wouldn’t take back home because I’d feel it beneath me. It’s the kind of job I could have been doing 5-8 years ago, not now, in my mid-30s, at the halfway point. However, it pays $40 an hour, which is more than I make at my college in New York, in a job I’ve had for 5 years. If the job offer comes to fruition, it will easily provide my income for the year that I’m here. It will give me a sense of self-worth. So in that case, it’s a good decision. I might start it and hate it, or I might sign a contract and then get a better offer two days later which I can’t take because I’ve put my name on the line. 33 In that case, it will, again, have been a bad decision. But at the moment, until the outcome is known, no value judgment can be ascribed to the decision. I took to saying I moved to Korea for You because I had to. I had no choice - I followed my heart. But if I hadn’t come, I would have been left with good memories of You instead of the last 18 months of my life. If I hadn’t gone to Korea, I wouldn’t be here, now, though, either. And I don’t know how this is going to turn out, but it might be better than having stayed in NY, which is where I’d be if I hadn’t gone to Korea. Or perhaps I’d be somewhere else altogether. How far back along the chain of causality is it necessary to go, though? And can you ever know if what you are doing is right before you do it? Isn’t the most carefully-planned decision ultimately just made on a hunch? Einmal est keinmal. Life is the dress rehearsal for life. The most important decisions in life, they generally make themselves. The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to see a person in only one light, one which is dependent on the circumstances in which you know them or have known them. If you meet someone at a rave, you might assume that they are a drug-user, when in reality they may have never touched an illicit substance. Your barber is still your barber, even if you run into him at the gym. 33
Which is exactly what happened to me last year in Korea with two universities I’d solicited for work, although any decisions made while in Korea which served to keep me in Korea should only be seen as ‘bad’, retrospect or no.
When I re-meet people here, I have to remember that it’s 2011, not 1996. They have children and money and lives and concerns that do not concern me. I chose to leave, and to leave them. I chose not to contact them for more than a decade. I never expected that things would be the same. I don’t know what I expected at all. It’s halftime in my life now, and I’ve played a very sloppy first half. If you are from the First World, you can never understand what it means to emigrate, to immigrate. Because when you leave your country, it is not borne of necessity, but of choice. You can always go back home if it doesn’t work out. I’ve been an immigrant for 80% of my adult life. But when the music stops, I pack up and leave. No hard feelings, thanks for the memories. Visas may be an issue, but everywhere I go, I’m welcome. Even living as an illegal in Spain made little difference because no one thought that I looked foreign, and no one at Customs imagined that an American would want to immigrate to Spain, so they never questioned my passport or the absurd amount of luggage I carried with me whenever I entered the country. One night, walking home at 3AM, I was stopped by two undercover cops on the street, who, evidently, were looking for someone who had just robbed a house in the area. I dismissed them with drunken fluency, told them I didn’t carry my ID card, because all I needed was 50 euros and my keys. One time I got busted with about a dozen ecstasy pills, and thought, for a few minutes, that I might be going home on the next plane. The cops just took them away, made me sign a piece of paper confessing that they were mine, and then put them in an envelope. Nothing more came of it.34 There was a long period during which I was fairly certain that I was at least partially immortal. Brunswick Street looks closer to its 1996 iteration than most of the rest of the city. The same record shops still line the street. The burnt umber paint on the façade of the Provincial Hotel is just as artfully chipped and peeling as it was the first day that I met Rohan, my old, mulleted drug dealer there, with my cash stuffed into my shoe for safety, a fistful of yellow bank notes that still felt like Monopoly money to me. The same shops in the same locations, the same bars straddling the line between trendy and crusty, though pricing would indicate a nod to the former. I walk north to see the Ex-Girlfriend and her family. At the corner of Brunswick and York, in the tall glass of an atrium window, scraps of paper are taped up in a collage. A sign advises passersby: “Write down 34
One of several “Did that really happen?” life experiences from my twenties, most of which involve drugs on some level.
your secret, and slip it into the mail slot. It will be displayed in the window. (No names or addresses, plz)” I am a furry. !" #$%&" '(" )$(*+,-./" 0./" !1'" .-2-+" 3$,.3" &$" *,./" 0.($.-" #,4-" 5,'6" I stole money out of my mum’s purse, and used it to buy smack. I secretly sometimes envy homeless bums, just a little bit. I travel far & wide, but try as I might, I will never escape myself. I stop and reach into my bag, looking for a scrap of paper. I find one, and write: “I’m finding it harder and harder to see the point of things.” I pause, the paper in my hand. I slip it back into my bag. No need to make public my disdain for it all. Even anonymously. I walk and walk. Sometimes I do that. The neighborhood changes, it becomes more Australian, less nouveau. The row houses look like the Melbourne I haven’t seen since last century. Time spent in perambulation seems, for me, not to count. I look up and an hour has passed. I realize my feet are hurting and only then am I aware that I’ve been in motion for a very long time. Bird Avenue in Northcote is very much the suburbs. I sit for a minute on a bench to compose myself, to stop sweating. Then I go to No. 42, pause at a BMW in the driveway, wondering if I am at the right place. I call a “hello” into the mesh of the screen door. And I re-meet my ExGirlfriend, now a mother of two, the first person I ever slept with, several versions of me ago. The house is impressive. The guy she’s seeing is a computer programmer who I knew vaguely from college, when he was going out with her best friend. I don’t ask how things transpired, nor do I ask about the divorce she went through a few years ago, because I have no right to and I don’t know what an answer would give me besides raw data to fill in the gaps in a story I don’t need to know. Her daughters are beautiful. J_____, the older one, looks like her; G_____, the younger one, looks like her ex-husband (or how I imagine him to look – I never saw him). J_____ sits across from me at the kitchen table and talks to me about many things, animatedly. Sometimes her accent slips into something more American than Australian - I blame a subconsicious parroting effect and/or too much television. She pronounces the ‘r’ in “turkey”, and her mother laughs. I tell her I knew her mum long before she was born, and that I haven’t been to Australia in quite some time. She seems surprised when I tell her that I’m American, though to be fair, at 8 years old it’s probably not something you think about, the fact that someone at your kitchen table who looks more or less like other people in your town and speaks the same language comes from another country. “Did you go to my mum and dad’s wedding?” she asks. I tell her I was living in Spain at the time, and I that didn’t. “Did you send a
present?” she continues. I tell her I was kind of broke at the time and didn’t think to. “Well, did you send a present after?” she asks. I tell her no, and that maybe I’m a bad person, but I smile because there’s no reason to be a downer to a 7-year old. I have never attended the wedding of a peer. 35 Migrations, defriending, and other avoidance measures have meant it hasn’t been difficult to avoid them. A majority of my longer-term friends are now married. I don’t think I’ve even received invitations to most of the nuptials. When you’re of no fixed address, it’s tough to get mail. Part of me knows you’re supposed to send a gift even if you don’t make it to the wedding itself. But a bigger part of me knows it’s hard to celebrate someone doing something I don’t want to do myself. Something I don’t want to be a part of. Whatever the opposite of schadenfreude is, I don’t have it. It is J_____’s eighth birthday in a few weeks’ time. She wants to have a sleepover, and apparently mom is only going to allow her to have a few friends over, which is, to her 7.9-year-old mind, not cool. I try to stay out of things. She wants to have a disco party. I tell her you need to be at least twelve for that, though she rebuffs this by saying a girl she knows who was 7 already had a disco party, thank you very much. “What kind of party would you have if you were eight and you could have any kind of party?” she asks her mother. “I’d have a pony party,” the answer. “Well, can I have a pony party?” she asks. “No, of course not.” “Well then why did you say you’d have a pony party?” the angry response. “You asked me what kind of party I would have if I could have any kind of party at all, not what kind of party can you have.” Check and mate. The adults try to promote the merits of an imaginary pony party. Or an imaginary disco party. “You can invite as many people as you like, and it can go on for as long as you like,” I offer. This is met with rolled eyes and tiny wrought hands. Maybe this is why we have children; so that when we tire of looking through the world with our own eyes, we can see it anew through theirs. Nah. I prefer to pack up and move to a new country every couple years.
35
The last wedding I attended was cousin J_____’s, 17 years ago. I rented a purple tuxedo and read something from the Bible in the church. One of those memories which feels borrowed from someone else’s mind.
G_____ comes in and out of the kitchen but doesn’t say much. With a laugh, the Ex-GF tells me she is evil sometimes, that once she wrote ‘F-U-K’ repeatedly on the chalkboard at her school (where her mum is also a teacher). When she is angry, she hides her mother’s things. A bicycle lock key was placed in an oven mitt in a kitchen drawer, where it sat for weeks. That’s kind of hilarious, I think. “That’s kind of hilarious,” I say. She agrees. S_____, her boyfriend, is delayed at a meeting, so the four of us have dinner together without him. A tableau: I am seated next to the only woman who would probably have married me 36 , across from two children who could very easily pass as my own, in a house in the suburbs of Melbourne. I’m drinking a beer, and my Ex-GF has a glass of wine. J_____ has water, and G_____ has milk. I pause with my fork in mid-air, and close my eyes for a few seconds longer than an eyeblink. There’s no way I can convey any of these thoughts to anyone present. When the kids are out of the room, my Ex-GF tells me that sometimes she just needs to be away from them. I tell her it’s perfectly understandable. At least, with joint custody, she does have a few days off. “But that’s no good either,” she tells me, “Because then they’re away from things they know.” Some days are a bit too much like a Jim Jarmusch film. I had a feeling that might happen here, this time around. At home, not long after dark, I run into the Paramedic, taking the trash to the curb. He smells and sounds of alcohol, and is a bit too touchy for my liking as he guides me inside. He’s a bit huggy inside, too, but I don’t say anything. Creepiness Factor 8.5/10, but it’s my first night in the house and I really don’t want to make an issue out of it. If getting a cheap furnished room within walking distance from the university means I have to submit to a bit of frottage by my 50year old homosexual flatmate, then so be it. This is actually what I think. I do, however, lock the door to my room before going to sleep. Rockmelons and sultanas. That’s how I started a journal here 15 years ago. A journal which lasted exactly 3 days, until I stopped chronicling and started living. I’m never very good at following through on projects. Even when those projects are just my life. The only joy in life is to begin. Continuing, not so much. People often tell me I look younger than my age. But I don’t know what that means. When I see people who are 35, people who look 35, 36
My wife notwithstanding, of course.
they are most likely older. And when I see people in suits and ties, in formal attire, doing formal things, I don’t think I’m that age at all, regardless of whatever chronological age they are. I’ve made the fundamental attribution error regarding myself. Someone doing what I’m doing can’t be my age. I still see myself, on some fundamental level, as a young adult. I still feel like I should be living in share houses and working a part-time job that’s “just for now”. Everything is just for now. Whatever you are at 35, that’s what you’re going to be. The DP chimes in to remind me that it’s all decline now. It certainly feels that way. You lose 1% of your hearing every year from your 35th birthday onwards. Metabolism slows down. Hair falls out and doesn’t come back. You sustain an injury now, even if it’s not that serious, and you are looking soreness for the rest of your life. Even when it doesn’t rain. But when you don’t have anything you want to do, it doesn’t really matter where you are. It doesn’t matter how old you are, or who you’re with, or whether it’s a Friday evening or a Monday morning. It feels very much like coming back here is closing the circle. Like it isn’t the halfway point that I’m reaching, but the finish line. Life is short, life is shit, and then you fucking die! On campus, I send some emails, and I lodge an application for a tax file number in anticipation of the job I think I have. I spend far too much time looking at dating sites online, sowing virtual seeds I will never, ever reap. What am I looking for, really? I have never had a successful online dating experience. I have had a few tragicomical online experiences, and several other ones not worth mentioning. And if I don’t know what I want, how can I know where to look? Back home, I chat with the Boys. When the Paramedic is sober, he isn’t touchy. I have been in town less than a week, and I already have a place to live and maybe a job. Uni hasn’t even started yet. Again, if you told me I’d have a job and a flat and reconnect with two old friends within 6 days of my arrival, that I’d walk around the city without a map, that it would feel, in some bizarre way, that I’d never left, I’d have said that would have been the best outcome I could possibly expect. I spent my first Friday afternoon on the South Lawn watching the kids go by. I have no obligations I am not meeting. Except those which I should have to myself. I walk around Brunswick Street in the long hours of dusk. I eat a falafel wrap, which is good, but doesn’t taste like American falafel. This
city was the first place I had falafel, and at the time, I had nothing to compare it to. Also, Indian food. Also, hummus. Also, sex. I was so much easier to impress the first time around. I’m home by dark, and sitting at the table with the Boys. The Paramedic goes to sleep and I spend my first Friday night in Melbourne with the Hairdresser talking about prostitution in SE Asia. This is not 1996. With his long limbs, his protracted movements, and his slow, deliberate speech, he is very much a character from an eighties Jim Henson film. Or maybe one by Don Bluth. He is the Trash Heap from Fraggle Rock. He is a benevolent Skeksi. He is an Ent. But a good man nonetheless. We are both in agreement that sex with the underaged is deplorable, but that consentual sex, even when by contract, is morally permissible. So say two travellers to SE Asia who have both partaken. In Korea the age of consent is 13. How can you even know what you are consenting to at 13? Though when I found this out, I also found that the age of consent is 13 in a lot of other countries too, including Spain. And isn’t the delineation arbitrary anyway? In the US, you could go to prison for a long time for having sex with a minor. But what happens on a person’s 18th birthday? They wake up an adult? It’s not a Bar Mitzvah. Yesterday, they weren’t fuckable, but today they are? We make laws to suit our prejudices. I've got 99 problems but having a bitch ain't one. In a vintage clothes shop, I chat to a tall, dark-haired girl. In a bakery, I chat to a short, light-haired girl. It's been so long since I've wanted to talk to anybody, that I sometimes don't remember it's important to have something to say. But walking around the city on a sunny Saturday morning, my first in fifteen years, feels just a little bit like being on ecstasy. Arequipa is a small mountain town in the center of Peru. I spent a few pleasant days there in 2006, and a few unpleasant days, too, while suffering from salmonella I contracted on a hike in the World’s Second Deepest Canyon 37 . The name of the town came from the Quechua phrase "Are, quipay", literally "Here, I stay", because legend has it that when settlers first arrived, the climate and geography proved most amenable to them, and they felt no need to continue wandering.38
37
A hike which culminated in my being strapped to a burro, somewhat delusional, and lugged back up to civilization. Another one of those “Did that really happen?” moments. 38 If the Lonely Planet is to be believed. So many travelers trek to the far corners of the earth reading the same anecdotes, the same histories. And yet they could totally be fucking with us.
I wonder if there is an Arequipa for me. I thought, for a time, that You were it. Most things are never meant. Good memories are just bedtime stories we tell ourselves. At night, the Boys sit on my bed. I don’t know how this happened. Creepiness Factor 6.5. I also don’t know how the Paramedic’s breath smells like alcohol at night and he acts drunk even though there isn’t any alcohol visible in the house, I don’t see him drink, and the Hairdresser says he doesn’t like alcohol. At any rate, they are both on my bed, and I am sitting at the table next to it, showing them photos on my computer. The Hairdresser asks if I can help him set up a laptop if he buys one. Why not? The two of them don’t understand what it means to “have internet” in the home. They think they do already because they have a phone jack. I explain it to them as plainly as I can. Why am I more patient with people I’ve known for 3 days than with my own family members and close friends? Later, I am in the kitchen, cooking. The Hairdresser is on a white leather swivel chair he keeps there so that he can sit while preparing food. 39 He watches me intently (Creepiness Factor 4.5) and we chat. This is how I spend my first Saturday in the house. I now feel almost no pressure to interact socially. I remember a palpable mix of tension and excitement at the arrival of a weekend in my twenties. I felt sure that something would happen, even though it rarely did. If I went to a party, I would stay until it got good, or until I felt like I’d “put in enough hours” there. Now, having a chat with someone in a kitchen is weekend enough. I’m a 60-year old in a 35-year old body. He leaves me when I sit down to eat. The meal isn’t much – some guacamole and sautéed chicken. But the chicken tastes far better than any chicken I’ve cooked in a long, long time. Yesterday I had the sweetest kiwi I’d eaten in my life. Three days ago, I sat on a bench on Errol Street and ate plums that tasted like candy, literally. When the ingredients are top-notch, you don’t have to do much to make a good meal.40 You live well in Australia. The evening’s bizarre pseudo-profound revelation: olive oil should be really expensive. If you took a fresh olive and squeezed it, how much 39
Functional, yet still pretty homo-chic. Contrast to Poland, where even in the ‘upscale’ (for Poland) supermarkets, the best package of chicken looked like the packages of chicken you’d push to the side in search of a better package of chicken. Like a package of chicken you might bring to the manager and say, “Hey, maybe you shouldn’t be selling this one anymore, no?” 40
liquid would even come out? A half-drop? I never thought about this until I picked up a bottle of Extra Virgin with olives on the cover. I didn't know the 'h' in 'Thai' was silent until I was in my early twenties. Good thing the Mensa test didn’t ask about that. In the 4th grade, I used to go to Heath Condiotte’s house and play Sporttime Hockey on his Commodore 64 computer. It was a challenging game – you could play with two people on the same team, but whichever player you chose to control was your player for the whole game – you couldn’t change to another. 41 Our team name was the Skipjacks, after a minor-league team from Baltimore which I had seen play on a trip with my parents the year before. The Skipjacks were famous for holding the longest losing streak in professional hockey history – 18 games (I believe we saw a game towards the end of this streak). The indefatigable fans, brimming with unwarranted fervor, had a battle cry which they repeated throughout the game: “Skipjacks on the warpath, Skipjacks on the warpath, Skipjacks on the warpath – Hey!” American sporting songs have never been known for length or cleverness.42 At any rate, in the video game, you designed players, paid to have them ‘trained’ (which made them faster and ostensibly, ‘better’), and went through a season with your team. Even after playing many, many times, we still only won about half of our games. This was enough to get into the playoffs sometimes, but it was a genuine struggle. 43 Once, I remember, in our jubilation at having won an important contest, one of us tackled the other, causing the power cord of the computer to disconnect. When we rebooted, we found that the result hadn’t registered, and that, in fact, we’d foreited the game. It was as devastating a moment as an 11-year old could have imagined.44 One day, though, we had another accident while playing – somehow we managed to hit the spacebar after a slapshot had been lofted into the air (the puck moved slowly in the game, which added to the agony of watching a goal float into your own net). When we unpaused, the puck continued on its arcing trajectory into the back of the goal. We must have looked at each other in disbelief. But we tried it again minutes later, with the same result. If you shot the puck, paused the game, and then unpaused it, you scored a goal every time. We won the Sporttime Cup that season, not by outrageous scores, but by just enough – we only used the Ultimate Trick when we needed it. And we never played the game again. 41
In retrospect, this was a far more realistic depiction of a sporting contest than ones which give you the option of controlling different players at different times; i.e. 99.5% of all team sporting games ever made. 42 See also: J-E-T-S. Jets! Jets! Jets! See also: Let’s go, Ran-gers! Etc. 43 Thankfully the 82-game real-time season didn’t exist in the 1986 gaming landscape. 44 Even an 11-year old whose mother had cancer, and whose father had suffered a heart attack 3 years previously.
In life, we want things to be challenging, but not too challenging. We still want to win in the end. What if you could live a life without reflection or contemplation? Malcolm Gladwell once wrote a piece about ‘choking’ versus ‘freezing up’, and posited that the former was due to thinking too much and the latter to forgetting everything that you’d already learned. Critics said the machine that won Jeopardy! had a distinct advantage because it wouldn’t have to deal with nerves. Balance a solid wooden plank between two chairs and tell someone to walk across it, they probably don’t have much problem doing it. Take the same plank and place it across a ravine, and it’s a different story.45 Perception is our reality. Every time I go to a new place now, I am comparing it to places I’ve been before. I remember the first few days walking around Barcelona the first time I apprehended the Museo Nacional from Plaza Espanya, I did a theatrical double take – I may even have rubbed my eyes a little bit – because I thought that I was looking at a well-rendered, largescale movie backdrop set 200 meters away. The churches and cathedrals of Barcelona left my jaw hanging down a few centimeters. The Eiffel Tower was impressive, Notre Dame less so, but there was a significant diminishing return on the ‘Wow! Factor’ the more things I saw. The walk to Machu Picchu was impressive, but the site itself? Meh. None of the structures even had roofs, so you never really felt you could get inside them. The trek in Luang Nam Tha was entertaining, but it was my fourth rainforest trek – besides the leeches that assailed us on our last morning’s walk, there was nothing I hadn’t seen before. Giggling, camera-shy villagers? Been there. Nighttime meals cooked around a smoky fire, with stories told by the locals and translated loosely by an indigenous guide? Done that. Any time we enter into a situation, we bring our own private world of experience to bear. The river may not be the same one you stepped into the first time, but you will certainly remember having been in it. Perhaps this contributed in some small way of Our problem in Korea – You didn’t have enough better things to compare it with to realize just how unexciting it was. Or, conversely, I just had too many. But not only does reflection cause us to be less impressed with things, it can lead to a damning inability to act. If I start a job now, I know that I’ll just get tired of it when I’ve worked out what it entails. Then 45
Another reason why this was an incredible story.
I’ll just start looking for something else. If I move to a new country, I know that when I get settled in, my body will resist the comfort like a rejected donor organ and I’ll be online looking at posts in far-off lands full of naive hopes that things will be different once I get there. If I meet someone now, I’m bringing a world of hurt, of false starts and broken promises, of divergent goals and excessive introspection, to bear. I can’t not think about everything that’s come before, and it feels like all new actions are simply reactions to things that have already come to pass. Eternal Thunderstorm of the Spotted Mind. Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose. Weak Heart, Muddled Mind, Can’t Win. Feteo ergo sum. In my Ex-Girlfriend’s kitchen, I took a globe and showed J_____ where I came from. With one index finger on New York, you can almost draw a straight line through the centre of the Earth and come out in Australia. It’s basically as far away from home as I could possibly be. My Oldest Friend is 19 hours behind me in California – almost, that doesn’t seem possible. Possible tag lines for the movie about my current living situation: “He wears the pants, because they’re wearing the skirts.” “Where the kisses are his, and his, and um, also his.” “Living in Melbourne can be such a drag.” I’ve long felt like I’m living my own version of The Truman Show. But I never seem to get to the point where I find out anyone else is watching. On some level, isn’t The Matrix simply the fantasy of every semiawkward adolescent male? You want a reason that you don’t fit in besides the fact that you are simply odd. And there is a reason: Surprise! – you are The One. One of the few things I still miss from my Midwest childhood was this weird, deluded but unshakable conviction that everything around me existed all and only For Me. Am I the only one who had this queer deep sense as a kid? – that everything exterior to me existed only insofar as it affected me somehow? – that all things were somehow, via some occult adult activity, specially arranged for my benefit? Does anybody else identify with this memory? The child leaves a room, and now everything in that room, once he’s no longer there to see it, melts away into some void of potential or else (my personal childhood theory)
is trundled away by occult adults and stored until the child’s reentry into the room recalls it all back into animate service. Was this nuts? It was radically self-centered, of course, this conviction, and more than a little paranoid. Plus the responsibility it conferred: if the whole of the world dissolved and resolved each time I blinked, what if my eyes didn’t open? Maybe what I really miss now is the fact that a child’s radical delusive self-centeredness doesn’t cause him conflict or pain. His is the sort of regally innocent solipsism of like Bishop Berkeley’s God: all things are nothing until his sight calls them forth from the void: his stimulation is the world’s very being. And this is maybe why a little kid so fears the dark: it’s not the possible presence of unseen fanged things in the dark, but rather the actual absence of everything his blindness has now erased. For me, at least, pace my folks’ indulgent smiles, this was my true reason for needing a nightlight: it kept the world turning. As an only child, and a pampered only child at that, these feelings were magnified between five- and tenfold. It still requires some reminding that I am not, in fact, the center of the world. But I am the center of my world. And are the two any different? Only an atheist can be a solipsist. Every man regards his own life as the New Year’s Eve of time. Why Korea Didn’t Work – A Visual Representation
I want to stop Koreans I see in the street here and ask them, “Seriously, isn’t this just so much better than home?” And if they say no, I want to punch them.
I would probably want to punch them regardless. Again, I repeat: Everyone in Melbourne is Asian. Here’s how not to make an interesting foreign community, or a vibrant university campus life. Invite a shit-ton of Asian international students who don’t really speak English well enough to be studying at an English-language medium school. Make sure that they’ll all be heading home right after they pick up their degrees so they don’t try and integrate into the community at all. Then let the party begin. Architecturally, Melbourne University looks roughly the same as it always did. But there is hardly any feeling on campus at all. It’s like the steak Jeff Goldblum sent through the matter transporter at the beginning of The Fly. Same same, but different. The Paramedic has memory issues. Or, like many simple people, he feels uncomfortable with silence. He asks me, pretty much verbatim “So how you settling in to Melbourne, everything ok?” every time I leave the house and come back home again. Every time I pass him in the kitchen or the hallway, even. Creepiness factor 7, trending upwards. I just say “Yup, everything’s fine” and do my best not to remind him it isn’t necessary to do that again and again. “I’m empty. But I found a way to make it feel less – bottomless.”
“How?” “Pretend. You pretend the feelings are there, for the world, for the people around you. Who knows? Maybe one day they will be?” Fake it till you make it. Just do it. Eat the crow. Bite your tongue. Put a bloody sock in it, mate. Do what has to be done. Maintain, Homie. Where do you see yourself 5 years from now? Five years closer to not feeling like this anymore. What is ‘normal’? If it is defined as ‘what the majority does’, then virtually everyone is abnormal in many ways. I don’t really eat meat. I am an atheist. I am single at 35. I have lived in six different countries. All of these things would place me in the minority of the world’s citizens. But are they ‘abnormal’? Are they cause for concern? What is ‘natural’? If it is defined as ‘what it is in our nature to do’, then every endeavor of the human race is, by definition, natural. Factories are natural. Nuclear bombs are natural. Genocide is natural. It would take actual trangressions of the laws of physics to qualify something as ‘unnatural’. Perhaps I am a natural, normal human being. It’s just that other people don’t see it that way.
It is easy to be here, though. Living in a country which isn’t your own but shares the language almost feels like cheating, in a ‘living abroad’ sense. Your linguistic differences are quirky, but not divisive. There are many words said here which aren’t the ones I’d use to express a similar sentiment. And certain phrases, when voiced here, don’t really carry the equivalent weight which they would in the US. But, more or less, I get it. Even if I hadn’t been here before, it still wouldn’t feel that foreign. Even the first time around, it never did. On the other hand, living in a country where you really don’t speak the language as you get older just makes you seem weird. It’s natural to be less socially-motivated as you grow older. But when you factor in the alienation which results from not being able to have casual interaction with the majority of those around you, it makes it even easier to turn away from it all. And each party seems less human to the other. You are reduced to what you need to say, not what you want to say. Perhaps this helps to explain why most older Westerners in Asia just seem odd – they are. I go to my new job and drop off my educational certifications. They want me to start on Wednesday, two days from now. In 1996, I was in the country 11 days before my first night’s work as a busboy at the Baby Grand, an outer-suburbs nightclub for over 28s. I knew almost no one and nothing of the city, but I started to work, because I needed the money. Wednesday will be my 11th day in the country in 2011. For what it’s worth. They want me to teach a class that has 4 elementary students and 4 lower intermediate students. “All classes are multi-level,” I tell the Director of Studies, “at least here you’re admitting it.” I don’t know if he understands that I’m not complaining. He reminds me again, apropos of nothing I’ve said, that this is a workplace for “positive people.” “Well, I’m a fucking cancer, mate, so I’ll put a fast stop to that,” I reply. But not out loud. I’m remarkably good at quickly forging out a shitty, lower-middle class twentysometing lifestyle for myself wherever I go. For what it’s worth Back to school, back to school, to prove to dad that I’m not a fool. I go to my first class, Second Language Writing. There isn’t much to say about it. I didn’t expect to learn a lot by doing this course, and I don’t think I’ll have to revise that expectation as I go. This degree is simply a piece of paper I need so that I don’t have to get angry about not being able to apply for jobs which require a field-related MA. I’m paying $23,000 to have one less thing to complain about. It’s odd being in a classroom and not being at the front of it, but that
doesn’t come as a surprise. What does is the fact that more than half of the students are non-native speakers. Besides one Canadian guy and me, everyone in the class is Asian. The professor teaches ESL at Melbourne Uni. I make a brief overture to her regarding the possibility of work in the department at the end of class. She directs me to a language center on campus. I’ll probably have to be a good student first, and pester her again later. Life is all about building up connections for us to exploit down the road. I still don’t have much social capital here. But it’s only been 9 days. In my second lecture, Sociolinguistics and Language Learning, there are more students, but only 3 of them are Australian. One of them is a tall, comely librarian who catches me looking at her when I shouldn’t be. I end up doing group work with a Malaysian, an Indonesian, and a Thai who are all working with the Australian Armed Forces. Their English is quite acceptable but still they defer to me. Of course they do - I am the native speaker. “We are living at a unique time,” I say to the class towards the end of the lecture, “– there isn’t much of the world left to discover, and everywhere you could possibly go, people are learning this language. Fortunately, it’s becoming dissociated with the monolith that is ‘America’ and simply being regarded more as the language of the world. I’m fascinated by the sociolinguistic implications of this.” Again, it’s good to be an unpatriotic American in a foreign country where you can both express yourself fully and side with the ways of the place you’re in. It’s a whole lot easier to endear yourself to those around you. On the last day before I begin my job, I wake up and am reminded how good it is not to be in Korea. In the afternoon, it rains hard for half an hour and then becomes impossibly beautiful. Yup, still in Melbourne. If you change one thing, that changes everything. The future’s just a fucking concept that we use to avoid being alive today. “I used to think that I’d have more people in my life as time went on.” “Mh, it doesn’t work that way.” “I’m starting to realize that.” “It’s almost like as we get older, the number of people that completely get us shrinks.” “Right. Until we become so honed by our experiences…and time and...” “Nobody else understands.”
I pick up my books at the school, but there is no contract to sign, no papers at all. I am still skeptical. The Student Employment Office on campus explains the difference between ‘casual’ and ‘part time’ work – basically the former means there’s no guarantee, no sick pay, and no severance. In other words, it’s like any part time job in the US. In a way, this makes sense – if there are no students, there isn’t any work, and the company doesn’t want the liability. If I make $40 an hour at 5 hours a day, 4 days a week, I can pay next semester’s tuition with 30 days of work. Not that I’m counting. I join a gym. I have spent too much time recently subtracting from my life – friends, pastimes, desires. If you keep subtracting, you end up with nothing. So I decide to add something instead. A few days ago I passed the place – it was there back in the 90s, and I go in before the Inner Naysayer can stop me (The DP hates being called that, and he waits outside as I’m doing the paperwork, chain smoking and making faces through the glass). The registration form I fill out asks which two areas I’d like to work on the most. I consider writing ‘left and right frontal lobes’, but settle on stomach and arms. I’ve already got nice legs and a tight ass. I say this to the guy who’s signing me up, but I don’t think he takes it the right way. He may well be gay, though I’m basing that only on what I feel to be a certain femininity in his demeanor, something I see in a lot of Australian guys who aren’t full-on meatheads. Also, he tells me went to a Lily Tomlin show last night. At any rate, for $12.95 I week, the math seems fair. What else is there to do anyway? I’m not going to jog outside; the weather here is decent, but variable. And I don’t know that running is the best thing for fitness anyway. I’ve never used a weight machine in my life, but I’m confident I can figure out how. I’m now at the age where if I don’t do something positive for my body, the results are going to be quite negative. And I have to do something with my time besides read and introspect. On my first day at the gym, I have an orientation session with a trainer. Ostensibly this is so they can sell me personal training sessions, for which they most definitely get commission. The trainer is a strong-jawed, rakishly handsome young guy who looks like the genetic result of combining the DNA of George Clooney with that of Brock Sampson, if the genetic result were that he turned out Australian, and a light-skinned Indian at that. He is so positive that it makes me feel even worse about myself than usual, but I go along with him and he leads me through a health questionnaire. The odd thing is, even being honest, I don’t look that bad on paper.
I’ve finally got the body I’ve always wanted. The key is, you just have to want a really shitty body. I don’t smoke, I don’t drink much, and other than my chocolate cake whoring and general lack of activity besides Forrest Gumpian jaunts across town, I should feel a lot better than I do. “How many meals a day do you eat?” He asks. “Two or three,” I tell him, because this seems to be within the expected range of normal human consumption. “Your body is a machine, so you need to eat frequently to keep it running. You need to eat five or six meals a day,” he tells me. That sounds awesome, but I am dubious. “Define meal,” I respond. “Breakfast, a piece of fruit and some toast, then a few hours later, some yogurt or a protein shake, then for lunch a sandwich, some lean meat on whoelmeal bread. Then in the afternoon, a handful of almonds, dinner, a piece of fish and some veggies,” he says with a smile. Those aren’t ‘meals’ – that’s ‘grazing’. But I follow his lead, admit that I am a worthless piece of shit, dietarily speaking, and if this is the closest I’ve been to a confessional in 20 years, I put on a good act of being repentant. He shows me how to use the medieval torture devices around the weight room. There is a card with my name on it that will be kept in a drawer. I have to fill out the work I’ve done when I come in. Theoretically, this plays to my strengths, because I absolutely love counting and note-taking. In the supermarket next to the gym, I am fondling tomatoes while a young woman next to me is looking at avocados that are nowhere near ripe. She is thin and somewhat attractive, wearing a loose-fitting blouse, a flowing shawl, and parachute pants ensemble that screams “Meat is Murder!”. “Those ones over there are better,” I tell her, gesturing to a stack of darker green fruits an aisle over. She says thanks, and smiles, and I feel that little thing you feel sometimes. There are many things I could say right now. I could ask if she’s making guacamole. I could remark about the sale on avocados. I could say a lot of things, if saying things to women in supermarkets was my thing, but it isn’t, so I don’t. If you don’t change anything, nothing changes. The only people, scientific or other, who never make mistakes are those who do nothing. I go home and pass out, ignoring my flatmates’ party of the evening. I have to teach tomorrow and I want to conserve my voice. I wake up and go to work. There is not much to say about doing a job I’ve been doing on and off
for the past 13 years except that, absurdly, it makes me feel better. If I could be the person I am in class all the time, even half the time, I don’t know how much better my outlook on life would be. In class, I have patience. In class, I am outgoing. In class, I try to make things work. In class, I bring people together. Outside of class I’m a guy sitting alone on a bench with a book. A guy you probably don’t want to sit next to. A guy who is most definitely not going to start a conversation with you, and will react with disdain if you try to initiate one with him. There’s not much to say about my students, either, except that they have a good time, which comes as no surprise to me. At this one silly, relatively insignificant job that I never really intended to do in the first place, I’m pretty goddamned good. The DOS seems to warm to me after standing outside of my room and watching everyone laughing wildly at a silly game I have them playing. I still haven’t signed anything or given my bank details when I leave for the day, but it feels a little less problematic, now that I’ve worked, and shown them what I can do. 29 days till tuition is paid. At home, I make a sauce. I don’t even want to eat it, but I’ve been buying tomatoes at the supermarket like I’m collecting them and it’s the only thing I really know that I can do with them. There’s something about the process of sauce-making that I enjoy. It’s as if a kitchen, a house, isn’t really mine until I’ve made a sauce in it. Perhaps that’s why I never feel at home in my father’s house. He tells me not to cook, because he’s confident I won’t clean up to standard. I don’t even know how it comes out, because I don’t taste it to check. Kind of, it’s not necessary anymore. I know what goes into it. I’m sure Australian tomatoes are better than Korean ones, so it will be the best sauce I’ve made in two years, at least. Then I force myself to go to the gym. The elliptical literally destroys me. After 10 minutes I hit the cool-down button and barely make it the final 3 on the lowest resistance setting. I do the weightlifting that I was instructed to do. I am sore in places where I didn’t even know I had muscles, but that’s probably because I don’t have muscles in those places. It is difficult to walk the two blocks home. Passing observation: there are black people in Australia now. I just noticed that. At the gym, one guy who looks like Adebisi from Oz lifts 20kg free weights like they are stage props, and two other young, sinewy Africans occupy a machine I want to use for what seems like a long time. I feel as though I want to say to them, “Hey, I’m from New York – I get you guys,” but there’s probably no way that would be interpreted in a positive way. In 1996, at 21, I came for a 4-month semester abroad, and felt like I would be away forever. I remember being scared by the length of the
journey ahead of me and sad that I would miss out on so much life in the US while I was gone. After 6 weeks I was in love with a girl and doing the paperwork to transfer my credits from college back home so I could finish my course here. And the rest, as they say, is history. But now I’m here for a year, or perhaps more. And after two weeks, I’m already walking around town and worrying and wondering about what it’s going to mean when I have to leave next February, at the latest. Two weeks down, 50 to go. It doesn’t seem like much time, a year. By the time you realize where you are, you’re preparing not to be there anymore. Every 15 minutes, it’s time for breakfast again. Though on the other hand, in some way I’ve also realized that a day is a long time, a week is a long time, and the ‘perception equals reality’ mantra is, again, perfectly appropriate here. Time accordions in and out for me, it telescopes and bobs and weaves like a kite in a strong wind. There are days when I feel scared that I’ve got so little time left on earth, and others when I look back in disbelief that a particular memory was ‘only’ X years ago. There are so many versions of myself to remember that I sometimes juxtapose them chronologically. I occasionally have distinct memories of people, of meals, and I can’t even recall where I was in them. As for Australia, Version 2.1, I’m not sure if I’ve been here for a long time or for no time at all. I’m not sure if I’ve got a long time left, or if things are close to ending. Some days I’m not even sure which of those two I want. Life, well spent, is long. There is a pretty, quiet British girl in my university program. During the group introductions, it comes out that she has lived in five countries. I want to ask her if the increased freedom afforded by such an existence is nullified by the untethered sense of placelessness that attacks one after so many moves. Perhaps at some point I will. If you live in two countries in your life, that’s one more than 90% of the people in the world ever do. And if you live in three countries, you’re probably in the company of less than 1% of the human race. After that, if you continue on as an itinerant, you enter a space occupied by so few people that, if your travels are how you self-identify, you will find it difficult, if not impossible, to relate to the majority of those you meet. And you can pretend that your Arequipa is wherever you are at the moment, but it’s going to become increasingly harder to convince yourself that it’s true. After class, a few of us go for a drink over on Lygon Street. I end up alone with a Taiwanese girl I’d partnered off with for discussion during
the lecture. She is 26 and has a wonderful smile which I noticed in Monday’s class as well. She worked for a few years as a journalist. Her English is quite good. We chat about the present and the future. I blow my ‘life story’ load pretty fast, and she listens politely. She is far too nice to destroy. I don’t bother to ask for her phone number when we part ways after a drunken hamburger and fries. An American friend from Korea wrote to ask if I was writing and I wrote back to say that I’m not. Not fiction. No time for stories. At least not invented ones. I wake up and find out that the Paramedic got knifed at an ATM down the street from our house at 8PM last night. I am incredulous, sorry, and newly fearful at this news. I still don’t see Australia as a place where that sort of thing happens. Creepiness Factor 4.5, trending upwards, as he has bandages on his throat – they actually slit his throat – but he is still all smiles this morning as he offers his daily “How you settling in?” question. He is Dory from Finding Nemo. He is the foil, and even though he asks you the same question 8 times, something I would not suffer gladly (or at all) in most people, he does it with such apparently genuine interest that it seems indecent to begrudge him his lightness of head. He is the gay male counterpart of my wife. No brains, no headaches. Here’s how life is different than the movies. What I would like to say to the next woman I am interested in, who may be interested in me, is this: “It has been nearly two years since my last relationship of any kind at all. Before my last relationship, it had been two years since the previous one. During my last relationship, I was betrayed and made to move halfway around the world to be with a person who didn’t have the decency to tell me not to follow her. It made me feel so horrible that I was fairly certain I would never attempt to let anyone into my life again, simply because I’d decided it wasn’t worth it. I’m really not a bad person – I’m just not very good at being in a relationship. But I would like to think I haven’t completely given up hope yet. I would like to think it is still possible to be proven wrong.” In the movies, the camera would then pan to the woman’s face. She would pause, appear pensive, maybe bite down gently on her lower lip. She’d glance down in her lap before looking back at me. Then she would lift her head to meet my stare and say, “You know, I’d like to prove you wrong, too.” Then the soundtrack would play something poppy, yet emotive. In real life, however, any woman who heard this missive delivered
sincerely, any self-respecting, mature woman, would nod politely and then stop returning my calls. Life’s too short to let someone ruin it on you. No one wants to get into a train wreck, especially not when they see the locomotive bearing down on them from a mile off. And, to be fair, even my putting it that way wouldn’t really be that close to the truth. It would still be leaving out a good deal of things. I stop at an IGA a few blocks from the house and pick up two bottles of wine. It is 6.30PM. The course of my evening is now determined. In my room, the DP splits a bottle with me, but he disappears when I open the second one. When I get drunk enough, he usually doesn’t stick around. I guess I make a pretty crappy conversationalist when I’m tipsy. 86 days from halfway home. The perils of comfort – time is already speeding up on me. Friday. I walk to and around the Docklands complex. The architecture is cold, contradictory, and difficult on the eye. The shops are empty and devoid of character. 46 I didn’t spend much time in Sydney, but I do remember that its port areas were a lot livelier than Melbourne’s. People actually used them to live, to shop, to eat, to play. Perhaps this conversion of a harbor into something ostensibly accessible to its citizenry was some integral part of Melbourne’s desire for equal footing with the Emerald City. Though from the little I’ve read about it, and from what I can see now, I’m not the only person who’s come to the conclusion that on most levels, they have failed. The shops and lanes are largely deserted, even though it’s a beautiful Saturday afternoon. The warehouses where we used to go to raves are gone as well, save two, which have been converted into more restaurants, boutiques, and a rentable banquet hall. It makes me feel quite old, though many things seem to do that now. I remember one party where we actually had to crawl through a hole ripped into the side of a wall to get inside. The invitation was given to me in a gilded, Chinese-print envelope by a kid from the radio station where I DJed. Inside, the slip of paper was sprayed with glitter and colored by hand. Perhaps such parties still exist somewhere here, though I have a feeling they don’t. At any rate, no one is likely to invite me to them. And even if they did, they wouldn’t be what they used to be. The past is not what it was. It grows suddenly, forebodingly, cinematically gray and a wave of existential nausea washes over me. I am reminded of a nihilistic mantra my mind repeats on occasion against my better judgment – no 46
There is, however, a black-light mini golf course, which seems to me the ne plus ultra of stoned pseudo-sporting endeavors.
place will ever feel like home, ever again. No matter what I do, no matter where I go, the place in which I ultimately settle will be as arbitrary as the life decisions I have been making for the last 15 years. It’s all just movement. There is nowhere that I can ever stay where I will feel as though I’ve been there long enough to grow in the place. Even if I do go back to one of the places in which I’ve experienced good times previously (like here), so much will have changed that I’ll be left lost in the void between how I remembered it and what it has become. There will never be comfortable, familiar nights out with old friends. In fact, there will never be a genuine group of old friends at all. There will never be holiday meals which gradually grow into traditions over the years. In fact, there will never be traditions at all – my father and I don’t even have a single one, and we never really did (though even without the overseas moves, this would still likely be true). Anywhere I move, I will set up my lodging there and that will feel as ‘home’ as any other place I’ve passed through. I have not spent more than 3 years in a dwelling since leaving the house I lived in when I graduated high school at 19. That was half my life ago. All I can do now is keep moving forward – it doesn’t matter if I want to or not. All of a sudden I feel like crying, just a bit. I hold it in. The DP, standing next to me, produces a small packet of tissues which he proffers. I wave him away. If you go fishing, and you spend a few hours without so much as a bite, when something does come along, it’s common to overreact and lose it, or just flat-out not notice it in the first place. That’s kind of how it feels now with women. And if you’re out on the boat all afternoon without a nibble, the bait you’re dangling is going to end up looking tired and uninviting. Basically, anything that would take it is likely to be pretty desperate, or at the very least, just not paying attention all that well. I’m sitting here, holding my rod and waiting for an old fish I don’t even want to catch. I don’t battle depression – I just kind of let it slap me around like a bitch. My father sends me an email which just says “I miss you”. “When you write things like that, it makes it more difficult for me to live a life devoid of close personal connections,” I respond. What’s the emoticon for ‘kidding, but not really’? In the end, I don’t send the message. Misery is a dish best served for one. Is that it, Dad? Did the penguin tell you to do this? At the gym, I do my second workout and sweat far less profusely than
the first time around. There is a very pretty, petite woman with short hair who is on the machines next to me. At this point it’s like I don’t even want to hear myself hypothesize about things I could, but won’t say. “You know I’m going to masturbate about you later?” would probably be the only honest line to drop. Walking home at 9PM, groceries and gym bag in hand, I realize with an audible laugh that like many people my age, I really am settling down. The only difference is, I’m doing it alone. I have always grown tired of things more quickly than the average person. I suppose life should be no exception. If I weren’t here anymore, on earth, there would be exactly one person who would be significantly saddened by this. And the irony is, I haven’t been a part of this person’s life for the past 15 years. Not that this revelation only came to me today. If all spoken human interaction since the dawn of time could have been digitally stored, it would take up less space than that of email traffic in the year 2006 alone. A study found that the constant checking of email and text messages temporarily lowers a person’s IQ by as much as 10 points – more than double the effects of smoking marijuana. Perhaps I should just get a bag of weed and lay off the internet. We are all Bowling Alone, listening to a steady stream of whatever it is that supports our extant worldview. Social networking doesn’t require you to be very connected to society. It’s as though language has lost its ability to connect us – as though we’ve misplaced a key that would allow us, somehow, to understand what words have come to mean. Saturday, I walk out to St. Kilda Pier, which was evidently reconstructed after a 2003 fire destroyed it. I don’t remember ever having been here before. I buy a piece of chocolate cake in a bakery, I buy a veggie pastie in another one. Luna Park is just as desolate as it always was, and the gaping mouth at its entrance is just as grimly Burtonesque. The Doobie Brothers are playing at the Palais Theate in a few weeks’ time, and House of Pain is playing the Prince of Wales next month. Will they play ‘Jump Around’ first so that everyone is happy, or last so that no one leaves? If they didn’t play it a all, would people demand a refund? Is it better to have created one iconic slice of culture that you eventually come to loathe, or to live with the eternally hopeful, but likely fallacious assumption that your 15 minutes are still yet to come?
At home, the Boys catch me in the kitchen and invite me to eat with them. Again, I’ve already eaten, a remarkably shitty falafel served slowly and without energy at a place on Smith Street I will actively tell people to avoid. In the last 15 years, I have taken far more meals, in both restaurants and at home, seen far more films, in both theatres and my room, and gone on far more holidays alone than I have with other people. I am now at the point where in my mind these are activities which are meant to be done by oneself, and when I have someone with me, it feels odd. He walks fastest who walks alone. But who does he talk to when he gets there? I try to explain to them that I am, by nature, a solitary person, in a way that doesn’t sound like I’m just being untoward. Then I sit down for a while and chat, because they have been good to me and there’s no reason to foster ill will simply to perpetuate my misanthropic ways. They want me to have dinner with a single female friend of theirs on Tuesday night. I acquiesce. 47 The Hairdresser recounts an anecdote from a street fair in Brunswick many years ago when he, in drag, was accosted by a drunken man who dropped his pants and let out his “huge floppy cock” for all to see. “I was Patsy,” he drawls, announcing the name of his nom du drag, “and Patsy does whatever she likes.48 So I bend down, and I take that cock right in my hands – I still have a photo of it somewhere,” he finishes, holding his hand in the air like there’s a microphone in it, only it isn’t meant to be a microphone. I ask what the reaction of the guy was, and he says he doesn’t remember, which strikes me as either odd or convenient. We talk about drugs. I tell them I’ve been feeling lately like a smoke is something I really need again. They both tell me they can get me some, but I don’t know that I believe them so much as I just want this to be true. Weed now occupies a place in my life which far more romantic than sensible – it’s probably the one affair that I’ve let go on too long. It makes me tired, stupid, and even less social than I’m normally inclined to be. Still, though – a boy’s gotta smoke. You most certainly do not have to partake of a substance to be addicted to it. I have a few swigs of wine before bed, because the bottle is in my room and sometimes it’s easier to go to sleep when you aren’t fully sober. 47
It bears mention that this will constitute the first time in my life in which someone has tried to set me up. Basically, even those who know me best and want good things for me know not to bother. 48 Switching to the third person feminine is probably a perfectly sensible way to refer to one’s drag alter-ego.
I wake up early and go to the zoo. I remember a Sunday 15 years ago when I went to this same Melbourne Zoo, a sunny, windy, brisk winter morning where I tried with great frustration to light the joint I’d brought with me while leaning into the crook of a tree in Princes Park. I was alone then, too, but at that point it was still somewhat new to do things that way. I remember being amazed at how you could walk right into most of the exhibits there – dividing barriers were almost nonexistent. I remember a butterfly room where hundreds of multicolored specimens circled around my head, and alighted on my arms. I remember thinking it was the first zoo that made me think going to a zoo as an adult wasn’t a bad way to spend an afternoon. Princes Park is still beautiful and expansive, but when I arrive at the zoo’s gates I realize that Sunday morning in summer is not the best time to go to a zoo if you want to commune with nature. There is a queue of pram-pushing families stretching out the gate, and I decide that it would be better if I make this trip on a weekday when I can have the place a little more to myself. I have now reached the point where I would rather not go to a tourist attraction at all than go to it when it is crowded. I walk back down Flemington Road. This is the road I stumbled home down in the mornings after working the night shift as a busboy at the Baby Grand. I would reek of cigarettes and alcohol, both spilled and ingested. I’d get back to my room, strip down, and throw my clothes into the corner in a pile, the smell from which would actually wake me up on occasion the following day, when the stench would radiate outwards from it in comic strip squiggly lines. My first semester here, I worked from 10PM to 4AM, Friday and Saturday nights. I probably missed out on a good deal of socialization because of it. And one of the only perks of working in a bar is that you can drink it down at the end of a shift. So that’s what I did. Memories. In the park I’m walking past, I also recall a wonderful acid trip, me and the Poet and a CD boom box and a big fat sun, and we probably didn’t move more than 50 feet in the entire afternoon/evening we were out there, but it felt like we’d travelled for miles. He was supposed to call me this weekend. We had plans to meet up on Friday. I suppose he was busy. Most people are, compared to me. I spend the afternoon in the park, reading, and am reminded again how important it is to live in a part of the world where the weather is your friend. It’s the kind of day where you should not be inside unless you are fucking or dying, and since I have no intention of doing either of these things anytime soon, I sit in the shade and read and write and do a bit of uni work because it would be polite to go to class somewhat prepared tomorrow. This program is odd – there are no tests, there is no class
participation grade, and even the papers we have to write don’t necessarily connect to the assigned course readings. I get halfway through a few of them before I am skimming so fast as to make the whole endeavor a waste of time – I read the abstracts, intros, and conclusions. That’s good enough. Near my house, I see a young boy learning to ride a bicycle, his father in tow. Another thing I never bothered to learn how to do. And another reason I do not want children. When I am gone, I don’t want any of my stories to continue. I want my stories to be the last stories. That’s how solipsistic I’ve become. If you have kids, you’ll never know what happens to them, in the end. Unless their end comes before yours. Which is even worse. “Even if We don’t stay together,” You said, “I want to have a child with you. I want to have your child, because I think that would be an amazing child,” You told me. When You said this to me, I wasn’t sure how to respond. The muscle memory can still recall the rush of pride, though. It isn’t a feeling I’ve had often. Words are deeds. At least sometimes. It feels like the sort of weather you should spend near a beach, so I go to St. Kilda again, and watch the sun go down over the water, and then watch 150 tourists take blurry photos of 4 penguins unfortunate enough to be out. Camera flashes keep going off and the guides there for the attraction yell each time they do. Mostly, the guilty parties to this small dereliction are Asians, who either don’t understand the admonishments, don’t care, or a convenient mixture of both. St. Kilda at night is bustling – people spill out from bars and onto the street. There are so many people I could walk up to and talk to, if walking up and talking to people was something I did. Instead, I eat a veggie pie at the same place I had one yesterday. I have a dessert I shouldn’t have at the bakery next to the one I went to before. It’s odd that someone so nomadic, someone with no connections to anything, can still become a creature of habit so quickly. Why bother? I want a girl who’s really hot, but doesn’t know it. I want a girl who’s beautiful, but has no self-respect. I want a woman who will arouse my intellect, as well as my loins. I want someone who chases me down, just like You did – because in the last 7 years, that’s the only way anything has happened at all. Though now, even for those who would seek to chase me, I am proving fairly good at being elusive.
My inner monologue now has the consistent plaintive tone of a Don DeLillo novel. The strongest man in the world is he who is most alone. One breakout, one time, six years ago, in Poland, and I know who did it, and I don’t begrudge her for it. It is not much of a stretch to say that she was the only girl I ever took even partial initiative in pursuing. See where that gets me. It’s Type 1, the type that everyone who has a cold sore has. But I didn’t get it on my mouth. It will probably never come back, I learned from reading everything about it that I could find online. I don’t need medication for it. Once in a while, it itches down there, but I think that’s also called being a man. And yet, if I don’t say anything about it to any potential partner I have from now on, it seems like I would be doing her a fairly significant moral disservice. Lucky for me there are no potential partners. It didn’t bother You, my confession of this. In retrospect, You had so many partners before me who You didn’t tell me about until You wanted no more of Us that You’d probably heard worse. You’d probably had worse. 48% of black women aged 24-49 have it anyway. I really shouldn’t have been worried You’d be turned off. There were a few warts, one time, too, and for a while when I returned to America after my decade abroad, I was fairly convinced I had had AIDS. It tore me apart, this (ultimately unsubstantiated) fear. You stayed with me through tests for lots of things I didn’t have. Looking at it now, I realize You were going through a period of extremely low self-esteem. I’m good for women like that. But I have no idea what happened to You before You met me, because now I’m quite certain You didn’t tell me much of the truth about who or what You were. At home, the Paramedic seems drunk again. It doesn’t take much. He says he doesn’t smoke, yet there is a pack of cigarettes outside on the patio table, and he goes out and has one or two when he drinks, which seems like it’s fairly often. 49 He is so ‘forgetful’ (that being a generous term for ‘stupid’) that it’s hard to converse with him, because he will ask you the same thing so many times that it’s hard to stay civil. Either his parents were alcoholics and passed it on to him, or he simply lived it up so hard when he was younger that there isn’t much left upstairs. Either way, I cannot believe he is a paramedic. That he is even remotely connected to the saving or preserving of lives unsettles me. He also makes random inane racist comments about immigrants 49
BTW, The whole “I don’t drink” thing is clearly some sort of illusory self-denial. Though I still haven’t seen the bottles anywhere, which is a mystery.
(not me - the brown and yellow ones) and how they should “all be sent back” which not only belies a complete misunderstanding of the concept of immigration, but also seems strangely intolerant for a person who leads a lifestyle that most people would be intolerant of themselves. Simply put, you’d think a drag queen would be at least fairly accepting of racial differences. I had some sympathy for him regarding the knife attack, and he told me when he went to the police station they basically blew him off. But then he said “They asked me how much money I took out of the ATM, and I told them ‘I’m not going to tell you how much money I took out’. They asked me how much was in my account, and I told them ‘I’m not going to tell you that’.” It was at this point when I realized he is possibly the worst kind of moron – the kind that thinks he actually knows something. I’m not sure how the Hairdresser puts up with it. I guess everyone bites their tongue now and again for a nice young piece of tail. Except me. Just another manic Monday. I am at work from 8-2.15 and in class from 3.15-7.30. I am so busy I don’t have time to think about anything. In a way, it’s the best kind of day to have. The bizarre irony is that these are the types of days I also can’t stand, because I don’t want to have obligations that take up large chunks of time I’d prefer to use painting myself into existential corners. “How important is it for you to achieve these goals on a scale of 1 to 10?” said the survey when I signed up for the gym. I wrote ‘5’. I wanted to explain to my trainer that there is nothing in my life that is more important than 5 out of 10. There is nothing in the world that is more important than 5 out of 10, and most things now feel considerably less. It’s like, on the soundboard of life, I’ve cut out the highs and the lows. And now I’m just middling. The DP comes back after class. He walks with me up town from work and pesters me like the little mutt jumping on the big bulldog in those old Warner Brothers cartoons. He wants to know why I don’t have any goals. He reminds me that I am now pretty close to officially being ‘weird’ – I don’t talk to anyone unless work or school mandate it. He reminds me that I do things alone with the intention of staying that way. I don’t know what to tell him in response. I start hoping someone will call me so I’ll have to take the call and be able to brush him off with a hand-wave. But who’s going to call me? On the phone at night, dad asks me if I’ve met anyone interesting. I tell him I haven’t had time, which is better than saying I no longer
know how, because I am not interesting or interested myself. When I meet someone, I can now dump my whole life story on them in the space of three minutes. And after that, there’s not much I can say to keep them around. To the essay topic “Describe Your Ideal Life”, I would now either write complete fabrications or simply “N/A”. The only thing worse than work is not having a job. There is a cartoonishly rotund Turkish woman in my class who does not use articles, prepositions, or auxiliary verbs. She does not conjugate, either. “When I pre-intermediate, I go Turkey” she tells me. “I, Australia, no like!” she decrees, on an almost hourly basis. She is quite possibly the most miserable adult student I have ever had, and that is saying something. On the first day she came to my class, which was the second day I worked, she ran out during the first break to complain because she couldn’t understand me. This prompted a quick sit-down with the DOS in which I simultaneously feared I might lose my job and rationalized that it might not be so bad if it meant I would not have to deal with such a cancerous student. I don’t teach children because I don’t want to have to discipline people. She calmed down, though, and we reached something of a détente. However, most days, she is only marginally better than she was that first time. For a native English speaker, it is impossible to understand what it means to have to learn a language. Sure, for a certain position it might be necessary to learn a language, but even in such a situation you could safely assume that you had chosen that position out of many available to you. Not so for immigrants. This girl is a journalist in Turkey. For some reason her newspaper is requiring her to achieve a certain level of English to maintain her job. She is clearly the most monolingual of people, and the worst kind of language learner – the resentful, ‘ignorance cloaked in arrogance’ kind. 50 She works at her uncle’s Turkish restaurant (where evidently food is part of the payment package). She hates it here. She hates the language, and she hates having to learn it. She comes to class an hour late and then leaves to use the phone or sit in the computer lab and look at pictures on Facebook. This is, though, why it’s good to teach adults – I don’t have to drag her back to class. There’s a Colombian kid in my class who also hates English. When we try to do writing exercises, he literally just doesn’t do them. He also leaves to go to the computer lab to use Facebook. He asks me how much marijuana and cocaine cost in New York, and I have to pretend like I don’t know. Today a very nice, very large Saudi Arabian boy 50
Linguistic issues aside, she’d probably get along well with the Paramedic. Overweight women always love gay guys – it gives them someone to dance with.
started class. We ended up at lunch together, the three of us, and I realized that I am still pathetically trying to be the ‘cool kid’. It was hard for me not to engage in drug talk even though I know there is no place for that in my position. I had to remind myself to treat everyone equally and not play favorites. Though I also kind of wanted the Colombian kid to get me drugs. Pumping Iron. People don’t go to the gym to be social. They go to the gym to escape. I’ve been about 5 times now, and I’m beginning to recognize faces, but people don’t talk to each other. There are enough people in worse shape than me there that I don’t feel completely out of place. But it’s mostly single men, doing a set and then gazing vacantly upwards at a flat screen TV mounted on the wall showing house music videos, or staring off somewhere into the middle distance where they have a perfect body and someone who wants to share it with them. It is a useful place to go to be anonymous. That and the library, where I go to use the Internet, because I haven’t got a connection at home. I’m finding how to be a part of society without having to interact with anyone. And my arms are getting a bit bigger. Another friend on Facebook announced that he is married today. He was the first friend I made in Seoul. You introduced us. He married a Chinese girl I met once or twice before I left. He is several years younger than me, and disliked Korea about as much as I did, even though he’d stayed there for 5 years, which made his tirades against the nation a bit empty. Another feed I have to hide. Perhaps You are married too. I don’t know that knowing would make me feel better, or worse. You were my best friend. When We weren’t Us anymore, I wanted someone to talk to. Unfortunately, it would have been You. I’d already ripped all the other endings out of my Choose Your Own Adventure book. Mersault in his cell, awaiting execution, revels in tape loops of past memories and the snippet of an article he finds underneath the mattress on his bed. And I, in mine, content to recall the petty, infrequent liaisons I have had, the few times in which I felt connected to another, the few times I climbed a mountain and raised my hands in triumph, the few times things happened that were worth holding onto. On a sticky Barcelona night in late summer, 2002, a girl I’d been dating turned up to a concert we’d planned to see with a guy she’d fucked the night before in tow and basically shrugged at me while she allowed me to draw my own conclusions. This is just a representative example of what happens when I have tried to form relationships.
Kerouac said that when he reached old age, he would content himself with reminiscences of lives already lived. Then he drank himself to death at 47. He probably would have gotten bored after a while anyway. He wondered whether he was born to be old, meant to be old and alone, content in lonely old age, and whether all the rest of it, all the glares and rants he had bounced off these walls, were simply meant to get him to that point. This was his father seeping though, sitting at home in Western Pennsylvania, reading the morning paper, taking the walk in the afternoon, a man braided into sweet routine, a widower, eating the evening meal, unconfused, alive in his true skin. I have preemptive regret of the things I will no longer be able to do at some point but am not doing now. Regret in the future perfect unreal. I have to invent a new verb tense to express how pitiful I am. Retroactive anxiety. Take your favorite thing in life. It can be an activity, or a food, or a song. Then realize that there will come a day when you won’t be able to enjoy it, ever again. There will be a last time you experience it. How is it possible to accept this with equanimity? Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless. I re-meet the Poet. He was a tall, lanky a friend of a friend who became a friend as people do when you are in university and friendmaking is something that happens with ease. We took acid in a park, we played beach tennis with old wooden paddles in the middles of unabandoned streets. We talked nonsense which was mutually intelligible. And then we lost contact because the Internet didn’t exist in a real way in 1998 in Australia or in my world. We meet at a pub on the corner of Lygon and Elgin Streets owned by a football hero from the 1960s. It looks like it hasn’t been refurbished since a few years after his retirement, if that. There’s an old man with a pint at a small table for one near the window occupying a seat he
was probably sitting in when I lived here last. The proprietor appears, mustachioed and muscled, in photos that adorn the wall, and graying and bent on a stool in the corner of the bar. The Poet is not married, and has no children. He dated a girl from Greece for a while, which necessitated his flying back and forth on several occasions. Until yesterday, he was casually dating a Korean girl, but does not seem too perturbed that things have ended. I explain to him that Koreans have no middle ground, in anything, and this seems to help him understand why things went sour. 51 He has a part-time job running the distance learning system at a university, though he has no real knowledge of computers or background which made him specially suited for the position. 13 years on, I release the ‘pause’ button, again. We drink until the last train, which he gets. I’m invited to a dinner party at a future date as-yet-undetermined. He tells me he can get me something to smoke. I go to bed feeling like I live in Melbourne again. I wake up, I work. I am a citizen of the city. After teaching, I learn. After learning, I drink, in the same bar as yesterday, with 4 classmates. It feels now like I’m part of the program. It feels now like there’s a reason I’m not doing this online. At some point in the night we switch bars and I end up talking to a group of Chinese Malaysians, or Malaysian Chinese, who are studying at the university and all speak near-perfect English. They tell me that ethnic Chinese in Malaysia all speak English like this. They are playing drinking games with cards and invite me to come back next Thursday and join them. One of the girls becomes the first Facebook friend I have born in the 90s, though I have a feeling that when she finds out how old I am, they may not want to invite me out again. I think about the job offer for a training position in Malaysia I received a few days ago in response to an application I sent months back. Perhaps it wouldn’t be the worst place in the world to go. After all, as the commercial tagline says, it’s ‘Truly Asia’. Though they have the death penalty for drug use. Which, in a way, is also a ‘truly Asian’ thing to do. Wherever you go, there you are. Any place is as good as any place. I’m going to the gym now when I can fit it in, and it feels comfortable to be there. I don’t know that I’m working towards a better body, though I will say I feel like I have more energy. So that’s something. 51
My one brief, abruptly aborted foray into the world of dating there after Us ended when a woman I’d had unexciting sex with two times began calling me every day, ‘to talk’, even though her English wasn’t good enough to do that, and then began repeatedly asking me if I thought she was pretty when we were together and enquiring as to my future plans. When I told her that this was exactly the way to scare a man off, she got angry and told me, via e-mail, that she was just looking for someone to ‘love’ her, and that if I was in Korea, I should try to date in ‘the Korean way’. In saying this, she made me realize I didn’t want to try at all.
Friday is another golden Melbourne day and my department has its semester-opening party. Over drinks, casually, I find out that I’m not enrolled in a class which is mandatory for students who started in 2010, as I did, when I began the program online. It is 6PM on the last day to change classes for the semester, and I only find this out because one of the other kids asks why I’m not in the class. The director of the department says that I can ask for a waiver so as not to have to take the class, but really I’m just pissed off because the class is no longer a requirement, and when I selected courses on the website it didn’t tell me that I had to take it. No one told me I had to take it. No one told me I’d made a mistake after selecting it. And now I’ve got to go in on Monday morning and plead my case to the Graduate Admissions office. This feels like something that shouldn’t happen at ‘the best university in Australia’, especially not in a program which only has 25 students to keep track of. Then I am reminded of the relative insignificance of anything in one’s personal life, as Japan is devastated by the largest earthquake in its history. We hear this during the party, and the horrible news spreads slowly around the room. There are a few Japanese women in the group who leave to go call their families. I remember that Tokyo was ‘due’ for a Big One, though this one doesn’t appear to have hit too close to the capital. The news then floats across the bottom half of the rest of the evening’s screen, even as I try to drink it off with my new classmates, first at the party, then on the South Lawn, where I haven’t been drunk for nearly 14 years. I remember being woken up one morning in my 8-mat apartment in Nerima-ku by my bed rocking gently, slapping rhythmically against the wall like tiny waves rolling into a pier. I got up and opened my door, and stood in its frame, something which I knew you were supposed to do during an earthquake even though I couldn’t remember anyone having told me this. I chatted to the Canadian guy living next door. “Is this the Big One?” we asked each other, more bemused than concerned, partially because our rural (for Tokyo) neighborhood didn’t have any big buildings to fall on us, even if it came to that. When the tremors stopped after about 40 seconds, I went back to bed. “My bed was rocking in the morning, and there was no one in it with me, so I knew something was up,” how I framed the event in narration long afterwards. There was a time, albeit brief, during which the prevalence of physical relations, and not their lack, was what I joked about. A time which now seems more foreign to me than life in Japan did when I first arrived there. We head to Brunswick Street and continue the party there, though on
the way I stop at the house to change into jeans and the Paramedic rushes out through the door I open in all his “I Can’t Believe He’s Not Drunk”™-en glory. He starts hugging people, Creepiness Factor 6.5, trending sharply upwards – he’s had a few drinks, or maybe just one, it really doesn’t take much, and I don’t want to be a downer but he really has to appreciate the fact that not everyone wants to be hugged by a flaming old drunk who they don’t know. I usher the group away quickly and try not to think about it. I would bet good money now that his run-in with the ‘3 Asians’ at the ATM had at least something to do with his complete lack of self-awareness. He either hit on one of them or said something stupid and racist. Call it a hunch. Now we are an American and a Canadian and a Chilean and a Taiwanese girl and an odd Australian American who claims to speak 10 languages but doesn’t get past the African doorman at one bar because he looks too drunk (which he is) and tries to speak to the guy in Swahili because that’s a language he thinks the guy will understand. I suppose a white dude with a tie and vest and long flowing hair trying to enter a bar at 1.00AM on a Friday night with a slur in his speech is probably going to sound more like he’s mumbling drunkenly than speaking an African tongue, and we don’t even realize he’s not inside with us until we’ve all ordered beers, at which point we have to finish them before going out to pick him up and moving on to a place without a door policy. I get paid. The salary is a few cents less than the low end of the range I was quoted when I was hired, which is more insulting than relevant. I’m also realizing with mild disdain that if I do intend to have friends here, it’s going to be tough to work and study and maintain a social life at the same time. 24 hours plus prep time at work plus 6 and study time of class – I am busier now than I ever was in this city before. But if I don’t work, I won’t be able to go out like I want to. Such are the Catch 22’s that befall one in life. Saturday night I have dinner with the Boys and their old friend J_____, described by the Paramedic as “an old hippie”, but one who “brings over a bit of choof” when he visits, so I stick around to get high. J_____ is tanned and clean-cut and probably the Hairdresser’s age but appears a decade younger. He’s a walking encyclopedia of social, political, historical, environmental, insert discipline here knowledge, and when I realize he isn’t just talking shit in a good deal of his anecdotes, I become genuinely interested in the conversation. He says “it’s like an antique clock that works” for a pleasant surprise, and uses “roger” as a verb in the way that only someone over 60 can do. He says “I moved to the Western suburbs, because I shagged everyone in the east.” He says that Australia may actually benefit from global warming, as there are creeks running in desert places where they haven’t in recorded history. He says that Area 51 was most likely
an American attempt to replicate a German attempt to build a spacecraft, and that what people saw flying across the night sky in Roswell was quite likely an American spacecraft that almost got somewhere. He says there’s a small marsupial in Australia called the katymandis which fornicates so much that it dies, and that he would like this animal to be on the national seal (I suggest that it should at least be the name of a rugby team). He tells us about a man in the Amazon who had a fish which crawled up his urethra and then had to have it removed in pieces, and about another fish called a bullet fish which enters the body and eats its way straight out the other side. We talk politics and lament the loss of the milkbar. He reckons that the Australian government is making a slow and concerted effort to eliminate all vices from society. Cigarettes cost $16 a pack, a good portion of the Pokies 52 parlours have been closed down, drinking restrictions abound. He recently got photographed by a speed camera for going 64km in a 60km zone, which almost defies belief. I tell them about the old man I saw getting fined for jaywalking on Flinders Street a few days ago. J_____ rolls big fat joints of low-grade homegrown weed that look like whiteboard markers. They are the kind of joints that only make you half-high, but then again perhaps if you are 60 and smoking every day, these are the kind of joints you need to smoke if you still want to be intelligent and conversative and remember a catalogue of anecdotes and bizarre marginalia. I want to ask him to be my uncle. The Paramedic, however, is a blithering idiot. It doesn’t take me all that long to form lasting judgments. Usually I get it right the first time. He quite possibly has the lowest substance tolerance of anyone I have ever met, though it could also simply be that he has such an issue with substances that a drop of alcohol or a drag on a joint is all it takes for him to let go completely. At any rate, he sits next to me, laughing at random moments, unrelated to the conversation at hand, and attempting to change the topic unsuccessfully at others. 53 The Hairdresser, who doesn’t smoke, sits across from him, and J_____ across from me. The Paramedic chain-smokes cigarettes but on more than one occasion he lights one while he has a lit one in his other hand already. When J_____ passes the joint to me, he makes a jittery motion for it, but when he gets it, he only takes one quick toke and then passes it on. He tries to light a cigarette and lights it in the middle because he apparently can’t see where to light it. At one point I think he lights one from the wrong end. Mind you, we are smoking outdoor weed and he isn’t even drinking. I really don’t know how the Hairdresser puts up with it, except to say gaming machines With such comments as “So what do you think about the situation?” and when asked, “What situation?”, a rejoinder like “You, you know.” Do we now? 52
53
that perhaps if you are 60 years old and somewhat physically invalid, maybe you let someone who’s 10 years your junior and thin and flirty stick around simply because they will, and an old man will put up with a good deal of nonsense for some young ass. The Hairdresser tells us about the biggest cock he’s ever seen, and about how and when to use amyl nitrate for maximum hedonistic effect.54 At one point the Paramedic blurts out something which I think sounds like “no more HIV” and again I am made aware that it’s quite possible the two of them have it. Not that it would really make much of a difference, I suppose. It might just explain why they stick together. Tea and coffee are made, and when the Paramedic is handed a mug from his partner with the warning “careful, it’s hot”, he proceeds to shake it up and down violently in a way that really almost seems intentional (indeed, J_____ and I tell him as much), spilling it on his hands and burning them. Really, if any substance made me behave the way every substance seems to make him behave, I’d just stay sober. He is like a child in conversation, too, shaking his head back and forth and saying “nop, nop, whatever” when he doesn’t agree with something. Sometimes he starts a sentence by saying “I’m just, you know, and – whatever,” and then trails off, as though we can understand him. When intoxicated, he’s more or less as conversationally capable as my grandmother is, but he hasn’t had 5 strokes and he’s not even 50. At times it seems he is too far gone to explain himself or even follow what is going on. Yet somehow I tolerate this – I suppose I have no choice, and it is somewhat entertaining. It turns out he voted for Pauline Hanson, a fiercely right-wing nutjob whose anti-immigration party gained some seats in the late 90s when I was here and made most of the country completely embarrassed. “I love her,” is all he says, without explaining himself further than that, and J_____ and I look at him in disbelief. The Hairdresser shakes his head. At one point I tell him, “You’re gay – you have to be liberal” but I don’t think even this sinks in. It also turns out he is the second cousin of the last premier of Victoria. Last time around I sold drugs to the son of the then-premier, this time I’m doing them with his successor’s kin. Small country, this. The Hairdresser, I must admit, is a pretty solid fellow, in any sense of the word. He tells me that I’m only the second straight guy he’s ever lived with. This is an experiment for him, too. Previous people to have slept in my room include a Timorese bartender who carried a tray full of wine glasses on his head in the living room, serving guests “for practice”, a young guy who was hosing down the neighbors in the nude when the Hairdresser had an interview at the house, and a plump Australian who left to become the grandmaster at a famous traveling circus. I apologize for not being more interesting. “You’re 54
At the point of orgasm, FYI.
probably not going to see me do anything too crazy here,” I tell him. I think he’s ok with that. The conversation continues until 3.30 AM, and then, stoned, I am unable to go to sleep until the sky begins brightening up towards dawn. With three days of alcohol and smoke and sociability, the DP is punch-drunk and confused. “Serves you right, you cunt,” I tell him, drunkenly, before passing out and sleeping till noon the next day. Sunday passes as Sundays pass – I’m hungover but still get up to do a project in the library, where I spend a lot of time simply watching videos of the carnage from Japan. Unsurprisingly for a nation of camera makers, there is no shortage. At one point I see a photo of a building in Odaiba on fire. It’s a building I remember seeing. Suddenly, I feel almost moved to tears. I email a former fling because she’s the only person there I really wonder about anymore, and that only because we had what, for me, was the perfect kind of relationship – one that started 3 weeks before I left the country and never really materialized, so I could keep it as a pleasant memory and a curious “What If?” instead of simply adding it to the pile titled “Things Which Didn’t Work Out”. Most things are never meant. I meet with the Chilean because we’re working together to give a presentation in class about an article we had to read. It’s pretty easy for me to put together a Powerpoint and parse out information in an intelligible way. Kind of, it’s my job. His English is great but the article was still a challenge for him, and I think he’s glad I’ve done the majority of the work for us. We adjoin to the pub for a few drinks, because that’s what Sunday is for. The weather changes from hot and sunny to rainy to cool and breezy. He is here on a scholarship paid for by his government, and he’s going back to be an administrative director at an English school in Santiago where he worked before. He asks me what I want to do after Australia. I tell him there’s never really been a plan. On days when the DP has been shelved, I say this with a smile and a shrug of my shoulders. On days when he’s screaming in my ear, or laughing at me from across a crowded mind, this thought almost brings me to tears. There is no plan. We talk about Korea and I tell him how I just shut down socially, “But you are a social person,” he assures me. “I can be,” I reply. I guess I’m starting to seem like one again here. Maybe I’ll go to Chile next year. Or not. Any place is as good as any place else.
Except Korea. In the Graduate Admissions Office, it may or may not be a problem to keep the current schedule I have. I plead my case as politely and forcefully as I can. The director of my department isn’t concerned if I don’t take the class, but it isn’t his decision. The director of the Admissions Office isn’t concerned if I take the class, but it isn’t her decision, either. I have to write an email explaining my case, which will be forwarded to some administrative board, which will issue a ruling. In trouble with the Dean already, and only here 3 weeks. I sit in class and multitask during it – an open laptop is virtually an invitation to do so. I look up at times and take part in the discussion, and realize it’s probably rude if the teacher thinks I’m doing something else, but I’m participating as much as anyone in the room, so I don’t see how it matters much. What must it be like to go to university in the US now? Everyone in class must be on laptops. Oddly, last year in Korea, the only time kids weren’t on computers was while they were in class. Though that just made it feel like our methods of education were horribly outdated. I remember my first year in Spain, 2000, when all the young kids in my classes had mobile phones and I suddenly realized what it meant to be from a different generation. We give our presentation and it goes as well as I imagined it would. My job is to stand in front of people and deliver content, so doing it as a student is really no different than doing it as an educator. It’s odd to have to share the stage with someone else, but I try not to step on his feet much. Maybe I’m just auditioning for a position in Chile. “I think you’ve put me out of a job,” says the professor afterwards, though she’s around my age and with a newly-minted PhD and this is the first lecture she’s given at the graduate level. “This is kind of what I do,” I tell her. I’m kind of a big deal. For what it’s worth, I have logged many thousands more hours in front of classrooms than she has. Though I don’t say this. At home, the Boys try to fix me up. The Paramedic had mentioned something about this to me some days ago, and when I moved in, I recall thinking, very briefly, that it might be interesting living with a work-from-home hairdresser whose clients are all women.55 So the Paramedic tells me they’ve organized a dinner next week with their friend D_____, a woman described, in turn, as “lovely”, “beautiful”, and “gorgeous” whose mother is a client. He produces a photo for me, of him and D_____, and when I look at it, I think, maybe, he is kidding. 55
Another reason not to hold anything against gay guys is that they are, on no level, competition.
D_____ is very plain, crow-footed about the eyes, and quite possibly 1015 years my senior. “How old is she?” is my immediate response to the picture. “About your age,” he replies. “Really?” I question, my tone a combination of disbelief and “Don’t take the piss here, Mate.” “She’s absolutely gorgeous,” he purrs again, and then I realize that he is one of a certain class of people who employ words like ‘beautiful’ and ‘gorgeous’ to describe female friends in a manner solely referential to their perceived value as a person, without any regard for their appearance. “Um, ok,” I say, “we can have dinner,” in a conciliatory tone which I intend to be unmistakable as conveying the implication “but realize the favor being done here is by me, and not vice-versa.” He tells me they’ll organize something for next week. I don’t even say “thank you.” It isn’t justified. My Ex- in Japan sends me a detailed message of her experience from the earthquake. Like most other disaster situations, what transpired was horrific, but provided you didn’t die, on some level, it would have been incredibly cool to have been there. The Thursday they opened up the bridges and tunnels after 9/11, I was there in Lower Manhattan. I don’t know why. I just had to be. Pain or damage don't end the world. Or despair or fucking beatings. The world ends when you're dead. Until then, you got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man... and give some back. 2000 bodies wash ashore in northern Japan. In the First World, earthquake damage is measured in dollars. In the Third World, it’s measured in lives. If this had happened in any country less developed than the one which is the most earthquake-ready nation in the world, we’d be dealing in six figures of bodies, not four. anosognosia – a condition experienced by stroke patients wherein they concoct elaborate stories to explain information that can’t be incorporated into their established worldview You do realize, on some level, We’ve been going out for nearly 4 years now. Work to gym to class to a barbecue in Fitzroy to which the Ex-GF has invited me. I re-meet her current boyfriend, S_____, who I used to know from college, when he dated her best friend. He was quiet then, but perhaps that’s just because I was louder. I often felt around her friends back then that they were just somewhat shocked to be in the company of
an American. I’ve always felt more important than I am. We are at the house of a friendly Dutch-Australian couple who are about to open a bar around the corner, and six of us empty several bottles of beer and a few of wine. As my Ex- gets drunk, a bit of the girl I remember comes out, and it’s somewhat endearing, though in no way sexual. I think now that our relationship was never in any way sexual, but there was certainly no shortage of care. She and I run off to the supermarket to buy more alcohol and she gets a bottle which costs $2.99 just because she can’t believe there is one for sale at that price. I am alone amongst old friends, and the conversation moves from jobs to schooling to the folly of organized religion to S_____’s ideological opposition to Fate, which really is just religion, or at least faith, in disguise. I tell them the plan the Boys’ friend J_____ and I had hatched the other night about sending Thai prostitutes to calm the anger of putative suicide bombers in the Middle East, but it doesn’t go over as well with people who are under 50 and perhaps just a little bit politically correct. I’m not trying to cure Islam, mind you, just fundamentalism. You show me a 16-year old who’s willing to strap a bomb belt around himself and go Boom! in a crowded market, I’ll show you a young man who’s never been loved long time. Just saying. I eat kangaroo. It’s what’s for dinner. I begin to object, and really I’m not that hungry anyway, but then I realize that I might as well try it. When in Rome… Please, go on. It is meaty and flavorful. Evidently it’s become a lot more common to eat it – when I was here before, I don’t ever remember seeing it on menus, but now it’s pub fare. A bit of culinary nationalism, perhaps. As bottles empty and the clock continues its march towards midnight, the discussion veers to reminiscences of past exploits in which I was not involved, and plans for future events to which I will not be invited. The couple are getting married next year, the other guy there is as well. Both weddings will be in Europe. As you do. I am silent, laughing where appropriate, and feeling simultaneous warmth from the camaraderie and a chill at the ultimate isolation I will have in any relations I enter from this point onwards. By my age, most people have already lived a lot of their stories. At least the good ones. The people who I lived most of my stories with aren’t around to share them now. A lot of those people, I don’t even know where they are at all. I’ve got a lot of memories I can’t share with anyone. It’s funny, and by funny I mean sad, that I used to think my Ex-GF was unintelligent. At 19 (which she was then, to my 21), who isn’t? Now I see she’s turned into one of the smarter people I’ve ever been with. It’s good to see her now, because, though a bond still exists, the
only attachment is fraternal. I’m not attracted to her, nor did I think I would be when I came here, but I’m happy to be part of her life again, in whatever capacity. Somehow, I don’t think I’ll be having dinner with You in an as-yetdetermined country with Your new boyfriend, laughing and chatting amiably over a bottle of wine. When you’re young, your body is malleable. If you break a bone, it heals quickly. Green bones, I believe they call them, pliant like the trunk of a new tree. I broke one wrist trying to punch someone56 when I was 14 and the other playing hockey when I was 16. Besides having wrists that are too thin to wear a reasonably-sized man’s watch, and no longer trying to punch anyone or to play hockey, there are no lasting effects of these accidents. The heart is the same. What happened with the Ex-GF was so long ago any memories of our relationship are untainted now by emotion, like an old photograph left in the sun until the color ebbs away. Even if I ran into G_____, my second ex- here, with whom I had a stereotypically ‘bad breakup’ and never spoke to again, I don’t think I’d have any problem talking to her now.57 Actually, I’d really like to hang out with her, to see what she’s become, and maybe even to apologize for being young and douchy and not wanting to talk to her after she broke up with me because I was miserable at the time. “No hard feelings” would be a perfectly honest assessment of things. As you get older, though, you don’t rebound the same way. You’re less likely to open up, and more likely to expect something in return when you do. If I broke a bone now, it would quite likely hurt for the rest of my life. As in, forever. It’s not about ‘getting over it’ – that part happens if you want it to or not. It happens because you keep living and doing and being. There’s not really much choice in that besides doing something theatrical, irreversible, and pitiful which won’t have nearly the desired effect. But ‘healing’? I don’t think so. There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it. Don’t forget about the man who got everything he ever wanted. What happened? He lived happily ever after. People always say it’s easier to heal a wounded heart than a wounded body. Bullshit. It’s exactly the opposite – a wounded body takes much longer to heal. A wounded heart is nothing but ashes of memories. But 56 57
Don’t ask. She, however, might not feel the same.
the body is everything. The body is blood and veins and cells and nerves. A wounded body is when, after leaving a man you’ve lived with for three years, you curl up on your side of the bed as if there’s still somebody beside you. That is a wounded body; a body that feels connected to someone who is no longer there. Trauma is survivable, but often not much more. It kills you while allowing you to still live. I walk home drunk and happy and smiling about the fact that it’s a work night and I am a part of the city again. Tonight, I felt a sense of belonging that I’ve almost forgotten I had the capacity to feel. It’s thawing, my heart. After two years of deep freeze in Korea, I am feeling like I want to build relationships again. It would have been great to have had someone there with me tonight, in a very ‘coupled’ environment. It would have made me seem more normal. Look at me, caring about appearances. But it doesn’t matter what I do, what I choose...I’m what’s wrong. In bed, I have a vivid but evanescent dream about You and I, and the break up is just now happening, or about to, and when my eyes shoot open two minutes before my alarm is set to sound, I don’t remember the setting or the details but the emotion lingers like a belch that brings back the taste of a meal that didn’t go down the right way. Must’ve been the ‘roo. And it’s odd because I don’t have dreams about You; in fact, this is possibly the first I can remember. Generally, dreams are formed around things which lurk about in the dark, neglected corners of the subconscious. And you haven’t really left the front and center of my mind’s stage yet. Maybe this is progress. When I leave work, I find that there is a message on my phone from the Paramedic. Evidently D_____ is ill, and has to cancel our dinner, which had been scheduled for this evening. When I return home, I tell the Paramedic it is not a problem at all. It is not difficult to be sincere in this. Neither of us makes any mention of rescheduling, which is probably for the best. Money is like sex. It seems much more important when you don’t have any. In the library between Work Time and Gym Time, I end up looking for jobs online. Any joy I feel in seeing that I am now able to apply for a much wider range of positions with the degree I’m earning is mitigated with ennui brought on by the awareness that I have no preference as to where my life goes from here.
What has to happen to make me care about my future in a concrete and positive way? I look up from my computer station and see the DP leaning against a rack of books, idly thumbing through a magazine. He catches me staring at him, and gives me a look that reads “I ain’t going anywhere, Buddy”. I put my headphones on and watch a few episodes of Colbert, exploring the curative powers of laughter. St. Patrick’s day. 74 days till the summit. I remember my last St. Patrick’s Day here, wherein I got drunk, realized, once and for all, that I really do not like Guiness, and took home a big-chested friend I’d been with a few times before just because I could. Those were the days. Socializing with people you don’t know when you get older can become a Sisyphean task. The type of parties you think you want to go to, when you get there, you realize you don’t really want to be there at all. You start thinking about queueing up for drinks and the toilet, about drunk people who don’t handle their alcohol the way you’d like people around you to handle their alcohol, and about music that’s too loud for talking, even if it is just talking shit. You think about cutting your losses before you’ve even really placed a wager. You think about the banal conversations you’ll have if you’re lucky, or the banal conversations you’ll wish you were having if you don’t, and how you’ll end up looking at the girls you want to talk to while knowing that you really don’t have much to say and neither do they, but you’ll kind of wish you had the nerve or the ignorance or the confidence or the naiveté to try anyhow. And then you are looking at your phone for messages that haven’t arrived and at the clock to see if you’ve “gotten your money’s worth”, and thinking about other parties from your past when you were an entirely different person but you did enjoy yourself, and at least there was that. So when a group of us walk up Canning Street to a big, fenced-in park party which costs $10 to enter, it isn’t the $10 that makes four 30-year olds balk at entering – it’s the throngs of people mulling about on the other side of the fence, not looking like they are having the time of their lives, and the collective baggage of all of our pasts weighing heavily against our odds of enjoyment. On the other side of the fence, I see the DP, with a pint cup of Guiness in one hand and his arm around a girl who quite possibly had to use fake ID to get in, even though it’s only 18 to drink here. He raises his nose to head-check me, and raises his glass in our general direction before putting the cup to his mouth and downing whatever is left in it. He turns his gaze to the girl with him, drops the cup on the ground, and raises her chin with his index finger. I turn away before they begin to kiss. We end up in pubs that aren’t crowded and aren’t exciting, having the
type of conversations that academics our age should be having. The Percy is acceptably empty, and the Clyde, which used to be the #2 Uni hangout behind Naughton’s, has 20 people, tops, in its cavernous interior and an empty pool table around which we rally. It has become upscale, which feels wrong. This is the first time I have entered this bar and not gagged on the passive smoke. Again, I’m missing something I didn’t like in the first place. We discuss national differences in the rules of billiards 58 , and then shoot poorly for a while before talking till I realize that yet again I’ve had a 15-hour day. All the prepared food here tastes a little worse than it should. All restaurant food in general, really. I know I haven’t been eating in upscale places, but I would say 2/3rds of what I’ve bought isn’t as good as it should be for the price it is. They use unsavory parts of the chicken in chicken sandwiches, too much oil and not enough anything else in stir fry things, and the pizzas are doughy and bland. I suppose it’s not fair to compare anything to New York, but even in Seoul, at least the foreign restaurants owned by foreign people made some attempt to make things more or less the right way. And even if they didn’t, it was Korea – if you couldn’t get a decent pizza it shouldn’t have been a surprise. I know that last time I was here I didn’t have much to compare things to, but I don’t ever remember thinking that the food was shitty. Again, though, my 21-year old palate was probably a bit less discerning than its 35-year old iteration. The past is never what it was. Friday I have lunch with the Ex-Flatmate. Her baby, is out cold, and she fusses over him so much that more or less it stymies any attempts at conversation we have. She confirms that there is a plan to reduce/eliminate alcohol from Australian social life. It’s actually been made explicit in the press by many conservative politicians. Nothing is as fun as it used to be. She tells me, casually, that a few years ago she was considering a run for Parliament, as though this is something one just does. She explains how it almost came to pass but all I’m thinking is how hard it is to fall down a class in society. Once the family’s gained a foothold, the kids are there to stay, as long as they want to. She also tells me that she pretty much stopped participating in the rave scene shortly after I left, partially because it died. How is it that I’ve been a part of the hardest party period of so many people’s lives? Maybe it’s connected to the fact that I’m still looking for people in that period, and that I’m disappointed when I can’t find them. Or maybe I’m only interesting under the influence of substances, and 58
Which would make for an interesting Cultural Studies thesis, but then again, what aspect of culture wouldn’t?
set to techno music. Once the music stops and the lights come on, then you have to think. And that’s never done me any good. At times the conversation lags, and feels a bit forced. But that just makes me realize that we are like family – we may not have much to say to each other now, but we know that maintaining a relationship is still important. Except that I’m not like that with my family. When I was last here, I still had something resembling hope for the future. Maybe that influenced the types of relationships I built then. You reckon? Friday night is dinner and the gym and a book. The DP doesn’t come to the gym. And when I go there, I don’t see him for hours after I’m done working out, either. He doesn’t like to sweat much, and he doesn’t like it if I let him hear my body talk. More reason to keep getting physical. As I’m passed out by 10, I’m up at 2.30AM when I hear something of a squabble coming from the Boys back down the hall. I can’t make out the words, only the tones, but they seem quite angry, and I drift back off to sleep. At 8.30 AM, there is a knock on my door and the Paramedic enters just as I’m getting ready to rub one out. Not about You, so don’t feel flattered. Not this time, at least. He comes in and sits on the bed, Creepiness Factor 5.5, trending, oddly, downward as I realize that, in some way, I am part of this ‘family’ now. He is being extra nice but not saying much of anything at all, which he does have a penchant for doing. He then tells me that he’s been ill, and that he’s had “renal failure”, at which point I suggest he might want to think about seeing a doctor, but he pooh-poohs this away with an annoying little scrunched-up face that might be cute if he was 40 years younger and/or I was fucking him, and really, there’s no talking logic to anti-logic. He had bowel cancer “4 or 5 years ago” but “it’s all better now.” We believe whatever helps us sleep at night. I realize as he leaves that he was only being nice to me because he knows I heard what had happened, and he’s just trying to stay on the good side of someone on the ranch. My Two Dads. “I hope fuckwit didn’t keep you up,” the Hairdresser says later, as I’m preparing breakfast and he’s inching his way down the stairs, two hands on the banister and two feet on each step. He is more unable to walk than I realized when I moved in. I try to play dumb, but that only works when I don’t want it to. “Who?” “Fuckwit, him, I didn’t sleep a wink because we were up all night.”
I am Switzerland between two camp camps. I don’t know what I can say that wouldn’t be taking sides, so I leave to the library to write a paper. When I return, the Hairdresser cuts my hair. This is the first professional hair cut I’ve had in probably 5 years. I cut my own hair, usually, and I treat it like most men cut their nails – trim where it gets too long. It isn’t that difficult to cut hair. For fuck’s sake - look who does it. It’s fun to see him work, though, as it’s fun to anyone in their element. He has no shortage of stories, either. As a young guy in the 70s, he moved to London, where he spent nearly five years. He met Annie Lennox before The Eurythmics. He met Rod Stewart before Jerri Hall. He dyed Ziggy Stardust’s hair. Then he came back to Melbourne. “It must’ve been pretty quiet to be back here,” I say. “You can bet I did something about that,” he laughs. He opened up a salon, blacked out the windows, and painted ‘We’ll Buy Back Your Rollers’ in white. “We had them lined up around the block,” he laughs. “They were still setting hair here, I had ten stylists working nonstop.” He tells me about the successes and failures of a career spanning four decades. It seems as though he has very much taken life by the balls, cupped them gently, and continued giving a good tug. He also tells me the Paramedic has cancer. Like, not 4 or 5 years ago, but now. “You’re part of the family now,” he says, as if to confirm what I’d thought this morning. He doesn’t know what type. Fuckwit won’t tell him. He says it’s been “6 or 8 months”, and I don’t understand if he means ‘since diagnosis’ or ‘until death’ but I don’t ask for clarification. “The doctors have said there isn’t much they can do for him,” he says. Kind of, that sounds as bad as a prognosis could be. Spilt tea and questions asked 7 times in a row seem somewhat less grievous offenses now. Thanks to my mother, cancer feels like an old relative I never really liked. I learned about it and what it does far earlier than most people, and it’s always been there as an undercurrent to life’s proceedings, first as something which shaped my life through taking hers, then as something I could grab hold of and fear for myself in periods where I am feeling too good about things. Or too bad. To wit, Jonathan Slemmer. Jonathan Slemmer was a tall, quiet guy I knew very tangentially from my brief stint as an intramural volleyball player at college in the US
(all my stints are brief). He, too, was a member of the Class of ’98, but he, unlike me, finished his four years there and took a degree with him. Though I did not graduate from that institute, they still send me the quarterly alumni magazine and occasional letters soliciting donations, which is how I found out what happened to Jon after graduation.59 In 2005, Jon Slemmer got married. He’d been feeling a bit under the weather, coughing and listless, but he went on his honeymoon and was looking forward to life with a girl who, like him, was doing postgraduate work in medicine. He ended up coming down with pneumonia, and took some rest. But the symptoms didn’t fully abate. If anything, they became worse. Tests were run. Nothing seemed to point to an easy diagnosis. Doctors, and more doctors, right up to the point where the people who were treating him had to entertain the thought that maybe it was ‘something worse’. ‘Something worse’ turned out to be Stage IV lung cancer. Jon had never smoked in his life, not even weed. 60 A series of aggressive treatments proved ultimately futile. He died in February 2006, a few weeks shy of his 30th birthday. I read about his story in the ‘Passings’ section of our alumni magazine in early 2008. 61 I learned of the specifics not from the article, but rather, from Jon’s blog, which he started right after he was diagnosed and which he, and, as his health failed, his wife, kept current for family and friends. What happens on the Internet is forever. He wrote a lot, even relatively close to the (fast and unexpected) end. He was not religious, and, to his credit, did not become so because of his illness. Largely, it seemed as though he felt he would beat it, even when he was running around NYC looking for doctors who weren’t simply resigned to a palliative course of treatment to minimize pain. I read the blog in its entirety because, at the time, in early 2008, I, too, was suffering from pneumonia. This didn’t stop me from taking a trip to Costa Rica and climbing its largest mountain a week after my round of antibiotics had finished. But the pain didn’t go away.62 I read and reread the blog with a tortured obsession that ultimately left me convinced that I, too, was dying. You were around through all of this. My apologies. 59
Though in the past few years I have noticed that they have either stopped, or my father has stopped forwarding them to me, since I wrote on one of the postage-paid return cards: “My family gave your college $60,000, and I did not even receive a diploma – if that’s not a big enough donation, I don’t know what is” – and dropped it in the mailbox. 60 Which I would have known, as I was dealing to a good percentage of people on campus. 61 The lag between his death and its appearance in the quarterly magazine did seem odd and unexplained. 62 Even if it isn’t lung cancer, and, even if you do rest, and even if you are young, pneumonia tends to hang around for a bit. Pleurisy takes its sweet-ass time in dissipating.
I ended up bullying my doctors into repeated visits and attempted diagnoses at a problem which only existed in my head, culminating, ultimately, in an MRI, which found some ‘slight vertebral displacement’ that I now realize was their attempt to make it sound like something was wrong instead of nothing, probably just so they could justify the procedure to my HMO. Life is a placebo effect. What I learned from this, a few years on: 1) Whatever the cause of my own death, and whenever it comes, I have no right to feel as though I have been ‘shortchanged’ – I will not be a nonsmoker who died from lung cancer before his 30th birthday, six months after getting married. See Also: Mom, 1945-1989 – leukemia. 2) Having Love in my life actually may have served to foster a psychosis which convinced me of my imminent demise. During the time We were together, I thought I was dying of lung cancer, AIDS, throat cancer, and several other things which now strike me as patently ridiculous. Moreover, in my adult life, I have never exhibited what could be considered even mild tendencies towards hypochondria. I found You, and I wanted to roll credits. 3) If Love makes me think I’m dying, isn’t that yet another pretty good reason for me to avoid it? My mother’s sisters are both still alive, and nearing 70. My maternal grandfather lived to be 81, and he smoked for the last 60 of those years. My grandmother is 91, and I think three of her four sisters are still alive, all in their nineties. But Mom? Nonsmoker, nondrinker, not overweight. Cancer diagnosis at 35, gone six years later. She just got dealt a bad hand. In the parlance of psychotherapy, my cancer angst would be a cued fear or a traumatic phobia, one brought about as a response to events of childhood. Akin to my fear of bees, which raged in me to absurd lengths 63 after I was stung at the age of five and my arm swelled up in response. Then I got stung again at 13, and nothing much happened. And from that point onwards, like a light switch, my phobia just turned off.
63
Mom was vocal in her fear that I would jump out into oncoming traffic to avoid a bee along the side of the road, and this was not far from the truth. If one flew into a classroom of my youth, I literally could not pay any attention to anything else until it was gone.
Life is 90% what you make of it. But that other 10% can sometimes be a real bitch to overcome. “Our relationship,” You said once, quoting a friend, towards The End, “has cancer.” Honey, I know a lot about cancer. And there’s certain types, you can cure them, if you want to. Saturday night I end up at a balcony bar in Melbourne Central which is full of Asian students and other people wearing tight black clothing. There is a Spanish-English conversation group which is meeting there, and I talk to a Chilean girl and realize that I can only speak Spanish if I control the conversation. So in a way, it isn’t that different from when I speak English. I order a pint of Hoegaarden and pay with a $20, and when the girl gives me a $2 coin back as change, I question whether or not she has made a mistake. She has not. I have ordered an $18 pint of beer which they’ve poured into comically oversized pint glass which makes it look larger than it is. Basically any drink glass this big should be filled with pink liquid and have a paper parasol sticking out of it. I take my big beer back to the balcony, where I salute my one-month anniversary in Melbourne. I have a job, a house and arguably more friends that I had at any point in Korea. Still, though, it feels like I’m only doing things to avoid sadness, and not to actively be happy. As if to underline the point, I catch the DP in a reflection in a mirror on a far wall of the bar. But when I focus and try to look more closely, he is gone. “Disculpa,” I tell the Chilean girl – “pensé que había visto un amigo, pero me equivoqué.” Sunday it is summer hot again, but so sunny I have to enjoy it. I walk from the house to the MCG. Football season is starting next week, and I am unexpectedly excited by this. Sport provides such a wonderful masculine escape from things that actually matter. What do women have? Each other, I guess. Or shoes. I do another homework assignment with one of the guys from the group. I’m at the gym till it closes, and in bed early again. The Paramedic knocks and enters, to ask how I am, again. He leaves and comes back once more, and when he sees that I am half-asleep, he switches on the lights as he leaves. This is someone who, a few days ago, put the new spatula I bought in the refrigerator, “because it wasn’t his”. 64 I don’t say anything. He is probably doing what most people with cancer would do – trying to avoid being alone as much as he can. I get it. 64
His defense of this action, when asked.
I end up watching Romper Stomper, an early 90s movie where Russell Crowe plays a skinhead who makes Edward Norton in American History X look like Mahatma Gandhi. I remember having seen it last time I was here, but I just found out the library has a decent selection of DVDs and I’ve decided to do a self-study course in Australian film. It’s a good place to start. There are so many things I can do without anybody, it’s a wonder I ever bothered to look for anyone at all. “Solitude is better than a bad companion.” 70 sleeps till the summit. I wake up, I teach. I have changed my lower-level class for an intermediate one because its teacher quit to go to China. A girl from California has been hired to fill the vacancy left by the guy I’m replacing. Two out of three of the teachers are now American. “We’re a majority now, mate – we decide policy. That’s how it goes,” I tell a Filipino guy who works in the office. I’m approximately half-kidding. It’s probably a good thing for the students, though. The American accent has become the default for most of the world: South America, most of the Middle East and Asia, basically everywhere but Western Europe and perhaps some parts of Africa. British English is a priori, but now, in the storied Age of Globalization, not more desirable. I don’t think any immigrants come here to study the language hoping they leave with an Australian accent. What good would it be? The university still has not seen fit to give word on whether or not I have to take the mandatory course that isn’t mandatory anymore that no one told me was mandatory in the first place. I fire off an email which is as polite as I can be to the head of the department and the professor of the course and the head of graduate admissions. It isn’t all that polite. I sit in my sociolinguistics course, where we talk about language socialization. “Can anyone think of a situation where you knew where was the correct thing to do sociopragmatically, but still refused to do it?” the Sexy Librarian asks during her presentation. I laugh out loud, and say “I do that about five or six times a day.” Linguistically-speaking, I am resistant to being socialized. And probably in other ways, as well. “What is your philosophy of life?” “Think as little as possible.” “Anything else?” “When you can’t think of anything else to do, be kind.” On Your bed in Harlem, You twisted Your sheets into the fashion of a
form, and wrapped Yourself around it when I was not there. “My Surrogate _________”, You called it. There were a lot of fucking Surrogate _____s, I later found out. Sometimes I would rather look back if it meant that I could feel something in my heart, even something sad. Sadness was better than emptiness. Retroactive anxiety. Conquer your heart – then you may become somebody. My self-help books aren’t ones which make you feel better – they’re ones which help to explain the way things are. In the book, The Invisible Gorilla, authors Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons explain how powerfully illusions influence our lives and our perception of the world. These include: The illusion of attention. Subjects were shown a video of two groups of people playing basketball, and asked to count the number of passes made by the team in white. At some point in the video, a person in a gorilla suit walks into the frame, gesticulates broadly with his hands, and then walks off. Half of the people who watched the video did not see the gorilla. They were too busy counting the passes. The illusion of memory. A person is approached by a stranger asking for directions on a university campus. In the middle of the interaction, two men carrying a very broad door walk down the pathway and pass between the direction-giver and the direction-seeker. While the men are passing with the door, the direction-seeker is replaced by another person as the door passes. 30% of the direction-givers do not notice that the person they were just talking to is now a different person. Perhaps I was mistaken in believing that what You said was what You meant. When You said, “Come to Korea”, I thought You meant “Come to Korea.” What I thought I felt was something that I thought You felt. I felt something that I was willing to keep feeling, because I thought You were feeling it, too. But perhaps what I thought You said, You never really said at all. Perhaps what I thought happened, never really happened, or perhaps I remembered what I wanted to, or heard what I wanted to in the first place. We all mould the world into a shape which best suits the view we wish to maintain. It’s not a denial of reality; it’s a creation of reality. Something I wrote in a journal, late 2007:
I smoke a joint, she sits reading my stories on the bed. This is what I think I've always wanted, and I think I feel pretty good about it. I think I deserve it. I think everyone does, and not many people get it, but I have. It gets better by the day. Sometimes she asks me why I am laughing for no reason, and I tell her it's because I'm giddy with the wondrous nature of her, of her and me together, of the fact that it's happening, and I'm not just imagining it. It feels so good I don't need anything else, I don't want anything else. I don't see my friends, I don't talk to my family. She is the universe in which I now live, and that universe is vast and mysterious still. She is my happiness box, my neverending high. I don't know if I should be scared, but I'm not, and that makes it all the better. ...Today I went to a copy shop and had a selection of my travel stories bound for her. Part of the Christmas gift. She’s just passed out now in my bed after having read a bit. She sits with her head on the pillow, next to my book, and she looks like an angel. She looks like a girl that I could be with for a long, long time. She looks like love, in a way I’d only hoped and dreamed existed. It’s a Merry Christmas indeed. I could, perhaps, be paraphrasing here. Though I’m not. However, being happy doesn’t do much for the quality of my prose. Now I feel like a team on a losing streak of historic proportions. But has a team ever lost so much they just stopped playing? “Your entire life is like, an Epic Fail, dude.” I am sitting on a park bench, reading, and the DP is laughing at me as he blows smoke from a hand-rolled cigarette in my general direction. “You should have Keyboard Cat as your fucking ringtone.” “Yeah, cute,” I tell him, waving the smoke away with a dismissive hand. “If you had anyone call you, loser.” “Enough, all right? I’m not in the mood.” “Whatever man, whatever.” He tosses the cigarette to the ground, stamps it out, and pulls out a pack of Drum to begin rolling another. Opinions are like assholes – everyone has one, and they all stink. He does not relent, though. “You do realize you’re, like, 2 months away now, dude.” “So what of it?” “Well, that’s 36.” … “That’s, like, pretty close to 40.” … “And at 40, there is no way you could pretend to be ‘a kid’, or ‘just a guy bumming around’.” I can hear the air quotes in his intonation. “At 40, you’re like, a man.”
“Yup.” “At 40, you can’t even really go out to most bars anymore. At 40, imagine what a 25-year-old is going to think about talking to you. At 40, you’re going to smell different. It doesn’t matter if you’ve still got hair on your head.” “I’m going to the gym.” “You’d better – gravity ain’t on your side anymore, and neither is metabolism.” I want to haul off and punch him, but he’s right. In four years, I’ll likely be too old to be doing whatever it is I’ll be doing. At my age, my father had an 8-year old son and a triple bypass. I’m happy not to be burdened with either of those, but I am now at an age that I would have thought was pretty old not too long ago. I remember when I worked in Japan and met a new teacher in his thirties. “Wow,” I would think, “I sure hope to hell I’m not going to be doing this when I’m his age.” Epic Fail, indeed. It's impossible not to end up being a parody of what you thought you were. Problem #264 about time is, concerns about its passage just make it go quicker. When I met You, I was 31. Somehow, that felt young. Young enough, at least. Somehow it felt like there was still a lot left to start. Now it feels like I’m raking over a too-clean beach with an old metal detector in the dying light of day – if I find anything now, it’d be a real surprise. At what point in life does the ratio between “Adventures Yet to Be Lived” and “Adventures Already Had” tip irreversibly in favor of the latter? What does “halfway” mean? Have I visited half of the countries I’m going to visit? Taken half the lovers? Done half the drugs? Eaten half the meals, written half the stories? I fear that, in most of these matters, the answer is a resounding “yes”. The return is always shorter than the trip out. Life’s adventures, small and large, are not spread evenly throughout. ...we’re all born and we all do stuff and then we die, but somewhere in there are the touchpoints which define our stories: first love, a brush with death, a scientific insight, a yen to climb tall mountains – and then we die. The story of our lives is usually long over before we die, and we spend our twilight years warming our hands on the embers of memory.
63% of people think they are of above average intelligence, 71% of men and 57% of women. 69% of college students believed themselves to be better drivers than 50% of their peers, 77% felt they drove more safely than the median. Men judged themselves to be 15% more attractive than they were judged by their peers, women only slightly less so. 60% of the time, it works every time. Brian, that doesn’t make any sense. failure of source memory: when your memory is so vivid, you feel it has to be true. Apocryphal is just another way of saying “this is how I wanted it to be”. People who are clinically depressed are less likely to have unrealistic levels of confidence in their abilities and appearance. It’s not pessimism, it’s pragmatism. Creatively gifted individuals are two times more likely to experience some form of mental disorder. Groups asked to solve a math problem together took as their final answer the first answer that anyone in the group offered 94% of the time. The ironic thing about confidence is, you’ll probably end up being justified in having it, if you do. curse of knowledge, the: when you know something, you’ll be more likely to think that other people will know it, too. I have to remind myself that, statistically speaking, I’m more intelligent than 98% of the people I’m going to meet. And better travelled than about 99.9% of them. Statistically speaking only, here. You're just a woman with a small brain. With a brain a third the size of us. It's science. “There is no god but god.” I’m in total agreement with the first 4 words of this sentence. Does that make me 67% Muslim? Mersault in his cell, awaiting execution, satisfying himself with that newspaper article, and the memories of the brief life he’d had, again and again and again. A ride in an old yellow hatchback down to a beach in Sorrento with a beautiful Australian blonde. Play-fighting in the snow in a Sapporo winter with an almond-eyed Japanese girl, and snuggling warmly against her in a hotel bed to
ward off the cold later that night. Post-rave romps with a blue-eyed Norwegian in Barcelona, sleeping off Sunday afternoon drug hangovers naked, with hash joints and chill out music to ease me back down. Walking 650km across northern Spain after We had kissed only twice, knowing You were back in New York, waiting for me, mentally composing love poetry for You every step of the way. Is it wrong to feel inclined to rest content with the experiences I’ve already had, when they likely outnumber those in an average life twice as long as the one I’ve lived? We want to live in a world where A causes B. When B happens, we want to find that A, and analyze it, and make things neat and tidy. You wanted to move away and explore the world. I told You that You should, that We could still be together. You went to Korea. I missed You. I moved there to be with You again. I arrived. The environment had changed. The relationship was not the same. It faltered and ended. One way of putting it. You see causality, I just see two billiard balls in motion. The fact that one ends up in the corner pocket is incidental. Monday morning. Most of the students in my class now are Thai, and I am reminded again that, if forced to choose a major religion to pretend to adhere to, I would gladly select Buddhism. At least its adherents are happy. selective matching: we remember only the things which help us to form the patterns we want out of life. You’re such a Capricorn. Put on a hat, or else you’ll catch a cold. The Bible. The Koran. The Gita. etc. There was a time when, like many young male Western itinerants, full of introspection and hope, I read Buddhist scriptures and the Bhagavad Gita, annotating the texts as I went. It seems almost childish now, in retrospect, an embarrassing vestige of my past, like 80s pop or the stove pipe jeans I wore when I used to go to raves. However, I still believe in 80s pop. And in raves.
From the time I was baptized, at age 12, until I was 19 and in my freshman year at college, I went to Sunday mass virtually every week. Even if we were on vacation, I would insist that my father, a nonpracticing Jew, find a church I could attend. This, to me, perhaps more than anything else, is the part of my own past I find most difficult to comprehend. Faith is the voluntary incarceration of the mind. The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken. When I went to college, I attended a small weekend mass in the Campus Center. Then, a few months after the semester started, I kissed a girl for the first time. Then I kissed her again. Then she told me she didn’t want to kiss me anymore. This all happened within the space of a week. I never went to church again. I attended church “religiously”. i.e., “without thinking.” Class happens. I am aware again that I am more active now than I ever was in Melbourne in the 1990s. I want pot. I don’t want pot. This is addiction. You want something even though you know it won’t do you any good. When I smoke I am tired, forgetful, and even more antisocial than time and experience have already left me. But I can’t explain why, I just love to get high. On a good day, like today, I can see my situation as a win-win. When I get weed, I’ll be able to get high. And as long as I don’t have it, I can stay relatively productive – I can remember what I read, sleep 6 hours a night without needing a siesta, and use the gym as a drug instead of THC. On bad days, I feel as though it’s lose-lose. When I get weed, I’ll be a wasteoid. And until I have it, I’ll just be thinking about having it – not every day is a 12-hour one, and the days that aren’t, I’m left walking through parks saddened that I can’t just plop down, roll a fat one, and stare up at the trees like an idiot. Feeling bad about not having something that’s going to make me feel bad, would seem to be the definition of “defeatism”. 61 days until the Back Nine. It is Member Appreciation Day at the gym. I’m impressed and surprised at my dedication in the three weeks since I’ve joined – perhaps it’s due to a variation of my Buffet Theory: at an all-you-can eat place, I feel the need to gorge myself to a point of discomfort because, in theory, I have paid for every piece of food on the spread, and so I’m doing myself a disservice if I don’t exercise my options on as much of it as I can.
Likewise with the gym – my six-month membership has no limit as to how often I can use the facilities. Every day I don’t go, I’m paying for it anyway. And if I don’t go at least every other day, I won’t keep the DP at bay. I won’t fight the brain atrophy and the cellulite advance of age. From a glance at the other member cards in the gym’s filing cabinet, it’s fair to say that, if everyone behaved like I did, there wouldn’t be a spare machine in the place. But I live a 5-minute walk away from the facilities, and most nights, I’m doing a whole lot of nothing. And without weed, without friends, without Internet access in the house, I’d have to dig pretty deep for suitable excuses to avoid the place. I have a 30-minute training session with a jovial, bearded, chiseled trainer. He gives me an entirely different regimen than the first guy, even going so far as to scoff a bit at what was prescribed me three weeks ago. He sets up an appointment to see me again next Tuesday, ‘free of charge’. I’m going to have to tell him I’ve just lost my job when he hits me up for private training sessions – he seems too nice to turn down without a (plausibly fabricated) reason. I have drinks with the California Girl at a rooftop bar after work. She is going to quit tomorrow. The salary is very low 65 and the DOS has been sexually inappropriate with her, something I did not see but have no trouble believing, because he seems to be inappropriate in distinct ways with virtually everyone at the place. He’s like an unamusing Michael Scott. 66 She also likes to write, and wants to form a writing group. Again I am reminded that I like to say that I like writing more than I actually like writing. But I am also reminded of just how easy it is to make friends in a city everyone is happy to be in. Even if I don’t go out much, I can still pick up a phone number a week. With every day that passes, Seoul seems even worse in retrospect. It is like waking up in the middle of the night with the shits after a meal you didn’t enjoy in the first place. It is like finding out you owe money on your tax return, paying it, and then finding out that you only paid state, but federal wants your ass, too. 67 If Korea were an ice cream flavor, it would be pralines and dick. Though I did receive my final pension from the government there a few days ago, and I must say, there is no other country that kept paying me 2 months after I left it. Still wasn’t worth it. Melbourne University is still doing me no favo(u)rs. It has now been 10 65
To her – I’m happy with it. I heard it said, not too long ago, “Every office has a Michael Scott. And if you don’t know who it is, it’s probably you.” 67 Which happened to me last year, compounded with four years’ interest. Funny how, even though CD interest rates are at an all-time low, the government manages to keep its late fees at 10% APY. And by “funny” I mean, “I see how people consider buying large amounts of fertilizer to construct bombs to blow up federal buildings.” 66
days since I submitted the request to waive the course which was mandatory but no longer is, which I neglected to enrol in because no one told me I had to. So I’m sitting in on the course without the book, without doing the assignments, without wanting to be there or knowing if I’ll have to, because if it turns out I can’t drop it, I don’t want to miss half the lectures. My emails to various people who should be able to take care of the situation are being passed around like a joint nobody wants to hit, and with each subsequent cc’ed email, my tone increases slightly in severity. Today’s email is way more direct than it should ever have needed to be to achieve the desired ends. But here’s the thing about being a dick – sometimes it gets you what you want. In situations where someone isn’t doing their job, if you act polite, you don’t get what you want, and chances are the people in charge will still be annoyed by your persistence, at the fact that you bothered them in the first place. At least if you take the hard line, you get a resolution. And you can sleep well. What’s the difference between a pussy and a dick? A dick thrusts its opinions out there. A pussy just gets fucked. I don’t threaten anyone, and I don’t make recourse to expletive. I simply write to the Graduate Admissions officer that I need a name and a physical address of this mythical ‘University Board’ which has supposedly been hard at work deliberating my evidently sui generis case for over a week now. I write that I am shocked that a university of this caliber is handling the matter in a manner so lacking in professionalism and expediency. I throw in a half-joking joke about the urgency of the situation. I do not start the message with ‘Dear’, nor do I conclude it with ‘Sincerely’. I CC several people on it, everyone I can think of, in fact. The next morning my waiver comes through... The squeaky wheel does indeed get the oil. Thursday night after class ends we head to Percy’s at the top of Lygon Street to watch the opening match of the 2011 AFL season. I am genuinely excited about this, though I am at a loss to explain why. Perhaps it’s because of this: When I was 7 years old and ESPN started broadcasting, they didn’t have the money to broadcast American professional sports, so they showed anything and everything to fill their timetable 68 . One thing they used to show was Aussie Rules. This was the early 80s, so it was probably still the VFL, and not the AFL, though I wouldn’t have known or understood this at the time. The weekly highlight show began and ended with the de facto Australian national anthem, Men at Work’s ‘Down Under’. I used to run around the living room with a toy (American) football, alternately trying to bounce it on the ground and 68
Ironic now that with 6 (8? 33? I don’t know, I don’t live in America) channels in the “ESPN Family”, they are doing the same exact thing.
get it to come back to me and kicking it through imaginary goal posts. I distinctly remember mimicking the sharp ‘two guns blazing’ gesture of the white-jacketed officials demarcating a goal. There probably aren’t many Americans my age with this memory, but it was so well buried in the hard drive of time that when I got here in 1996, I had forgotten all about it. But one night, probably my first night working at the Over 28’s nightclub in Moonee Ponds, I was taking out the trash, and when I went to open the bin I saw ‘City of Essendon’ on the lid. And the suburb name made a rush of recollections flood back to me. I don’t think I even thought about the footy before moving here, but I started to go to matches as often as I could. Ormond College, my first semester home, was just down the road from Optus Oval, where the Carlton Blues 69 played. On a Saturday afternoon, even if I didn’t go to the match, I would know if the Blues had won because I’d hear the team song70 blaring out from the speaker system when the game ended. It used to cost $8 for general admission seats. I think half the time I’d just go alone if I couldn’t coerce one of the other American exchange students to go with me. Now there are only two ovals where they play in Melbourne, and both of them are big. Several people from my class are in the bar, but I’m the only one who’s really paying any attention to the proceedings. Carlton, still my team 71 , starts strong, but fades in the third quarter. Oddly enough, my energy after a long day ebbs with that of my team, so it probably appears as though I am unduly saddened by their poor form. “I am an old man in a bar, drinking cheap beer and acting gruff as his team pisses away a match” I text the Poet. He writes back that I should just support the Dons 72 , but that he did wager on Carlton to win tonight. In the end, though, the team comes alive and manages to win. I make a decision to try and watch every match that Carlton plays this year. It shouldn’t be all that hard – the games are mostly played on the weekends, and I’m not doing much then. For the first hour or so in the bar, I have a good conversation with the British Girl who, if I still cared about such things, would be pretty much an ideal match for me at this stage of my life. She’s lived in 5 countries, so she’s a ronin, too. She’s a teacher, she likes hiking, she’s bright, and she’s pretty enough. We talk quite animatedly and agree on a lot of things without even trying. We share a veggie burger. But then I just, stop. I let her talk to the Chilean. I am so nonchalant about meeting women that I can’t even follow through on a conversation when it’s going well. But hey, the footy’s on. 69
Who, I found out, were the team favored by the Italian and, to a lesser extent, Jewish diasporas in Melbourne – kind of made my adoption of them a no-brainer. 70 Which the team also sings together after every victory, in as quaint a nod towards camraderie as you’ll see in modern professional sports. 71 Though I’ve neither watched a match nor read about their fortunes in 13 seasons. 72 Essendon, his side.
Friday. The weather is grey and chilly, trending downwards, so I head to the Melbourne Museum, around the corner from the house. It is free with a student card – if I come here 26,500 more times, the course will have paid for itself. The building is modern and airy, and I don’t remember it from the last time I was here. 73 The exhibitions are an interesting hodgepodge of ethnocultural artifacts and scientific displays. I spend an inordinate amount of time in a large hall titled The Melbourne Story, reading the majority of the signage on the walls. I learn a lot about the history of the city, but what is most impressive of all is how much I care. I wouldn’t read this much about a place almost anywhere else in the world. I don’t care much about how New York came together. Perhaps I care a bit about Barcelona’s genesis. But really, this city, I don’t know what to say. It is my Happy Place. Yes I am alone, and yes I am old, and directionless, and I don’t know what I’m doing or where I’m going. But somehow, just being here again brings back all the memories of the first time around, the first time I was out in the world, and it doesn’t even matter that most of the people I shared that time with are now gone or too busy to see me. Since my adult life began, it’s never really been about the people for me anywhere. It’s been about the sense of place. Some of my adopted nations have had it – here and Spain – and others really haven’t – Poland and Korea. Maybe Japan was somewhere in between. But the DP is not as strong here; in fact, unless I get hung up on my perpetual solitude, he doesn’t bother me much. Could I apply for residency here seeking asylum from myself? In the museum’s expansive insectarium, I learn that, in spite of the widespread fear of poisonous spiders in the country, they have killed only 13 people in the last 50 years. The whitetail spider is not deadly, which renders the coda of an ofttold story I recount about killing one in the Ex-GF’s room when we were back at college untrue (“That would’ve killed you” a laconic roommate had told me at the time). The Illusion of Memory at work again, I guess. Sucks when facts get in the way of a good story. Friday night I meet the California Girl at the Napier, a pub which existed when I was here last and hasn’t changed much in the interim. I meet a somewhat attractive girl from South Africa who’s with her, but don’t bother to get her phone number. I’m not sure I would even know what it meant to hit on someone anymore. Basically, at this point, someone would have to throw it out there. Just like You did. I have now been single for 18 months. I had been single for 18 73
I later find out that it opened in 2000, which would explain this, though the Illusion of Memory makes this knowledge come as a surprise, as I could have sworn it was here before, when I was.
months when I met You, too. Though back then I hadn’t yet abandoned all hope. It took You to help me do that. Now, even though people I meet have nothing to do with my past, and need not be affected by it, I still feel as though I’m hiding something from everyone. The DP and You, to name two somethings. When I was young, and well into my teens, in fact, I used to count things. Steps across a room, times I touched a surface. As manias go, this one isn’t all that extraordinary. Three was a magic number for light switches. 74 I never used to step on the bottom step of a flight of stairs, either going up or down. I used to say the Lord’s Prayer or a Hail Mary if I took His name in vain (the blurring of the ‘superstition/religion’ distinction again). Then sometime during my years in high school, I just stopped. I didn’t even have the energy or the perseverance to maintain my OCD. Turning off a television on Channel 4 remains as the one vestigial practice from those days. It’s the closest thing to a non-logical belief that I still have, and I don’t even know what it means. The Paramedic may be dying. Or maybe not. I don’t know, and I’m not sure how to ask that. It’s been quiet around the house, and the Hairdresser tells me that he’s not well. I haven’t seen him for a few days, but that’s not a surprise because I’m never home, and if I shower at the gym, I have literally no reason to ever go upstairs, which is where the Boys sleep. He’s been bedridden. At some point on Saturday afternoon, a doctor comes round to look at him, but I’m in my room and don’t go out just to be nosy. I don’t know how much attention I should pay to this – I am still something of an interloper here. And he himself told me he no longer had cancer, though his partner has made it very clear that he still does, but doesn’t know exactly what kind it is. I’m not sad, but it is a strange feeling. I suppose it’s good I’m hardly ever home and don’t make any noise when I am, because I don’t want to have much of a part of this one way or the other. And in this case, I don’t even know that this is symbolic of my characteristic ‘distance yourself from all suffering’ attitude as much as just a case of not wanting to offer attention that isn’t desired. In the evenings of the past few days, I’ve heard the distant but still imposing drone of auto engines – the F1 is in town. I saw where the race track is relative to my house – it’s several kilometers away, down south, towards St. Kilda. Yet every afternoon this weekend, for hours, I hear the imposing rumble of the cars. How does holding an event which causes auditory distress 5km away classify as ‘a good idea’ for a 74
3, but, as I concurred with a fellow sufferer, it really is a good number.
city? Couldn’t they have built a race track a half-hour outside of town?75 The one-man Australian Film Festival is heating up. Partly because I’m hoping that the website I covered a festival for in NY will let me do either Melbourne or Sydney this winter (I already asked, request pending). Partly because I want to write an article on Australian film for another website for which I’ve written a few times before (request not yet made). And partly because I’m bored, the films are free at the library, and I have developed the ability to watch several movies in succession after three years of solitary theatre-hopping at the Tribeca Film Festival in NY.76 The refreshing thing about watching movies which aren’t from Hollywood is that you don’t automatically know how they are going to end, and the actors aren’t all pretty. Many parts of the world make pop music which sounds identical to that which comes from the US, but, thankfully, cinema is still pretty distinct to its country of origin. I’ve started watching a film almost every day, and I triple up on Saturday, passing out early and then waking up at 2.30AM for a screening of a Heath Ledger heroin flick. Then I fall asleep again and have this dream: We are together in the same city again, maybe it is Seoul. First, We are in a living room, sitting at a table across from each other. You are smiling. I haven’t asked You how You are but You are telling me. You start to tell me about relationships You had before Us, relationships I never knew about, relationships which You had neglected to mention. You tell me there were Asian guys. I cut You off. “I don’t want to hear any of this,” I say. Your face drops. “What about you?” You ask. “What can I say?” I respond. “Of course, there hasn’t been anyone since You. I gave up, why bother? It’s just going to end the same way – I hurt someone and I drive them away, or I lose interest.” You ask me something about the possibility of reconciliation between Us, not getting back together, just being friends. “Well, I’m not openly hostile to You,” I say. “That’s probably the best You’re going to get.” Then We are in a crowded street, an approximation of the Gangnamdaero where I worked, except that none of the people have faces, so I’m not even sure We’re in Asia. You ask about me again, and I tell You I work for a big school, but I can’t remember its name. You help me recall it, it is ‘Limitless’, then You smile and quickly avert Your eyes from me, and say, “I don’t know if you want to know this, but 75
And how is navigating a gas-fueled vehicle around a course categorized as a ‘sport’ anyway? That has always seemed to more closely resemble ‘transportation’, than ‘athletics’ in my personal sporting ontology. 76 Film festivals really aren’t designed for people who have jobs. Good thing I only worked 3 days a week while living in NY.
my boyfriend used to work there.” “Oh,” I say. Now a friend of Yours shows up, a white guy, not Your boyfriend. He has glasses and a goatee, he says ‘hello’, realizes who I am and hesitates a bit, but You tell him it’s ok and so he stays. He is on the phone or otherwise distracted, leaving me alone with You for a brief final moment. “Don’t ever, ever contact me again,” I tell You. You start to cry. I’m in the lobby of a building now, waiting for an elevator. I see You outside, crying. Your friend comes in. He is not angry, just confused, as he doesn’t know what to do. “All the lies, all the cheating,” I tell him, “But you don’t know me so I could be lying right now, too,” I say. “Am I sorry? Well, I’m sorry She’s crying right now. I’m sorry you have to deal with this. But more than that, man?” The elevator arrives, the doors open. “I don’t know, my life is –“ and I can’t even finish the sentence, I just wave my hand dismissively as I enter the elevator. It is glass-walled, and I ride up and down, looking for a floor I cannot seem to find. I jump up and turn on the light. The DP is sitting up on my dresser, striking a Puckish pose, and he is clapping his hands like a baby watching someone rip paper. “Oh, you didn’t see THAT one coming, did you?” he says, laughing so hard he almost dislodges himself from his perch. It is 6.30AM on a Sunday, but there will be no more sleeping for me today. I am doing so little work for my uni courses now that when I do have to sit down and write something, it almost feels like an intrusion. It’s ironic, but a job has replaced weed as my avoidance tactic – whenever I feel as though I should be doing more preparation for the classes in which I sit as a student, I end up doing more for those in which I stand as a teacher. In a way, though, it seems just – I never really felt as though I needed to study any more to improve my abilities at a job I’ve been doing for 12 years. I just need that piece of paper. This is my third degree, and the first one which connects to a field I work in. Still, when I finish, I’m not going to feel pride, or relief. It won’t have been that difficult or that arduous. It’s just another thing to do. Like everything else. Just something else to do. The Paramedic is in the hospital, and may well have killed himself out of his refusal to accept his health situation and deal with it in a mature way. Yesterday morning the Boys were already up when I awoke and went upstairs to take a shower. “Well, we have to let _____ into the bathroom, he’s got to get ready for work, too,” I heard him say. I stopped to talk to them, and he was sitting on the sofa without his shirt on. I asked how he was, and the reply, though it came with
a smile, was not good. He had been up all night, “pissing a lot of blood,” but he said this in a flat cadence akin to that which you’d use to make an observation like “rainin’ hard today.” I wasn’t sure how to respond. The paramedics had come to the house on Sunday, and here it was 48 hours later and whatever he was doing, or whatever it was that was going on inside of him, wasn’t getting any better. So they were going to go to the doctor. Before I went to work, I met the Hairdresser in the kitchen. I didn’t know what to say. “I don’t know what to say,” I said. “If there’s anything that I can do – but I don’t really know what I can do.” “No, you’re fine, you’re gorgeous,” he said, and the fact that this didn’t even register a Creepiness Factor made me wonder again just how it is that I have come to be so accepted by these two men I hardly even know after I’ve done very little to ingratiate myself into their lives besides pay them $200 a week and not make any noise. I went to work, and tried not to come home early so as to be able to avoid whatever was going on, which wasn’t that hard, because it’s now summer again, 25 degrees in the daytime and the type of sun that makes it feel almost criminal to stay inside. When I get home, the place is empty, and I know the Paramedic’s been admitted to the hospital even before the Hairdresser comes home to confirm it. His kidneys and his liver aren’t working at the moment. It seems this is not a combination which connotes a good prognosis. He has to stay in the hospital two weeks, the Hairdresser says, which doesn’t even make sense, knowing that someone has to stay in that long at the outset. A friend comes by to take the Hairdresser to the hospital. I continue my Australian movie marathon and wonder how exactly I’m meant to feel in this situation. I’ve known these people for 5 weeks. They have both been decent to me, but the one I like considerably less is now quite possibly on the verge of death due to his own neglect and Reality Acceptance Disorder. 77 I feel bad for his partner, but I don’t feel any real emotion, nor do I think I should. But maybe the Paramedic I know isn’t the one that would have been had he not been so ill – maybe the scatterbrained antics, the repeated asking of questions without regard to their answer, the spatula in the fridge and the laundry on the floor 78 and asking how I am every 17 minutes, maybe all these things have only been happening because he knows something is not right inside and he’s been trying to come to terms with it. On Wednesday afternoon, I get home not long before the Hairdresser. He’s come back from the hospital again. Things are not really good, “55% leaning towards the wrong way” is how he puts it, and the 77
If this isn’t in the DSM-IV, it really should be. A few weeks ago, when I needed to use the dryer, but found it full of wet, clean clothes, the Paramedic said “No problem, and proceeded to throw his clean clothing on the bathroom floor, before laughing and walking out. 78
Paramedic is on morphine and has many tubes in places where they would probably cause great discomfort if he wasn’t completely out of it. “You can’t talk to him,” the Hairdresser says, “he’s not making any sense.” Supposedly, he had cancer some years ago, but the hospital cannot find any record of it and it is hampering their ability to treat him. “But did you know him when he had cancer?” I ask. “Yes, but he has also been on all of these alternative treatments recently.” How could a hospital lose records in this day and age? It seems odd. Has he made the whole thing up? Has he used his connections as a paramedic to destroy his own medical records? Could either of those things even happen, and if so, why doesn’t his ‘life partner’ know any more about it than someone from another country who moved into the house a month ago? Perhaps not caring about yourself at all is just another form of selfishness. If you have people who love you, and you aren’t honest with them about your condition, and it causes you discomfort, or worse, leaving them with the mess to deal with, well, isn’t that, for lack of another word, rude? If you know someone loves you, and wants to be with you, shouldn’t you be honest with them, and with yourself, instead of being cryptic and asking others how they are? “As long as you don’t leave me,” the Hairdresser says, and this is Creepiness Factor 7, trending upwards, even in spite of the circumstances. I really don’t know how to respond. Is there a 10-year old kid somewhere in the world who’s going to grow up into a smart but poorly-adjusted adult who roams the world without direction and is going to share a house with me when I’m old and can’t pay rent without help? Is that where all this is going? What’s definite is that there’s no way I’m going to be able to move out now at any point during this year unless I want to really hurt someone’s feelings. Not that this has stopped me from doing things before. The Hairdresser is going to work tomorrow. “I have to pay rent,” he says. He isn’t going back to the hospital tonight, because it’s far away, he doesn’t like to drive at night, and there’s nothing he can do. Is this what I have to look forward to? Or even less? One person who loves me but won’t even alter his work schedule to sit by my bedside as I lay dying? The Hairdresser says he’s “shattered”, and to be sure, he does seem out of sorts, but at least some of his sadness must be mitigated by confusion – what has his lover been neglecting to tell him all these years? And, ever the solipsist, if he doesn’t make it, then what am I going to do? Am I going to live in a house with a grieving old man who is lamenting the passing of someone I really didn’t even know? I tell the Hairdresser I’ll go to the hospital on Saturday. I suppose I have to. Emotionally, I’m not feeling much. Nothing new there. But this is a situation where if I don’t do what I’m supposed to, it’s going to be
pretty difficult to explain away. Thursday night and I am sitting in my room on night Number ‘I’ve already lost count’ of my ongoing Australian film retrospective, which is now turning more into an autodidactic long-form course. I hear a key in the front door, and then a thud, and I know what has happened, but I really don’t want to see it. The house door is swung open and the Hairdresser is crumpled into an odd shape on the ground, saying “Shit, I’ve really gone and done it now”. I try to help him up but he weighs more than me and he’s used to pushing off of low-lying surfaces to get himself up anyway (coffee tables, chairs, the floor), so he crawls inside, and I pick up his cane and his shopping bag. In the kitchen, I pour him a scotch. It must be a pretty hard thing he’s going through, one I can’t relate to in any real way.79 He’s worried about the Paramedic, and about how much it costs to get to and from the hospital, and about lies he may or may not have been told by his life partner. So I get drunk with him in the kitchen, and he tells me the following things, in no particular order: a) They have an ‘open’ relationship, but the Paramedic is insanely jealous. When the Hairdresser goes to Thailand alone, which is an annual trip, the Paramedic thinks he’s going to see an old lover. Which he does, “But he’s a friend, and that’s it.” He does, however, have sex with a lot of Thai rent boys. b) The Paramedic has had many short relationships, all of which have ended badly. You don’t say. c) The Hairdresser can no longer get an erection, so he has to inject himself with something that keeps him at attention for two hours. “I figured you must have seen the vials in the fridge, so I might as well tell you what they are,” he says, though by this point, he’s into his third drink. I did notice the plastic containers on the fridge door, but I didn’t even bother to look at them. With all the shit that goes on in this house, I really don’t care what they’re on. d) His own disability stems originally from a horse riding accident he suffered in his early twenties. He broke some bones, but what the doctors didn’t realize at the time is that he damaged a part of his brain as well, the name of which he can’t recall, but which now “no longer works.” He says it’s tough to read. I’ve seen his attempts at spelling things scrawled on notes left on the kitchen table – ‘towel’ was ‘toul’. He is also dyslexic. This was from before the accident. He’s got 99 problems, and, unfortunately, his bitch is one. e) He has found three empty bottles of wine hidden around the lounge room. This is odd on a variety of levels: 79
Though I’m not sure if it’s the “losing a partner” or the “having a partner” that I can’t relate to...
1) The room isn’t that big, and there is a housecleaner, so he really can’t have looked very hard. 2) He admits he has no idea that the Paramedic drinks (he said as much to me when I first moved in “He doesn’t drink” – and I thought he was actually joking so I didn’t question it. He reeks of alcohol most nights, and becomes a visibly different person, but hey, I’m just a guy who moved in 4 weeks ago noticing this, not his partner of 7 years). Evidently, among other things on the Hairdresser’s body that don’t work, his nose is shot. But how can you kiss someone who stinks of booze and not know? Love is blind, but also devoid of olfactory sense, and a pretty naivë idiot, apparently. 3) Why is a 47-year old man hiding his drinking habit from his live-in lover? Really, what the fuck is going on here? f) The Paramedic hasn’t talked to his mother or brother about his condition, and the Hairdresser is angry about this. Evidently they don’t really like the path his life has taken.80 They are wealthy, which would explain the Paramedic’s woefully misplaced sense of entitlement, and they are estranged. The Hairdresser is angry that they don’t help him out, but really, at what point do you just accept that and move on? The cynical side of me (i.e, Me) is at least partially convinced that the Hairdresser keeps the Paramedic around because of all the money he has – I’ve heard mention of ‘multiple properties’ that he owns, which doesn’t explain why he’s living in a rented share house with the need for a boarder to help cover rent, but still. g) It costs $100 a month to turn on the TV in the hospital, and the Hairdresser won’t pay it, because he “doesn’t have it”. Again, some thoughts. 1) How can you not have $100 if you’re 60 years old and have owned a business for 20 years? How bad are you with money? 2) How can the Paramedic not have any savings with which to turn it on?81 3) How can you leave your life partner lying on a hospital bed staring at the ceiling because you won’t part with a few bucks to give him some moving images to look at? 4) Again, how can you say you don’t have $100 when I see you ordering take-away food? 5) Why do hospitals charge for television in the first place? I think you probably even get free TV in prison, and in a hospital, it’s entirely possible you haven’t done anything wrong to end up there.82 I almost start to say I can help with the money, but really, what the I can’t really blame them – I have a hunch it’s not about the homosexuality, though, but rather the lying, the alcoholism, the racism, the xenophobia, or just the being a petulant 50-year old child part. 81 Again, the ‘multiple properties thing’ springs to mind. 82 Though not in this particular case... 80
fuck??? How badly have you managed your life to end up in this financial situation? I don’t understand how people who start off middleclass (or better, as the case may be) can just lifefuck their way out the back door. I try to offer counsel. We are now drunk enough that it seems the Hairdresser won’t get pissy with me if I do; in fact, it seems like it’s what he wants, and most definitely needs. I tell him he has to get word directly from the doctors, and not trust his partner to convey what they’ve told him. I tell him he has to confront the Paramedic about the alcohol, and not just let him pooh-pooh the situation away – he’s almost fucking killed himself. The time for being a little child is over. I tell him I really don’t understand how you could keep something like rampant alcoholism from your long-term partner (and I mean this on two levels – literally, and morally – see above). He keeps his head down for some of this, nodding slightly, like a child who knows he’s done wrong. At one point, he looks up and says to me “Do you think you could help me with this?” Who the fuck am I here? As much as I like to throw my weight around, in this case, I really don’t want to. And how is a 35-year old straight male, celibate for 4.5 of the past 6 years, in a position to counsel two devoted gay lovers decades his senior? Maybe because I’m not a fucking idiot. Though it’s always easier to make sense of things when you have no discernable emotions. Like Thoreau, I have no problem not being ‘thick’. He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god. Inadvertently, I wonder what my erstwhile Best Friend would do here. You loved gay guys – You had a whole harem of them in Seoul. You’d probably have loved this situation. My Two Dads certainly would have loved You. Well, maybe not the Paramedic, but only because he’s racist. When I go to bed, I hug the Hairdresser. Creepiness Factor 5, trending upwards, but not because of the hug – because of the fact that I am somehow now thrust into this bizarre soap opera concerning people I have no history and probably no future with. Maybe part of life is pretending to care about other people. And maybe this is as good a place as any to start. “Never underestimate the capacity of other people to let you down.” “Yeah, well, I don't really care about girls.” “Oh.” “I just like being alone.” “But most normal people don't, and it's important that you seem
normal.” “Even though I'm not.” “Because you're not.” Friday morning and I wake up ready to do some tourism, but the day is too nice to enter a museum, so I end up having a lazy lunch and then just walking around. Again, life is a great deal easier when it’s 24 degrees and sunny all the time. There is a flower festival at the Carlton Gardens which I won’t go to, and a comedy festival all over town which I won’t go to. I remember being here before and wanting to be part of everything. Now, I just want to be part of the city – what it has to offer is sun and clean air and parks and that’s about all I need. Even in Kyoto, I long for Kyoto, wrote Basho. 4 seems to be the ideal number of days to work in a week. By Tuesday, you are 50% of the way home. If you spend a weekend day in bed, you’ve still got two others to play with. Friday feels like Saturday, Saturday feels like Sunday, and Sunday feels like you don’t have to answer to anyone. And I’ve always liked that. Even in Melbourne, I long for Melbourne. Yesterday, I received a promising email via Facebook. The Chilean girl I met a few weeks back invited me to a party at her friend’s house. I remember talking to her for a while while drinking an $18 pint of beer. I remember thinking she was cute enough to talk to, but I may just have wanted to practice my Spanish. I don’t recall what she looks like. I know she has a 5-year old kid, and I know that a few nights ago I said, with a fair amount of sincerity, “Right now, I’d be perfectly happy with someone who had a kid around 5-9 years old – I don’t want to deal with a baby, I don’t care about bloodlines, and at that age they are still young enough that you could conceivably become a de facto parent anyway.” Who am I kidding? I’ll never be ‘perfectly happy.’ At any rate, partially because I have nothing special to do, and partially because I’ve always felt that, if a girl makes the first move, at least you owe her a date, I decide to go. As I’m waiting on the street corner in front of Melbourne Central for her, I realize I truly have no recollection of how she looks. I know she is short and dark-haired – that’s about it. Her Facebook profile pic didn’t show much, and she hasn’t friended me, so I can’t see any more of her. I see a girl waiting across the street who is seriously cute, and for a second I get a bit excited, but then realize that there’s no way it’s her. And when she finally does turn up, with a friend in tow, I realize even as I lean in to give her the first of the customary dos besos that she is not going to make me reneg on my vow of celibacy. She’s ‘cute’ the way all
really short, diminutive people are. She’s ‘pinch on the cheeks’ cute, not “Gonna get me some of that” cute. We meet another Chilean guy and take a train down to St. Kilda. It’s odd to be speaking a foreign language in public in a country where I do speak the lingua franca. People are looking at us. I think I like it. The party is subdued, a group of friends from the girl’s department at uni. It’s in the apartment of another Chilean girl who is genuinely attractive 83 , but of course she’s engaged to an Australian guy. It is no surprise that I would find everyone else in the room more attractive than the person who is attracted to me. It’s the math I normally use. Most of the people here are studying something business-related, which makes it very easy not to talk shop. We drink enough, and then a bit more, and when we leave to go dancing I realize that my little friend is definitely giving a lot of attention to me. At a small club which is a converted house, we dance to bad Latino pop 84 and she is pulling me towards her and dancing up against me. If she were a cat or a dog, you would call what she is doing “showing.” I humor her a bit, turning around and shaking my ass at her, but I try to make it fairly clear that things aren’t going any further, gracias. There have been a few moments, since You, when I realize I could get with a girl. In virtually every case, I have felt almost a gag reflex of revulsion. To be fair, I haven’t been turning down anyone all that great. But if someone special did come along, would I even know? The dance floor has long mirrors lining the far wall, and I see the DP in one of them, grinding up against a young Australian redhead with a tight dress and an amazing body. Shakira is playing, and he has his face in her hair and his hand on her ass, paying me no mind. It’s at this point that I just want to be home. This happens sometimes when I go out now. I am having a serviceably good time and then all of a sudden I realize that I would gladly pay ten or twenty bucks to be teletransported to my room, where I could pass out and not even have to say goodbye to whoever it is I’m with. It probably doesn’t help that my voice has given out, which happens from time to time when there’s a lot of drinking and loud talking involved over the course of an evening. My poor girl. Now she’s fending off the very unwelcome advances of a tiny Indian kid in her study group. She’s probably going to go home sad that she couldn’t get with me, convinced that it’s because she has a kid. She’s probably going to feel some regret, along with the unwavering maternal love, about having made a decision that is irrevocable and has implications which will never, ever go away. Honey, I’ve got multiple things going on for which they don’t have People say that Chilean women are the most attractive in South America, but my (admittedly limited) empirical evidence has shown otherwise. 84 Surely a redundant phrase. 83
cures, and a wife. I don’t give a fuck about your kid, and I mean that in the nicest possible way. The thought phrases itself in exactly these words, and I find it wildly funny. Good thing it’s ok if you laugh on a dance floor in a club – nobody minds. Next Tuesday will be my 5-year wedding anniversary. What is the gift to commemorate the fifth year of a sham marriage? I vote plastic. Those of us who live in the same direction cab it home, and I have a feeling I won’t be seeing my new friend again because she now realizes that she isn’t going to get what she wants from me. Women are all the same. 57 strokes till the far end of the pool. I wake up and walk a few kilometers north to an outlet sale at a retro clothes shop’s warehouse. I sift through racks of stained and mangled vintage wear, looking for pearls in a big pile of manure along with a few dozen other shoppers roughly half my age. I buy two shirts I don’t really like and most definitely don’t need simply because they are cheap and I always feel like I’m ‘rescuing’ vintage clothing from some horrible future of neglect by buying it and then not wearing it myself. I am the Mother Teresa of Kramer Shirts. In the afternoon, I go to visit the Paramedic, because I told the Hairdresser I would and because, regardless of how heartless I think I am, I suppose I should see my possibly dying flatmate in the ICU. Saturday Afternoon in the Hospital – definitely not the title of any Rockwell print I’ve ever seen. He looks much better; in fact, he has more color than I have ever seen in him before, probably because this is the longest he’s gone without being drunk since I’ve known him and with a team of doctors and clinicians monitoring you 24 hours a day it’s pretty hard to abuse yourself. I go in with one of their friends (two is the ward limit per patient at a time). The woman, a “dear friend”, seems less comfortable there than I am, and stays about 20 minutes without saying much of importance or sincerity before excusing herself. I then have a few minutes alone with him before the Hairdresser hobbles in, so I try to take advantage of it. I tell him as gently as I can that he’s really going to have to start listening to the doctors and taking care of himself. I tell him that he’s going to have to start being honest about his health, to himself, and to those around him. And all the while I’m telling him this, I’m thinking that I haven’t had this sincere a discussion with anyone in so long that I can’t remember the last time it happened. We only understand that which is already in us. Perhaps he’ll shape up. Necessity saves us the trouble of choosing.
Death, or its pretense, brings everyone closer. He seems to agree, but it could just be the meds he’s on, and I fear (though why I care, I still don’t know) that his overprotective, paternal partner will just be his love-blind enabler and that if a person makes it to 50 without any concept of honesty or sense of responsibility about himself or his actions then it’s pretty hard to expect that person to change. The Hairdresser limps in. I excuse myself and take a train back to the city (the couple who drove us here have disappeared). On the train back, I start thinking that maybe it’s for the best if I look for a new house. I didn’t come here for this. 85 I don’t want this from my own family, let alone someone else’s. But yet I am involved, here. Why? Perhaps it’s just more of my warped, inverted emotionality – it’s easier to get involved with people I’ve just met because I have no past with them – it’s risk-free. When this year is over (or when I move out), this episode just ends. I won’t even see these guys on Facebook, because they don’t know how to use a computer. Also, I can be 110% honest 86 because I really don’t care what they think of me – you asked me for my opinion on the issue? I’m going to give it to you, mate. Fuck, even if you didn’t ask me, I’m going to give it to you. Saturday night is a house party at the flat of one of the girls from the group. It’s good to be back at parties. It’s good to want to be social again. Odd, but good. No one is so completely disenchanted with the world, or knows it so thoroughly, or is so utterly disgusted with it, that when it begins to smile upon him he does not become partially reconciled to it. I still feel that exercising social civility is akin to using a muscle that has atrophied from two years of disuse. Tonight, though, alcohol helps, rather than hindering. I talk about a lot of things with a lot of people. I make no effort to hit on anyone at all. Tentative plans are made with selected group mates to take a trip during Easter Week to the Great Ocean Road, or somewhere scenic. I feel almost like a fully functioning member of the human race again. We go from the party to another, that of another girl in the group, the British one who I think in another, still sexual lifetime I would have been interested in. Her flatmates are doing coke, but at $300 a gram I feel it indecent to ask even for a bump. It is good to see it, though I can’t really articulate why. I’m out until 3AM and too drunk even to continue the movie marathon when I finally get home. Sunday is lost to a hangover and a lack of interest in anything specific. 85 86
Though I’d be pretty twisted if I had. 10% over my norm.
Without the internet in my house, however, I am forced to do act. Somebody better put something on – I’m starting to think! But I can always find something to avoid doing what I should be doing. There are so many levels of procrastination. There’s the room-cleaning level. There’s the book-reading level. There’s the ‘go for a long, long walk’ level. There’s the pot smoking level. Then at some point, you begin to realize that the procrastination is life. I have less free time here than I have had in a very long while, but I still have more free time than most people have ever had in their lives. 20 hours of work plus prep time, 6 hours of class plus assignments, but I still have 3 days a week where I am not accountable to anyone I don’t choose to be accountable to. I still have time to have watched nearly two dozen movies in the past thre weeks. When you stop to think about it (and I have stopped to think about it plenty), what is it that we are supposed to be doing? When I was with You, You became the answer to that question. But how can you live for a person? What if they don’t live for you? What if they live for you, but then you want to live for something else, too, and they don’t like it? What if they die? What if you meet another person, and you want to try living for them? No kids, no religion, no passion, no job that requires much thought outside that which you give it while you are there. Maybe people just believe in god because they want to believe in something. In Brooklyn (and Cambodia), I certainly saw people have kids because they had nothing to do. For a long time now, I’ve used question word cards in my classes. It’s a simple tactic, one I take no claim for inventing, though I can’t remember where I first saw it. Basically, I’ve got laminated cards with “Who” “What” “When” “Where” “Why” and “How” on them.87 With lower level students, sometimes getting a discussion started is just a matter of feeding them that first word. After that, the question comes, and you’re on your way. If I show a class a picture and say “Ask some questions about this picture,” it doesn’t work nearly as well as if I hold up one of the cards and say, “Ask me a question about this picture using this word.” Anyway, enough pedagogy. The odd adjunct to this is that I’ve found the question words are also a useful way to help you understand and conceptualize life choices. Life is a matter of asking questions, to yourself and to others. The questions we ask determine the answers we look for. And the decisions we make, the important ones, at least, they’re determined by which question is asking loudest at the moment. If you find yourself in a period where it seems like you don’t know what you want, ask yourself, 87
In Comic Sans, the smiley-face emoticon of fonts.
“What questions are asking right now?” When I was in Barcelona, that was a “Where” time – it didn’t matter that I was broke, or that I had no residency visa or stable job. Just being there was enough, soaking it in, experiencing the city. Sure, the people I liked were there, but they were there because of the place, too.88 They were answering the same question as I was. Most people I knew in Barcelona weren’t doing anything important, but it didn’t matter to them, either, because they were just happy to be there. Ultimately, though, I left, because the “How” and the “What” started speaking up, and I couldn’t ignore them. How could I afford to stay there? What was I doing with my life? I moved back to America to answer that “What” – when I was 30, I had still never held a stable job which had allowed me to save money and act like an adult.89 I had to do it, to know that I could. But by the time I met You, I had answered that question conclusively to the affirmative. In fact, I had grown a bit bored. That happens pretty fast for me. When We became Us, there was quickly only one question asking, and it was asking pretty loud. It was the same one that put me on a plane to Korea. I was living a “Who”-based existence, and the only answer was You. Everything else seemed silent in comparison. For a while, I like to think, Your life was dominated by a “Who” question to which the answer was me. But by the time You got to Korea, You were asking a whole bunch of other questions, and the answers I had weren’t ones You wanted to hear, because You wanted to answer them for Yourself. For the last two years, I’ve been drowning in an earworm cacophony of “Why”. I don’t know why I’m doing what I’m doing, or why I’m going where I’m going. It doesn’t matter where I go when I’m finished here, or what happens to me, or when, or who I’m with, or how I get there. I’m living with one big question and I don’t have any answer for it. I use drugs and alcohol and sleep and sometimes (less negatively) work and study and reading and exercise, to silence, briefly, their chorus. But they are always there. If I had a better answer to this “Why”, I don’t think I’d still spend so much time lost in fabricated memories of You. I don’t think the DP would be around nearly as much. But you can’t choose which questions you ask. And you can’t choose when you finally get a satisfactory answer to them. As with many important things in life, you’ve got very little say in what happens at all. Speaking of nothing to do, I go to the gym. It is masturbatory, standing in front of a mirror, watching yourself lift weights. But it passes the time. And I feel better afterwards. And if I don’t keep doing 88 89
And the fact that we were all asking the same question made it real easy to be friends. Whatever that means.
it, it’ll be one more thing that I’ve given up on. Maybe I need to burden myself with pastimes just to see if I can follow them through. Maybe I need to keep giving myself days where I can’t stop and think about question words without answers. If I don’t look for him, I don’t see the DP. If I’m already half-asleep when my head hits the pillow, I don’t have to deal with his nattering bullshit before I drift off to the Land of Nod. The work week begins. Work and class. I get feedback on the first written assignment I’ve submitted for the semester – 20 out of 20. Odd because in Australia you don’t get 100% on written work. The teacher says class participation has nothing to do with the grade, but I know from personal experience as a teacher that it’s hard not to let it. And I am a pretty awesome student in her class. I love the fundamental attribution error when it works towards my being viewed more favorably. I am also becoming a fairly good academic writer. If you go to university when you are ‘university age’, you know there’s bullshit to be slung, but you don’t know which direction to sling it in. Fifteen years on, I know how to tell them exactly what they want to hear. For what it’s worth. One more thing that I’m good at without really trying, and will fail to follow through on to any conclusion which benefits me fully. “Heyyo!” Hoots the DP. Setting: Kitchen, mid-afternoon. I enter, Stage Right. The Hairdresser sits quietly in his white leather swivel chair in the center of the open plan kitchen area, inspecting a bottle of shampoo. He tells me that he spent $120 on some facial cleansing product in a matter-of-fact way that indicates that he just had to do so. I would say that recent events have earned him the right to splash out on himself a bit, but it doesn’t seem like this expenditure is anything new for him. I don’t think I’ve ever spent $20 on a beauty product, let alone $120, I tell him this, and he looks at me as if I’ve insulted him. Which, in a way, I have. I’ve had a few similar discussions with my wife, a ‘beauty consultant’ herself. I’m vain, but not in a way that is going to be mollified by prettying myself up with expensive products. High fashion is about the least interesting topic imaginable. Celebrities are fantastically dull. Beautiful people in general are horrendously boring because they spend all their time sprucing up the outside and so don’t have much left working on what’s within. Like putting new paint and a lovely garden in front of an empty house. The TV set in my own private hell would be stuck on the E! Channel. Also, I am reminded that he told me he didn’t have $100 to pay for a TV in his dying partner’s hospital room. Priorities are a funny thing. You don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps! Last week one of the friendly marketing guys at the school and I
began to have a conversation about the DOS and the state of affairs there. This led to me saying I’d be happy to continue the conversation, but not in the office, and to him sending me an email inviting me for coffee. So after work, he and I sit down for a few minutes to chat about the school “confidentially”, as he assures me. I tell him about the many, many ways in which the DOS is weird – the leering over the students, the female teachers who’ve quit because he made them uncomfortable, 90 the evasiveness and obscurity with not introducing me to the owners of the school or being honest about my pay.91 He tells me that he hasn’t heard any of this, that he thinks the guy is weird too, that the guy has already received warnings about his behavior and that if one more teacher quits he will be sacked along with them. He tells me he’s in charge of things, along with the Spanish guy in the office (who has told me the same thing himself). I don’t know what to think at all. He tells me he wants to increase student enrolment threefold in the next year, and I tell him, “With this guy in that position, that is never going to happen. But I’m not going to tell you what to do.” I tell him I’d like to stay in Australia when my course finishes, and he tells me they may be able to help me make that happen. When I hear things like this, for just a moment, it feels like my future is a good deal brighter than I generally imagine it could be. I leave thinking it sad that everyone thinks one person in the office is odd and miserable but no one does anything about it. I also leave thinking that I may have just done something which gets a boss I don’t like fired. Which is, in a way, pretty awesome. Lowering my head, I raise my salary. I work over an assignment while doing a pub quiz at a bar with a few of my classmates. The British Girl is there and I feel like when we are out in a group, I address her more directly, and she I, than either of us do with the others. Sometimes I feel a little bit again. It’s almost like I can remember, even if I don’t want to. It is Tuesday evening and I already have tentative plans for Friday and Saturday night, and Sunday afternoon. It is hard, even for me, not to feel good about this. 90
The California Girl wasn’t the first – she had a friend who worked there, too, and the woman I replaced, although she was pushing 70, also rolled her eyes when I asked why she was moving on. 91 A few weeks after I started, when he’d told me the 12 years of experience I had in the field “didn’t count” in Australia, I called up the Labour Board, where, after about an hour on hold (literally), they told me that overseas experience does count for up to three years. Since in Australia, your minimum wage is dependent on the amount of experience you have, I brought this information back to him, at which point he told me again that the experience wouldn’t count, at which point I told him, “Hey, I can just file a claim with the Fair Trade Board, but do I really have to go that far?” At which point he disappeared to “look online”, and then came back with something printed out and told me he “hadn’t seen” that information earlier, but that indeed, I was right. Now, this is a guy who is working casually, just like me – he stood nothing to gain from keeping costs down – it wasn’t even his money. He’s just a weirdo.
There are days when the cloud lifts, slightly, when thoughts of You are nothing more than a fine fuzzy memory, devoid of emotionality, in the way that I recall thoughts of my mother or one of the many homes in which I lived for a time. The cloud always returns. I am packing up at the end of the work day, after a successful class excursion to the Australian Centre for the Moving Image Museum. The school owner comes into my classroom to talk to me for the first time in my six weeks of employment here. She is a haggard, gray-haired Indian woman who is probably about 50 and looks every day of it, which is especially odd for someone dark-skinned. She tells me that the DOS is my immediate supervisor, and that he has “superb qualifications” and is doing “an excellent job”, though I can tell she doesn’t believe this herself even as she’s saying it. She tells me not to talk to other people about my job, because they are not my bosses. I tell her I haven’t given anyone any information that wasn’t solicited, and that I don’t know the hierarchy because no one has told me what it is. She is trying to ‘put me in my place’, but I look her right in the eye as I speak and don’t give much. She is expecting me to cower here, a bit, or to defer to her position. That is not going to happen to me, ever again, in any situation where I have not committed an actual crime. 92 I can’t tell if maybe I’m being fired, but I also don’t give a shit. I’m not. And I’m told I’ll get my pay rise. However, what is now clear is that even the people who don’t seem strange here are. I clearly need a different job. Or not. I’m remarkably sanguine about the whole thing, and as the Aussie dollar scales historic heights against its US counterpart, I know that if I don’t keep working, my time here is going to be a fair bit less comfortable. Here’s the thing about work. Regardless of how good you think you are at your job, or the level of esteem in which you feel your employer holds you, you are utterly and completely replaceable. If you decide that you do not want to do your job today, now, then tomorrow morning, there will be someone else sitting at your desk, filling your post. On the company level, you will be missed about as much as a subway seat misses a departing commuter’s ass. If you do not like the conditions of your job, keep this in mind - someone else would be very glad to do it for you, for the same conditions, or probably even lesser ones. They might not be as good at the position right away; in fact, they might never achieve the 'mastery' you feel you have attained. But it doesn't matter to the company or to its clients - they will all survive and ultimately be none the worse for it. However, at least with teaching, you can live with the hope that the students themselves might feel you are special. Sure, the next teacher will have her own games and tricks and ways to entertain and educate, 92
And even then... Ask the police of Spain and Laos. I may have a record, but at least it isn’t in English.
and the allegiance of your pupils will most likely shift like that of a cat to its newest food provider. Still, there is a chance that you'll get an email or a card of thanks, or even just that you will persist as a pleasant memory in the minds of those who were in your tutelage. That someone will say, "______, now, he was a good teacher." So that's something. The Paramedic is home. He was supposed to get out in a few days, but he was “tired of being in hospital” and he “felt like they were trying to get rid of me.” He called a cab to take him home, and didn’t even tell the Hairdresser he was coming. He looks a good deal worse than he did when I saw him on Saturday. He tells me he’s going back to work “in a week or two” and I realize that his delusion is deepseeded and complete. There is a guest speaker for the first half of our Thursday lecture this week, a British fellow who gives a fairly insipid and insignificant presentation about semantics in child-counseling situations. 93 However, he does say one interesting, albeit semi-tautological thing, regarding the subjects in his study, couples who have separated and require mediation to help in dealing with their children. “Their future is clouded by their past. The language which they use is a relic of what they have experienced.” Isn’t this true of everyone who has ever lived? Does anyone come into a new situation without bearing the weight of all that which they’ve felt before? In his most recent biannual ode to the zeitgeist, Generation A94, Douglas Coupland95 posits a future world in which there exists a new form of antidepressant, one which: ...is indicated for the short-term treatment of psychological unease grounded in obsession with thinking about the near and distant future. By severing the link between the present moment and a patient’s perceived future state, researchers have found a pronounced and significant drop in all forms of anxiety. As well, researchers have found that disengagement with “the future” has allowed many patients complaining of persistent loneliness to live active and productive single lives with no fear of anxiety. 93
The connection of which to our field is tenuous, at the absolute best. Alas, there will perpetually be a ‘now’ or a ‘near future’ for this hypergraphic author to romanticize/satirize/harpoon. Sufjan Stevens claims he will write an album for each of the 50 states; I only hope that Coupland does not live/work/aspire to do the same with the various alphanumeric “Gens” different periods may or may not lead us into. 95 And looking at the “Also by” page at the beginning of this book, I am shocked/embarrassed by both a) how much of his forgettable ouevre I have read and b) how little recollection of this reading that I have. If there is another contemporary, nonairport fictiony author whose books plot a more inverse relationship on the X:Y axis of “speed with which you can blow through an entire novel vs. what is able to be recalled of same”, I have little desire to find him/her/it. Perhaps Oprah will. 94
If all that matters is what you’re doing now, it’s a lot easier not to be worried about where you might be tomorrow. However, if said hypothetical drug were truly to have a positive impact on the reduction of anxiety, in my case, at least, it would have to do to the past what it does to the future. I have anxiety in just about every verb tense there is. Everyone has baggage, and if you don’t have baggage, that’s suspicious, too. If and when I meet new people now, I am scarred. Part of me doesn’t work anymore. Perhaps it never properly did. I suspect You don’t think of me much at all anymore. I’ve come to suspect You didn’t think much of me for most of the time We were together. But I still have reflexive automatic thoughts, without even wanting them, without even trying, and they cloud my linguistic landscape. They affect what I say, and what I feel. There is no way around this. There is no tabula rasa. My slate, instead, is like a whiteboard which has been used so much that you can’t fully erase the lines streaked across it anymore. My soul is a muddled palimpsest of remorse and angst. After class we have a few drinks because it is the weekend again. We chat about the relative superficiality of men and women. “One clear proof of the fact that women are less superficial than men is that I have had girlfriends in my life,” I tell them, and this earns a good laugh, though when I am in the presence of the British Girl now I feel at least a bit as though I’m mindful of what I say regarding my place (or non-place) in the dating world. Everything clever has already been thought; one must only try to think it again. Then I go and see the Poet. I take a tram to his house, in which three drunk aboriginals carrying beer bottles sit at the back of the train in the stairwell and make everyone uncomfortable. “Don’t be a fucking stereotype, lads,” I want to say to them, but that probably wouldn’t help much. Though Australia did its best to kill off all its indigenous peoples, just like the United States, it seems as though they are a significantly more visible presence here. You can’t ignore them, even in Melbourne, as far as you can get from the Outback without going to Tasmania 96 . It may well be easier for Melburnians to profess hypothetical support and sympathy for their case because they don’t know any aboriginals, so they feel vaguely that ‘people’ should do 96
And there’s a reason there are no aboriginals there, too.
more to help them. It’s always easier to wax sympathetic when sympathy is all you have to give. But whites here were still separating aboriginals from their parents in order to civilize them in the 70s. The 1970s. At any rate. The Poet lives in a big share house with a dog and a cat he can talk to, and a pond out back and a lot of turn-of-the century glass windows and odd nooks and crannies and strange miscellania nailed to the walls. 97 There is a special room for instruments, but they are somewhat comical instruments, like a very small piano and an old drum kit. An Australian couple sit on sofas in the living room, and a German girl sits working at a laptop out back. The remnants of a few semi-communal meals sit in frying pans on the stovetop. The Poet has changed as little as it’s possible to change in 15 years. We should, for all intents and purposes, be best friends. How many people our age are doing what we’re doing? I don’t know if it’s stranger to see how much someone has changed since last I’ve seen them or to meet someone who hasn’t changed much at all. We sit on the back patio and smoke a few joints, drink a few beers, and mull over a few topics. It might not be the same river, but the water feels pretty damn similar. Topics covered include: The difference between dogs and cats. My opinion is that cats are far less domesticated than dogs, and far more independent, too. Here’s why. You could have a bull mastiff or a German shepherd around the house and it won’t likely cause a problem for anyone. Dogs are tame unless they have no food or we train them not to be (usually by giving them no food). You leave a dog on its own in a house, and it will die. It will shit all over the place, and then it will die. You put a dog out on the street, and it will maybe (maybe) forage through some trash bins until it gets hit by a car. Cats, however, are hunters. You can leave a cat alone and it will eat mice in the corner. It will eat stuffing from a sofa. It will pull down spider webs and eat insects. It will survive. Also, housecats are small, and they are still ferocious at times. Even the most docile cat is perfectly capable of turning on you in mid-petting session. Why? It’s a wild creature, that’s why. And all cats hunt. The Poet’s cat brings in a fish from the pond on occasion, and he has to admonish it when it does because evidently they cost $20 a piece. No housecat weighs more than 10 or 15 pounds, yet they can still seem dangerous. Imagine if you had a housecat the size of a German shepherd – you know what that would be? It would be a fucking puma. It would be something you would want nowhere 97
A ukulele and a non-functioning cuckoo clock, to name two.
near you. You can’t tame big cats. Ask Siegfried and (what’s left of) Roy. The Footy. The Poet played amateur footy into his early twenties and was supposedly pretty solid on the pitch. He’s also a rabid fan, so he’s a good one to talk with about this. Here’s why I love the Footy: 1) The game is almost never over. A team can be losing by 40, even 50 points, and still come back. In team sports where scoring can be relatively high (like basketball), if you are down by 20 points at any point in the contest, the game is most likely over, because if the other team is sufficiently better enough to build that large of a lead, it means you aren’t good enough to come back. In American football, the scores aren’t that high, but if you are losing by the equivalent of 3-4 scores, there’s a 95% chance you aren’t going to recover. But in the footy 98 , there is an ebb and a flow in almost every match, except the truly uncompetitive ones. You are going to have a period where your side kicks 4-5 goals in a row without the other side doing much, and vice versa. When the ball isn’t bouncing your way, you have to weather the storm and wait until it does. In a four-quarter match, there’s a good chance you’re going to lose at least one quarter outright. The goal is not to let that quarter carry over into the next. I’ve seen bits of several matches this year while at the gym where one team was up by 30 and when I looked up at the screen again it was all tied up. It’s exciting because you don’t have to give up hope if things start out badly. 2) The heroes of the game aren’t the scorers. In most team sports that require some type of goal to be scored, 99 the stars are the scorers. In baseball, the occasional pitcher is a star, too, but for the most part it’s the guys who hit home runs. Ditto football, where it’s the quarterbacks and the wide receivers who get the glory – they put it in the end zone. In basketball, defense is important, but if you ask a fan to name the top 50 players of all time, chances are that 48 of them will have been primarily scorers, the best of whom “could play defense, too,” as though it were a bonus (Offense is defense, after all). Ice hockey? Scorers, or at least guys who get assists along with the goals. Soccer? Scorers. They don’t make videos titled “100 Great Saves” or “50 AllTime Best Passes.”100 But in the footy, the average fan (and the average announcer, too), places a lot more attention and importance on what happens in the middle of the pitch, on the guys who manage the game, who take 98
And it is the footy, though I don’t know why. i.e., all team sports. 100 Well, they do, but they are most likely holiday gifts for people who 1) play the sport and 2) can’t score. 99
marks, 101 make tackles and disposals, 102 and generally get themselves involved a lot. The Brownlow Medal, which goes to the MVP each year, almost never goes to the leading scorer. When I was here last time, Tony Lockett (“Plugger”) set the all-time record for goals scored in the league. The all-time record. But people weren’t even that excited about it. Perhaps it was because he played for Sydney, or perhaps it was because he was a dick, but really, scoring goals for the most part just involves being in the right place to take a mark close to the poles. The Poet confirms this. 3) The ball is an agent. It is oblong, but rounder than an American football, and it can, and does, bounce in entirely unpredictable ways, especially on a wet pitch. 103 Many, many times in the average match, an ostensibly well-placed kick will bounce in a random direction away from its intended recipient, in ways that can profoundly alter the course of the match. I have seen several goals kicked almost by accident – a player kicks the ball in the direction of the goal, and it takes a wonderful bounce or two and ends up going right in between the poles. Is there another sport in which even one goal can be scored by accident? Sure, soccer and hockey have the occasional own-goal, but these are due to mistakes, and the guilty parties are roundly chastised for it (and, in extreme cases, killed). But could you score a basket in the NBA by accident? Could you hit a home run by accident? If you did, it would be on all the highlight reels. In the footy, however, the ball very much has a mind of its own. In hockey, the puck is dropped directly downwards, at a faceoff. In basketball, it is thrown a few feet above the heads of the players, directly upwards. But in footy, after each goal, when play is restarted, the referee slams the ball straight down on the ground and it has a lot of leeway in which way it goes when it bounces back up. Throw-ins are done by an official blindly heaving the ball over his head. 4) It may just be to the layman, but it really seems like the whole enterprise is nothing more than 36 well-conditioned guys chasing a ball around and hoping they can make it go the right way more often than not. The pitch is humongous (175 meters long by 125 wide at some grounds) – if someone is chasing you, you can just run the other way for a long time. And when they get close to you, you can just kick it in the other direction. Sometimes it’s just a big game of dump & chase. But in all the matches I’ve watched, it certainly seems like there have been very few extended periods of play where a squad is working well and in unison, where a team kicks and handballs the ball several times in succession without incident as it marches downfield towards the goal. It seems, at times, as though even the best players in the 101 102 103
Catch a kicked ball, which earns you a free kick Get rid of the ball, preferably to a teammate Which often exists in a city where it rains a bit about five days a week, on average.
world at this sport aren’t all that good. Yes, this is a gross oversimplification, and yes, it’s hard to use finesse and make quick decisions when you can literally get hit from any angle at any time. But still. I have rarely seen a team manage a game completely, even for one entire quarter. 5) No one team dominates. At the beginning of the season, there are teams which are generally agreed to be better or worse than others, but it would not be outside the realm of possibility for virtually any team in the competition to end up on top at year’s end. There is a new squad this year and they’ve already gone and bought themselves the best player in the league – imagine that in another professional sport, unless we’re talking about an EPL team bought by an Arab oil baron or Russian oligarch. When I was here in the 90s, Adelaide won two titles in a row and the team had only been around for a decade. A few years ago a team won a title in their sixth season of existence. Strict salary caps evidently help foster equality, but it’s good for a sport when everyone at least thinks they can win. Good for football, as they say. 6) It’s a Melbourne game. The league now consists of 17 teams, but nine of them 104 are from different suburbs in this city. Until about 20 years ago, the league was called the VFL – the Victorian Football League. Even two of the teams not from Melbourne used to be. 105 The result of this is that the whole city in involved in the game, but there’s no telling who’s going to barrack 106 for which side. Some of these teams have been playing for well over 100 years, since back when different suburbs were separated by farms, fields, and open spaces. Nowadays, it’s all one big happy Melbourne, but the old loyalties still remain. I support Carlton and I also happen to live there, but that’s probably an exception. People like the footy in South Australia and in Western Australia, too, but in New South Wales, they prefer rugby, whereas here no one gives half a shit about it. 107 108 Still, though, even though it’s called Aussie Rules, it’s a Victorian game. The stepping in of rivers. If the three most important things in real 104
Carlton, Collingwood, Essendon, Melbourne, Western Bulldogs, North Melbourne, St. Kilda, Hawthorn, and Richmond, which I knew without having to google it, thank you very much. 105 Sydney were South Melbourne, and Brisbane were Fitzroy. Again, I did not have to look this up. 106 ‘root’, which in Australian vernacular means ‘fuck’, something I learned the hard way last time I was here. 107 An opinion I am happy to share, as rugby has always seemed to me little more than physics: If Body A, weighing X kilos and traveling at speed Y, collides with Body B, weighing Z kilos and traveling at speed W, what will the resultant crash cause? Probably just another goal by a Samoan. 108 Additionally, you can tell where an Australian is from by what he/she (but really just ‘he’) is referring to when using the word “footy”. In Victoria (and now probably Western Australian and South Australia as well), it means AFL. In New South Wales, it means rugby.
estate are location, location, location, perhaps the three most important things in taste, relationships, and most important life decisions, are timing, timing, timing. We talk about my old (and still) favorite chill-out album, which we shared way back when. Perhaps I only liked the album so much because I hadn’t really heard a lot of music like it at that point. Perhaps I wouldn’t have enjoyed it in the same way if I’d had more to compare it to. There are certainly some albums I’ve heard at a time when I wasn’t yet ready for them. See also: books. See also: films. See also: relationships. But you’ve only got one time to encounter something for the first time. If you aren’t ready for it, you may not realize how good (or bad) it is. You only sought me out because You were profoundly alone and I represented the life You wanted to live. And I only accepted Your offer because You were sufficiently different from anyone I had dated before so that I couldn’t compare Us to anything else. For what it’s worth. Wherever You are now, if a You met a me, you wouldn’t be all that into him. We simply aren’t each other’s type. Though I don’t know that I really have ‘a type’ anymore. We talk, too, about my love for Melbourne. I wouldn’t even say that I love Australia, though I certainly do feel positively about it. I love Melbourne. This is my Australia. If someone told me I could stay in the country, but not in this city, I’d probably just leave. When I lived here the first time, I didn’t realize how lucky I was. I thought everywhere else in the world was great, because I’d never been anywhere else outside of the US. I didn’t realize how miserable places could be (Korea) or people (Poland, at least the drunks, i.e., all men). If I had never left Melbourne in the first place, I would always have been wondering what else was out there in the world to explore. But what if someone had told me then that I’d never find a place which suited me better? I suppose I wouldn’t have listened to them. If the me of 2011 could have 30 seconds with the me of 1998 on the phone, all I would say is “Stay, stay as long as you possibly can.” And the me of 1998 would probably say, “What the fuck is this old guy talking about?” “Your story is a continuum,” I tell the Poet, “but my Australia pressed ‘pause’ in 1998.” And I’ve added five new stories, complete arcs, since I left here: Discovery (Tokyo) Adventure (Barcelona) Downfall (Poland) Rebuilding (New York) Desolation (Korea) A night spent smoking and drinking and reminiscing is just about as
good as I can imagine a night being – I take a taxi home at 2.30 in the morning and don’t worry about missing much of the next day - I don’t have to work and I’ve certainly earned it. Friday the weather is so beautiful I make a Facebook status update extolling its virtues. I don’t do much of anything all day, just sit out on campus and procrastinate around a paper I have due next week. And in the evening, I have a date. A few weeks ago I got a message on one of the dating sites I don’t really use much. 109 But a red-haired girl who didn’t look half-bad sent me a message about 10 days ago, and I responded, and surprisingly she asked if I’d like to meet up (‘surprisingly’ because any time I have wasted on online romantic endeavors in other countries usually seems to end in email buddies I never meet, at best). The Poet’s German flatmate happens to be working for a website promoting audience reviews of local theatre, and she asked me if I wanted to see a show in the Melbourne Comedy Festival for free and write a review about it. So I meet the Redhead at a bar just off Smith Street, and we have a drink before heading off to the show. Even if 1 in 6 new relationships begins online, it’s still odd to meet someone face-to-face who you’ve come upon while cyber-trolling. To her credit, she does look exactly like the picture on the website, and she seems relatively normal. –ish. She has very small features - small nose, small mouth. She’s thin, and a decent height. She has bad posture, but that can be corrected, theoretically. However, she does have some whiskers on her upper lip. Very clearly, the voice in my head tells me that there is no way I could get it up to make love to someone who looks like this. But there’s no need to run off screaming – I need someone to accompany me to the show. She’s from Perth, and works editing something I don’t really understand for some sort of governmental/public office. We agree on a lot of things and don’t roundly dispute the things which we don’t. She lived in China for a year teaching when she graduated uni. “So you’ve been pretty footloose for a long time, then?” she says, when I start to tell her of my travels. That’s one word for it. The show isn’t bad. There are 20 people in the audience and half of them are reviewers. Part of the ‘gig’ I have is doing a vox pop with three or four people outside the show afterwards, but the first guy I ask is a reviewer also and the guy he’s talking to laughs because he’s being interviewed already. I make up the vox pops from comments I overhear in the bar’s foyer after the show. The Redhead gives me a quote, too. We go to another bar, and then to an 80s/90s disco-type thing in an 109
I don’t use any of them much – I’ve long since determined that looks aren’t my strong point, so the only girls who send me messages are unattractive ones and anyone I think is good-looking enough to contact won’t respond to me.
old union hall down the street from my house. I don’t know what I feel about this girl, but it isn’t absolutely nothing. And she did make the first move by contacting me. I meet a few of her friends, and then I feel bad because I can tell my voice is giving out. I think this will be a problem for the rest of my life.110 But it’s a good excuse to break off without waiting for something to happen which I don’t really think I want. I’m never really sure of anything in these matters. It is odd to be sexually interested again, if even in the abstract. It’s been so long I don’t know what to feel. She kisses me on the cheek when I leave. She looks, perhaps just a little bit, like G_____, my second girlfriend here, albeit a poor man’s version of her. But I’m a poor man’s version of myself, so it’s only fair. “Call me, we can meet up again sometime,” I tell her, because I don’t know how else to say goodbye to someone. “You don’t have to wait for me to make the next call,” she tells me. On the short walk home, I replay this memory sound bite: Sitting on bleachers with G_____ here at a huge rave, her feet draped over my lap, her hair in silver foil bows and her smile so P.L.U.R. cute I literally could not believe she was sitting there with me. And I knew that we were going to get together, and I’d known for days, but I still had to ask “So when do I get to kiss you?” before I did. 52 days till I punch my return ticket. I wake up and write the review, sitting on a bench on the South Lawn on another beautiful morning. I try to finish up my column on 10 ‘must-see’ Australian films for the other website. I re-watch Bad Boy Bubby, the first and still most bizarre Australian film I’ve ever seen. I see the Hairdresser putting away food in the pantry and I chastise him for buying a few boxes of cookies after he’s told me the two of them are now on a health kick. “They are for guests - we’re having a dinner this week,” he says. “Sure,” I tell him, and he actually smacks me on the ass. Creepiness Factor – not nearly as high as it should be. I am now Guy Pearce in an all-ugly version of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Last night the Redhead told me I had to move out when I told her some of what was going on in the house. It is difficult to explain my living situation in a way that makes it sound acceptable. Somehow I’m tolerating things that, to an outside observer, would seem wildly unacceptable. Tolerance is a new hat for me. Not sure how well it fits. While I am cooking in the kitchen later, the Hairdresser does another flop onto the ground. The Paramedic doesn’t even get up from the sofa. “You’re living with invalids, he tells me,” from the floor. 110
Explanation below.
I feel like I’m in an outtake from a gay Alice in Wonderland.111 The Paramedic tells him he needs some cordial, some sugar, to right himself. He gets up and takes a drink. The Paramedic, a man who literally came within about 12 hours of killing himself two weeks ago due to stubborn self-neglect, tells him “it’s because you never listen to what anyone tells you”. He responds “Neither do you.” The Paramedic then says “It’s because I don’t have to.” There are so many inappropriate but entirely warranted things I could say right now that I am stunned into silence from not knowing which one to choose. I spend the evening in an internet café which – unlike uni and most wi-fi spots – has access to torrent sites. I download several episodes of The Office because I can, and because the Aussie Film Marathon is ending. Saturday evening has become rainy, so I don’t bother making plans. There’s a huge difference, though, between not making plans because you want a night off and not making plans because you hate where you are. This is one of the few things I learned during my time in Korea. I haven’t seen the DP in a few days. I hope he’s well. Perhaps it is true that we are defined not by what we possess, but by what we no longer have. Earworms. Ironic processing is the phenomenon whereby we remember things we are purposefully trying to forget. But there’s nothing ironic about how much unintentional thought space You still occupy in my psychological landscape. I run from work to the library, where I spend the waning hours of the day and the first few that follow holed up getting sources for a paper. Internet or no, I’ve already spent more time in the library by about a factor of five in the month and a half I’ve been here than what I spent there in two years last time around. It used to be unwieldy, the process of finding resources on paper. I remember doing research for Cultural Studies classes, leafing through tattered magazines with an increasing loss of hope that I would find any of the things that I needed. Many times, useful articles were simply ripped out of journals – that’s what 25 people having to write the same paper and also being uni student broke will do to you. I remember green screens and card catalogues before that. I remember microfiche and the flaky black-print negative copies I made of things I found on it after hours of tedious, eye-burning searches. Now it’s just a search engine and a few clicks. Convenient, but sterile. Perhaps that’s a good modern description of a lot of pursuits. 111
i.e., Alice in Wonderland.
I get most of the articles I need electronically and then go down to the basement to print them out. I make $12 worth of photocopies and use a machine that eats and erases the balance on my student card. At least the guy who comes to help me is friendly about it. I even check out a book, assuredly the first time I have done so anywhere in at least 6 years. The electronic check-out system doesn’t work – they have many supposed technological advances around here now, but a lot of them just don’t function properly. Maybe it’s a uni thing, because I don’t see the same problem around town. The Poet texts me re: weed, to ask if I want a whole Q or just a bit – “Get a Q – it’s going to be a long winter” my response. It figures that my first weed will arrive the first weekend I actually have work to do for uni. But it’s been so long since I’ve had my own stash that I can’t be worried about bad timing. At work, they make an honest woman of me and give me a contract. $40.87/hr, the highest rate I’ve ever earned. I’d still like a week off, though – it’s hard to be with people 5.5 hours a day, 4 days a week, even if you do like them. I have now spent more time in the same room with this current group of students than I have spent with my father in the past 10 years. WLG - Work, Library, Gym. 112 There is an order to my life here that never existed last time around. I’ve also become much more cognizant of time’s passage. I am as happy here as I could reasonably expect to be anywhere, yet I’m still counting days, now because they will (relatively) soon be an issue regarding my future plans. I have been working since the second week I’ve been here. Not only did I de-select the ‘pause’ button on Melbourne, but it feels like I stepped into a ready-made life here pretty much upon arrival. Sometimes the reminiscences of my first time here perplex me. I lived here for two years and yet there are so few places that I remember going to around town. What did I do? I had all the free time in the world, and money wasn’t an issue because I still had a guilt-free credit line with the Bank of Dad back then. Did I really just sit around and get high? Did I have lower standards for what constituted ‘excitement’ then? I know I didn’t read much, and the Internet wasn’t really a big part of anyone’s life in 1996. So again, what the fuck did I do all day? I don’t have those hours to play with now, but if I did, I’d be all over town, weed or no, weather almost notwithstanding. I just move now, all the time. There is no relaxing, even when I’m not accountable to anyone. Perhaps that’s why I smoke 113 – it forces me to slow down and smell the roses for a bit. It takes the 78 RPM back down to a more manageable 45. During class, I get a text from the Poet telling me he’s got something 112 113
The health-conscious academic’s GTL. Among many, many other reasons.
for me, and I quickly respond with a suggestion that we meet up when I’m finished. In passing, I note that I am texting to score while in class as a Master’s student. Had texting existed the first time I was here, though, surely I would have been doing the same. After class we go to Percy’s for a few drinks with the people who are interested in having them. It’s not going to be a long night, and on top of that, I’ve got an out – the paper that’s due in four days, which I still haven’t started writing. When I attempt to socialize now, I am looking for ways to politely finish the night before it even starts. The Poet meets us, and I go to his Vespa to pick up the first quarter ounce I have purchased in many years. Again, I don’t even like being high anymore. But I love getting high. And that’s the problem. I leave the pub and buy some papers in the petrol station across from it. I roll a joint in my hands on the way home because I can, and there’s no mystery about how the rest of my night is going to play out at this point. I pass a cop as I’m doing it but he is on the phone in the booth near our house and doesn’t notice me. Not that the consequences would have been all that dire if he did. I smoke for the first time alone in Australia, on the back patio. The Hairdresser is around but I really don’t have to hide it from him. I think it’s probably better I didn’t start smoking here until now – if I had been stoned at the beginning, these living arrangements may have seemed even stranger than they are. I watch some videos, pass out, wake up, and pass out again. It is the first time I have been high in a place where I truly have my own bed since some time in late 2008 in Brooklyn. An hour or so after the first J, I go out back for seconds, and then I’m just absolutely wasted in a way that you are when you haven’t spent a night alone with Maria in a while. I’ve been functioning on 6 hours sleep here, many days even eschewing my beloved siesta due to time and practicality constraints. But if you burn one before bedtime, the next day doesn’t really want to start. I get up at 9, and it feels like someone has left a damp dishrag somewhere in the back of my cranium. Alcohol hangovers hit your head like thunder claps. Weed hangovers are just a rain cloud undecided as to when it will dissipate. I do some work, I cook the lunch I was too stoned to eat last night. I get out and go to the library because I know it’s the only way I’m going to get myself moving towards productivity. For what it’s worth, I’ve developed a pretty good system for researching – it’s too bad I don’t have much desire to do it except when absolutely necessary. It looks something like this: Stage One (1 or 2 days) – gather sources, pile ‘em up, do the research, make the connections to the right articles, and go home with a ream
of paper under your arms. Stage Two (2-4 days) – read it out, bitch. Plow through the articles with a pen and a highlighter and whatever else helps – take notes on the pages, too, so you remember why you’ve highlighted what you’ve highlighted. Stage Three (1 day) – consolidate – type out all of the important things you highlighted from the notes, even long quotations. Make one document of all the good stuff. Print it out. Stage Four (a few hours, the most difficult part is forcing yourself to sit down to the task at hand) – write. If you’ve got all our notes already, it’s just cut and paste with a bit of insight thrown in for good measure. And then you revise, if need be. I haven’t reinvented the wheel here, but I know I wasn’t doing it this way as an undergrad, or even during my first master’s course. In fact, I don’t remember how I was doing it at all. But it seems to work pretty well for me now.114 Last semester I was doing this over the course of a few weeks for each class. But last semester I was teaching 12 hours a week with little need for prep time – that was a ‘full time’ job in Korea, and I didn’t have any friends, and I didn’t even like to leave the house, because by that point in my ‘Korean Adventure’, there was no reason to. Now, I’m teaching 20 hours a week, plus a good deal of preparation time, for a part-time job that is pretty much bottom-of-the barrel here. 115 I paid so much more attention to my schoolwork last semester than I’m doing now. I was so bored in Korea that I was happy to get assignments because they gave me something to do. Now I treat them like a person who sits next to you in an otherwise empty movie theatre – an unwelcome incursion into my personal space. A disruption of my flow. I go to a cabaret show in South Melbourne. An Australian woman plays the accordion nude and tells jokes. It’s free if I review it, so I take the Chilean because he was the only person who would come with me. The Butterfly Club is a magical place, a shadow box of a bar with Christmas lights hung everywhere and antique bric-a-brac lining bookshelves and spilling out artistically onto the furniture. It is so cluttered that patrons have to navigate their way through rooms, everyone moving in turn like plastic squares in one of those old sliding jigsaw puzzles where there was only ever one space free. “Hey, at least we’ll get to see some tits,” I told the Chilean in convincing him to come. I was wrong even about that. The performer does strip, but only when safely obscured by her instrument, which she never removes from her 114
I suspect I used to try to jump right from Step Two to Step Four, which makes the latter much more complicated and time-consuming. 115 Though it’s a pretty respectable barrel.
lap. Her jokes aren’t funny and her songs are even worse and she loses the crowd halfway through. The hecklers are more entertaining than she is. It is quite painful all around. According to her website, she has played to “fantastic reviews” in Adelaide and her native Brisbane. She is going to overseas comedy festivals with this act. It is atrocious. Afterwards, I don’t even want to go to a bar. We walk back across town and I smoke a joint. The Chilean takes a few puffs. Hay que hacerlo, de vez en cuando. We get an ice cream instead of a beer. The California Girl texts and calls me out to Smith Street but this is what weed does – it makes it even easier to call it a night, because you’ve got something warm and stoney waiting for you at home. Saturday I am stoned hungover and lie in bed until 11AM, the latest I’ve slept here by a good two hours. I am not going to do any work today, so I won’t even try. I go to uni with my computer and delete two hours of life riding the waves of the information superhighway, then go and sit in a park with a book, trying to will my brain back to lucidity. In the early afternoon, the Poet calls and asks if I want to go to the footy, Essendon vs. Carlton. His team vs. mine. He reckons you can get in for free after the fourth quarter starts. This sounds dubious to me but I figure he knows best. It is a splendid sunny day, and he tunes in the match on an old transistor as we near the MCG. The roar of the crowd after a goal is audible from the time we cross the bridge towards the Tennis Centre. When we get there, the third quarter is ending. The spectators collect their pass outs and stand outside, smoking. Security is not nearly the concern here it is in the US. The Poet tells me that when he was a kid, the limit on alcohol you could bring in was 24 cans per person. A slab of beer. But no more than that, Mate. The thick old tin cans were good for kids to stand on, as much of the seating wasn’t raked. Today, though, we arrive sober and empty-handed. We just want to watch. A man gives us his pass out, and we are halfway there. We make attempts to go in through a few gates, the Poet doing the talking, and making silly but sincerely-delivered excuses that his friend (me) has lost his pass out. It doesn’t work a few times, but then we find a kindly old lady who clearly doesn’t give a shit. A security guard even opens a gate for us to pass through. The safety of this place and the amiable naivety of the people still come as a shock to me sometimes. We get in 12 minutes from time. It is a close game, “a corker of a match”, in the vernacular. It is clear both teams are exhausted, but the crowd demands more from them. The two sides exchange goals, each one seeming like it will be the match’s last. In the waning moments, Carlton are ahead by a lone point, and a Bomber curls in a
behind116 from a rough angle. The match ends in a draw.117 The entire crowd moans in disgust. “When you watch a match that ends in a draw and your friend barracks for the other team, I think the proper response is to smoke a joint,” I tell the Poet. But out of decency, I do wait until we get to a park up the road from the stadium. He doesn’t smoke with me, though – he says it affects him too strongly now. You gotta smoke through that, Mate. We share dakdoridang at a Korean place on LaTrobe Street. It’s always difficult to eat the food of a country you used to live in when you don’t live there anymore. You’re more demanding. It’s impossible not to compare price and quality to the real deal. It’s the reason I don’t like tapas bars. I suppose the reason I don’t mind so much with sushi is that I didn’t really start eating it until I left Japan, so I don’t have that to compare it to. I can be cynical about virtually anything. However, despite being small and expensive, the meal is pretty tasty. And the nice thing about Korean shared food is that by its very nature, it requires you to take some time. You can’t eat dakdoridang in 5 minutes. Jimdak too. And samgyetang. Even the bulgogi places involve rounds and rounds of lazy, increasingly drunken, grilling. Funny for a culture that fancies itself as always being in a rush - they have cuisine designed for long meals. At home I smoke, and smoke. There will be no work done today. Not if weed has anything to say about it. It’s so easy, so natural, to just fall back into smoking like this. Mary Jane and I are always happy to see each other, especially if it’s been a while. I don’t even bother to call anyone. We’re staying in tonight, my green goddess and I. I can’t explain why, I just love to get high. I have now been smoking for half of my life. If, during those first times, running off into the woods in northern New Jersey, carrying a water bottle with me because the pipe hits burned my throat so much I couldn’t speak, you’d told me I’d still be doing this 18 years later, and that, moreover, this would be the only thing I did back then which I’d still be doing, I don’t know what I would have said. It’s pretty hard to imagine doing or not doing anything at all, two decades down the line. In a life largely devoid of traditions, the one I maintain involves only me and an illicit substance which makes me tired, forgetful, and lazy. But it’s all mine. Three days off is a long time from the gym. Everything is harder than 116
Worth one point, as opposed to a goal, which is to say, really not worth anything at all. Which is unusual because it only happens once or twice a in a normal season, on average. 117
it should be when I return. I suppose quitting is not an option, but I have a feeling that the plot-point diagram charting the relation of ‘Weed Smoking’ vs. ‘Trips to the Gym’ would resemble a large ‘X’, fitting for a depiction of what a waste I will become if I revert to full stoner form. After a certain period of being single, pretty much, you’re a virgin again. I understand “born again virginity” now, at least in theory. It’s not about not having any game. It’s about no longer even recognizing the playing field. Last weekend I had a date, and it wasn’t a bad date. She wasn’t unattractive, I guess. She was “good enough”, really. She told me to call her, and Australians don’t do that unless they sort of mean it. So I don’t do anything about it. Really. I texted her late on Thursday night for a thing on Friday I knew she wouldn’t be able to go to. This is what constitutes, in my world, “making an effort”. Friday night I got into a texting conversation with the South African girl that lasted until 2AM. Then I just let it stop. I was tired. I wanted to go to bed. Game over. No ‘game’ to begin with, really. It’s hard even to imagine wanting someone anymore. And with the weed, solitude is even more desirable than before. The beautiful thing about my love/hate relationship with Mary Jane is that she doesn’t judge. She doesn’t require much, except that I turn off the phone and take it easy for a while when I’m with her. And she’s always glad to see me. What more could you ask for? “Are you one of those guys who doesn’t hook up much?” asked a 26year old from Mississippi with whom I shared a bed roughly one year ago now. It was a declarative phrased in the form of a question. She had celestial, pendular breasts, but was about 12-15 lbs. too heavy for me ever to have hopes of getting it up for. We fooled around on the night that the US drew with England in the World Cup, and in a way, a draw was a perfect analogy for what it felt to spend the night with her. She was smart enough and chatty enough and emotionally flawed enough for me to take an interest in, and after our one night of connubial play she made it clear via SMS/social media that she wanted to see me again for a repeat of same, but I felt, unsurprisingly, nothing, without even being able to give a reason. On the night the US lost a match it really shouldn’t have to a Ghanaian squad whose athleticism and continental pride we could not match, she and I ended up in the same bar and, being drunk and World Cup-focused and incapable of handling things like a mature middle-aged man, I just completely avoided her. Then I got on a plane to Cambodia two days later and, of course, proceded to fantasize for months, intermittently, about her in the abstract because it was far
easier to imagine her sans the extra poundage than to deal with her in reality avec same.118 Here’s a horrible feeling. When you want to be with someone, and you know this, with all of your heart, with as much conviction as you could reasonably expect to know anything, that you are “All In”, in the parlance, and that person, she tells you that she does not feel the same way. That person tells you that you are not her Arequipa. There isn’t much that feels bad like that feels bad. Here’s another. When you, as a man, want to make love to a woman, and that woman, she wants to make love to you, and, for whatever reason, be it psychological, sociological, physical, emotional, irrational, you, you – just – can’t. And she tells you it’s ok, and you want to believe that it’s, but you don’t. There isn’t much that feels bad like that feels bad. But here’s the thing. What if, in making one very simple choice, you could preclude yourself from having either of these feelings, ever again. You’d jump at the chance, wouldn’t you? Well, there is such an choice, and here it is – just stop trying to have physical relations. Countless singers, writers, poets, bards haved riffed since time immemorial on some variation of the theme “after she broke my heart, I never loved anyone again.” But for the most part, they are singing/writing/saying this metaphorically. They make the claim, but they don’t follow through on it. Because they do love again. They do get back on the horse. But me? I’m thinking now, what if it isn’t a metaphor? How would that be? It’s ironic that in a life littered with aborted dreams and unfinished stories, my newfound abstinence is the one thing I’m seeing through. And really, if any other pursuit had ended in failure/embarrassment/unfulfillment as much as sex has, for me, I would have given it up a long time ago. No one ever accused me of perseverance. The university campus has a reading room in which the Muzak is gently-played ambient tonality, a la Brian Eno. I sit in it and write the entire of my paper in four hours. Again, I realize I’m good at academic writing. I’m good at synthesizing information. I wish I wanted to do a PhD. I could spend the next three years doing this, and getting paid for it, at that. But it would feel completely forced. It’s hard to imagine moving purposefully in any direction anymore. I smoke a joint walking across campus when I’m done, then sit out 118
I saw her again shortly before she left Korea last November. She had lost weight. It is interesting, and by ‘interesting’, I mean, ‘pathetic’, that women only are only attracted to me when they are at their worst, emotionally and/or physically. See also: everyone.
and use my computer on the steps by the South Lawn. This is the first time I’ve been stoned on this campus in 13 years. The last time I was stoned on this lawn, it was shortly before I left Melbourne. I was walking across it one night, going home from yet another goodbye with a person I knew I’d never see again. I lit and smoked a joint and when it was finished, I stopped walking and sat down on the lawn and started to cry. It was, I think, the first time I cried regarding my departure, and it is my most enduring memory of the Melbourne University campus, above all others, because at that time I still wasn’t used to crying over much. When the period of serious grieving for Mom ended about a year after her death, more or less I stopped crying. There were a few times I did, to be sure. But it was as if the daily tantrums I enacted as a child combined with the grief from the death of a parent had worn out my tear ducts. Like they’d been equipped with a finite amount of sorrow to expunge, and had found it exhausted only 14 years in. So I stopped. Like so many other things. I just stopped. No crying tonight, though. Just a few downloaded podcasts and a bit of back-patting for the completion of my first paper of the semester. Back at home I tell the Boys that I always smoke a joint when I finish a paper, and then go outside and do just that. Never too late to start a tradition. And I’m sure I did it the first time around, here. Though I was never far from a high then. A Korean student in my class says he’s going to move to Brisbane to pick fruit. They pay $1000 a week for 9 hours’ work a day. That’s roughly 5 million won a month. For what, in Korea, wouldn’t even be a full work week. Picking fruit. “Maybe I’ll join you”, I tell him. It doesn’t matter how many places I’ve lived in, how many places I’ve visited. I’m still envious of people in their early twenties. Because they have time to play with. They have time to throw away. The Global Village has done almost nothing it claimed it would do. There has been no redistribution of economic and cultural wealth. Economically, the Third World has become poorer, particularly the bottom half. In some of those Third World countries, a wealthy upper middle class has emerged or has become more wealthy. And in the industrialized world, the shift in wealth upward has been accelerating just as rapidly, if less visibly. The working classes of the industrialized world, bemused by vast increases in their disposable income, do not seem to have noticed the quantities of consumer items that have come to be classified as necessities and have become indispensible to full citizenship.
To be saved is to want only what one has. The Paramedic is back on the bottle. I hear the Boys arguing down the hall and up the stairs, though behind my closed door it’s difficult to make out most of the words. I hear “If you want to kill yourself”, and “You’re a fucking idiot” (the Hairdresser) and lots of poncy, fingers-inears grousing (the Paramedic). I am not really surprised. Yesterday he came into my room and asked if he could have a cigarette. I told him I only had rolling tobacco, but that he was free to roll himself one. Of course he didn’t know how to do it. “Well I’m not going to do it for you, mate,” I told him. Then I took out the tobacco and the papers and tried to give him a lesson. He put a lump in the middle of the paper and went to ball it up like he was disposing of a used piece of gum. Now, even if you had never rolled a cigarette before, how could you think that “rolling” means fashioning something into a shape that doesn’t resemble a cigarette? My disdain very thinly veiled, I corrected him and he ended up with something that at least looked like it might light. Then he left my room, thanking me profusely. But the alcohol is something else. I suppose some people really don’t have a desire to live. How else can you explain drinking 10 days after you were discharged from the hospital where you spent two weeks in intensive care because you drank too much? I feel bad for the Hairdresser, because he thinks things are going to change. But I also find myself having less and less desire to associate with the two of them because it’s hard not to say what I’m thinking. I’m funny that way. What I’m thinking is this: “The two of you are both fucking idiots, one for willfully killing himself and refusing to realize that’s what he’s doing, and the other for sticking around and fooling himself into thinking his partner has a capacity or a desire to change.” So I keep the door closed, and smoke my nighttime joints after they’ve gone to bed. The more detached I am, the easier things are. Though I could say that about virtually everything. Easter is coming. Travel plans have been discussed, then abandoned. It’s quite difficult to organize a group of people to do anything. Generally, for me, anything over 1 seems problematic. He travels the fastest who travels alone. We rekindle the hopes of doing something at our Tuesday night pub quiz, but two people only want to go away for one night, no one besides me is willing to drive, and there are neither cars nor hostel beds available for the long weekend when I enquire about them anyway, because we’ve waited too long. Fuck it. It’ll be good just to have 5 days off of work in a row. I’ve got weed, too. So there’s that.
Setting: Kitchen, mid-afternoon. I enter, Stage Right. The Paramedic sits quietly in the white leather swivel chair in the center of the open plan kitchen area, leafing through a brochure. He tells me that they are going to have a house built somewhere down south, and that they’ll live there when it’s finished in 18 months. “But what will you do?” I ask. “Live off the super 119 ,” he says, “we’ll be retired.” His family is buying out his share of a farm (not the farm, mind you, a farm) and he’s going to use that money to do it. He also has two houses in the Mornington Peninsula, which he assures me are always rented. Now I see why the Hairdresser stays with him. He’s rich. Love is quite secondary in most relationships. It’s almost a bonus. But I do have a question. Doesn’t the Hairdresser want to retire in Thailand? I ask now, because I know that’s what he’s told me. The Paramedic scuttles this with his characteristic, “devil may care” dismissiveness. They will retire in rural Victoria, because that’s what he wants. I don’t press the issue. I ask if he’s even going to visit Thailand, as the Hairdresser wants to do for his sixtieth birthday later this year. He says maybe they’ll go “for two weeks”. I would take a bet at any odds that he will never set foot in a Third World nation. Too many brown people. Pretty much, he’s told me this himself, many times over. How is it worth maintaining a relationship when both parties have entirely different views as to where they want to be? If one person wants to retire in-country and the other wants to live abroad, then one person is going to end up disappointed. One person is going to end up living a life that they wouldn’t have chosen had they not had to take their partner’s desires into consideration. How can anyone be ok with that? Before leaving New York to come here, the female half of a couple I know told me, “You have to com-pro-mise” if you want to be in a relationship. But I just can’t. Even about the little things. And if I force myself to, I’ll eventually end up remorseful towards the person who made me do it. I’ll eventually end up right back where I started. Alone. Perhaps We had different goals. No, no “perhaps”. You hadn’t been anywhere before, so You didn’t realize how unexciting life in Korea was. In contrast, I had been to so many places that I couldn’t help making unfair comparisons with places which were better. I couldn’t help not being able to hide my extreme distaste. But as soon as you became an expatriate, You didn’t really want to be 119
Superannuation, i.e., social security which, like in most First World countries not named America, provides you with a pretty decent life, because the government/your employer match 9% of your salary over the course of your career.
with me anyway. You wanted to live in Europe, and have a European life and a European lover. You wanted to reinvent yourself in a way that You couldn’t do if I was still around. In a way I’ve done time and time again, and now do every few years as a matter of course. I taught You how to teach. I wrote You a recommendation letter. I helped You get out of the country. But after that, there wasn’t much more I could do for You. I get it. Goddamned earworms. You are probably now with someone else, but the You he knows is not the You I knew. You probably behave differently with him, in the relationship, in the bedroom. You probably have different habits, and You’ve probably woven for him, for yourself, a different tapestry of stories, which You’ve presented as the Version ?.0 of You. And yes, the things You kept from me were manifold, and significant, and they made me feel like no one should ever truly believe what anyone else ever tells them. But to be fair, You were just doing what people do, which is revealing what suits them and hiding what doesn’t. Managing the front region, keeping it clear from the back one. Every relationship is sui generis. People are like rivers, in this respect. And if I ever do see You again, and I don’t know why or how that would happen, I’ll only see the You that I saw before, and You’ll only see the me that You saw before. I suppose it is possible that one day we will meet again and it will feel as if nothing had ever happened between us. This seems unimaginable, but the fact is that it happens all the time. It is small wonder that so few erstwhile lovers maintain contact depuis le deluge. When each person reminds the other of something s/he isn’t, what’s the point? Though I, as You mentioned more than once, in the Chris Rockean sense, don’t really have ‘a representative’. Easter. “Would Judas be in hell?” an Easter article on cnn.com questions. The author, a Christian ‘scholar’, is unsure. “The facts are the facts,” he says as a means of explaining that Judas betrayed Jesus for 30 gold coins. Which seems akin to saying “facts are facts” in recounting the proceedings of a Quidditch match between Hogwarts and Voldemoort. There is a knock on my door in the morning. It is the Paramedic with a chocolate bunny and a card. It makes me feel worse when someone does something good for me.
What does that say about me? In the end, I do get out of the city. The Chilean and I take a train to a bus to the Mornington Peninsula, where we stay in the house of a girl he knows from last year’s Masters’ group. There’s another girl out there, too, a Canadian who graduated last semester as well. I met both of them once before. I debate leaving a note for the Boys, and then I don’t, and I don’t know why. Sometimes I know the minimally decent thing to do but choose not to do it anyway. I can’t explain why except that it is a means of exercising my autonomy. Like a recalcitrant teen. The train ride is long, and the bus ride is longer. It’s good to be out of the city, but I am also aware of the fact that Melbourne is so unbad that it’s easy not to get tired of it at all. I’ve been here two months. I don’t know how to apprehend two months psychologically anymore, but it alternatively does and doesn’t seem like a long time. I felt like I was at home five days after I got here. This city does that. This may not be my Arequipa, but if it had to be... We meet the girls in Sorrento, and after getting off the bus and walking down the main drag for a few minutes, I realize that I came here with my second Ex- 14 years ago. I think I even see the bed and breakfast where we stayed, where I think I had what, at that time, was the best sex of my life. But the veracity of memories like this is always dubious. We have a coffee and then head down to the beach to watch the sunset. 99% of Australia’s coastline is breathtaking – I remember this from the last time around as well. It gets to the point where you almost take it for granted. There’s no Jersey Shore here. Conversation comes easy and we don’t disagree on too much. The Australian girl, whose house we’re staying in, has a serious arthritic condition and walks with a noticeable limp. I find out that she’s had it since she was 15. It caused her to miss class time last year. She spent a while in hospital a few months ago. But she seems quite ok with it. The worse your problems are, the better you handle them. Reality, Perception – you two work things out now, ok? As darkness falls, the temperature drops and we do our shopping and head back to her house, a quaint cottage with trinket-lined shelves and so many random items lying around that it feels like an ethnographic museum. There’s so much to look at that it’s hard to know where to start. It’s how I would have decorated a house if I’d been given a house to decorate when I was 7. “This must be impossible to dust,” I say.
I can always find a negative angle on things. The dinner preparations are long, wine-soaked, and enjoyable. The Chilean makes a tortilla de patatas and by the time we sit down to eat it we are already halfway drunk. The Canadian girl talks a lot of her time in Vietnam, and mentions, en pasant, a few guys she used as ‘Goodbye Shags’ before she left. I wonder who Your Goodbye Shags were. I probably knew some of them. Why does this still cause a small knot to form in my stomach, briefly, 566 days after You and I became no longer You and I? Why does it still matter? Feelings don’t need reasons. One more reason I don’t like them. Retroactive anxiety. The night is comfortable, so the last thing I need is to go outside and smoke my second joint of the night, and when I do, the red wine hits me so hard I that am falling asleep in the middle of our drinking games. I want to apologize but somehow now I am sitting on the only sofa in the room and it is comfortable enough that nodding off is no longer a choice but an inevitability. I slip in and out of consciousness, fighting it, and I’m relaxed enough around these people not to care too much, but I still feel a bit bad because I’m the only one who’s smoked and the only one who is now catatonic. In any social night now, though, there now comes a point when all I want is to be alone. The presence of weed just gets me to that point even faster. Unfortunately, when staying in the house of another, you can’t just make yourself invisible and evanesce into the safe confines of sleep. At some time around 2AM, I am half-awake again but the others are now tired enough and we all go to bed. Monday morning I am in a gruff mood and I don’t know why. I should be apologetic for having crashed out early but I still feel high and detached and so don’t attempt to address my early exit from last night’s conversation. It is a beautiful day. Yesterday, when we were by the beach, I saw a map outlining a trail which heads all the way out to the tip of the peninsula. It’s been so long since I’ve hiked that I really want to do it, and the Chilean seems ok with it as well. However, the Australian really can’t walk far and the Canadian wants to stay with her. I really want to see the coast. I try to angle for the Chilean to come with me, but he’s too nice to disregard the person who’s just put us up for the night. I don’t know when I’ll be back out here, and even if I am back out here, I don’t know that I’ll have a day this beautiful, so I want to press the issue. I honestly don’t care if I just take a bus out there by myself and get back to the city alone. Is that wrong? I don’t really know two of these people. Do we have to spend the day together? Does it make me evil if
I just say “Hey, thanks for the bed, but I’ll be on my way now?” Probably. My ultimate inflexibility in making travel plans stems from the fact that 95% of my voyages have either been alone or with people I’ve met along the way (and who, in joining up, end up having the same goals as I do). I am fundamentally incapable of mentally altering a travel plan once I’ve made it. You experienced this in Argentina, quite possibly my least favorite overseas trip because I felt like I had to look out for You. I’m not very good at taking into account the needs of another when they don’t align with my own. And on the road it feels like everybody else is just a liability. He walks fastest who walks alone, especially if he doesn’t turn around to look and see if anyone’s keeping up with him. In Argentina, it seemed like everyone wanted to cheat Us, so I had to look out for two. Which didn’t stop a cab driver from changing Us fake money. Or the people in a guest house a few days later from stealing it from my closed backpack. Which actually, come to think of it, is kind of funny. Though they probably just passed it on to more unsuspecting tourists. I begin to realize I am not going to get my way. Instead, we do a walk along the beach, which the Australian can manage, a plan which even I realize I have to acquiesce to – after all, I did pass out last night and I am a guest here. The beach walk is a good opportunity for sunbathing and philosophizing. The Chilean is a good kid, and in many ways he seems a lot like me. Too much for his own good, really. His father died when he was young, he’s an atheist working in the field of ESL. He’s six years younger than I am but I think he’s got the same hang-ups about love as I do. Correction – no one has the same hang-ups about love as I do. But he isn’t good with girls. We share that. Without even intending to, I end up veering into my favorite internal monologue topic of discussion. No, not You. That would just be odd. We talk about the utter pointlessness of existence. When I say “I have no goals”, I think it’s easy to misconstrue this as an exaggeration. When I say “I have no dreams” it’s tempting to view this as hyperbole. But I really have no dreams. If asked to describe my dream situation, my Best of All Possible Worlds, I would have no answer, at least not one constrained by the parameters of the physically possible. Conversely, perhaps I would have many answers, and I would want
time to experience them all. As a child, I read every possible ending in Choose Your Own Adventure books, just to compare. There is no one thing, no one place, no one job, no one person, that would keep me content indefinitely. Anything I had, I would want something else. Anything I had, I would be wondering if I would be happier having things another way. It’s like playing blackjack, but you can’t hold, and you can’t see your cards. So you just have to keep hitting until you most likely bust. There’s a small chance I’ll end up right on 21, but I don’t really like the odds. No god, no love, no family ties, no desire to acquire. No art. What else is there? I don’t know what I expect people to say when I open up and tell them things like this. I see the DP swimming out in the ocean about 30 meters from the shore. He is doing a lazy backstroke, rolling up and down with the tides. I pretend not to notice him, but he catches me staring out in his directions and quickly darts below the water, surfacing a few seconds later and spraying water out of his mouth in an arc that resembles the explosion from a whale’s blowhole. An insanely beautiful day at the beach, and he’s still there. I’m only surprised that this still surprises me. We catch a bus, then a train, back to the city. Tentatively, plans are made for a hiking trip next weekend. The Canadian girl was going to stay in Australia for another six months after finishing the MA course, but she made a mistake with her visa and now she has to go home. She doesn’t seem to mind too much, though I don’t know how she can’t. If you’re the sort of person who isn’t bothered by the small stuff, it’s remarkable how many things seem like small stuff. It is in no man’s power to have whatever he wants, but he has it in his power not to wish for what he hasn’t got, and cheerfully make the most of the things that do come his way. Reality is 90% what you make of it. Or variations thereof. My favorite earworm. From the train station I head to Chinatown for some dumplings and then to campus to do a bit of work. Instinctively I reach into my backpack for my rolling apparatus as I am exiting the CBD. I get the dizzy head rush the first toke of the day gives me even before I light the joint. Life is a placebo efffect. My second favorite.
I do some work for my college back in NY and then call my father. He says he may come to visit. I tell him that’s a good idea, and I don’t mind when he does so. I tell him I may do some travelling when the course finishes, buy a car and drive it across the country. Or not. It’s a thought I’ve been entertaining frequently of late. He and his wife haven’t done much to celebrate the Easter holiday, though I didn’t, either. I am standing on the South Lawn of campus with a rolled joint in my fingers and I’m playing with it and the small Bic lighter in my palm. This is what life is now, again. I work, I drink a bit, I watch DVDs, I spend time on campus using the internet. And now I get high when the sun goes down and everything just feels normal. There is nothing in my life which resembles a ceremony or a ritual. Religion and religious institutions hold no meaning. Family and family institutions hold little meaning. Friendships are fluid and transitory. No ritual, no ceremony, no ties. I have strong views and strong opinions but often they are based on tenuous foundations. I engage in discourse but I am always speaking more than I am listening. I want to meet people who have a little fight in them but ultimately agree with what I’m saying. I don’t really feel the need to change much of what I feel anymore. Nothing is objectively important. Yesterday on the beach we talked about the pointlessness of activism. All activism, in general. Why should one issue be more important to you than any other? And if you dedicate yourself to one, aren’t you cutting off the possibility of expending time and effort on others? This is the way I feel about relationships. See also: countries of residence. See also: jobs. See also: friends. No ritual, no ceremony, no ties. And there never have been. I watch the Super Bowl every year. I guess that’s a ritual, but it doesn’t involve anyone, necessarily. 120 Growing up, I played video games regularly, joined teams I didn’t want to regularly, and got my parents to buy me toys I didn’t really need regularly. The family used to go on vacations a few times a year, and we had the Holy Trinity of reform Christian holidays – Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas – at my grandparents’ house. We’d go to the beach house every summer.121 But there is nothing now which ties me to any family members at all, even in a loose sense. My father and I have never – never – done anything more than a few times. We went to ballgames sporadically. I assume we played catch. But I can’t give him a book I like, because he won’t read it. If he sends me a CD he likes, half the time I never get around to listening to it. Ditto mutual movie recommendations. We 120
Though I’ve now seen the game in seven countries and six different time zones, which is somewhat cool. 121 Perhaps 80% of my joy in watching Jersey Shore is nostalgia for the images that I recognize – though the storylines are often riveting.
are very much the same, but we don’t really like the same things. We have a lot in common, but we share nothing. And he is, by far, my closest relative. I like to say I write, but I don’t really do it. It would be more correct to say that I enjoy saying “writing” when someone asks me what my interests are. When I wanted to be a DJ in my early twenties, I never did anything that would help to make that dream come to fruition. See also: sketch comedy. See also: theatre. See also: journalism. Even with You, my ‘dedication’ curiosity than genuine emotion – feeling for a person. Then You made sure my effort determined the final result of the
was more a matter of experimental I wanted to see if I could sustain a to that ends wasn’t the one which study.
Now my life is spent engrossed in screen time and electronic nihilism. I walk aimlessly about town in my free time. I travel aimlessly around the world. I read, quickly and often without comprehending. That’s about it. None of these pursuits means anything, and I prefer to do all of them alone. In fact, the only thing that has been with me for my entire adult life, the only thing which I revere, even in its absence, the only thing which I consistently point to as being necessary for my overall wellbeing, is weed.122 Since 12 days ago when the Poet gave me a quarter ounce, I have been living a stoned Melbourne existence again. I’ve smoked on the streets in the CBD, on the patio behind my house, on the verdant lawns of the Carlton Gardens, and all over campus. Usually, I’ve restricted myself to partaking at night. I’ve still been going to the gym, though a bit less. I’ve still been going to work. Sleeping hours have shifted in strange, but predictable ways – the smoke sometimes makes me stay up late, and makes the morning alarm a more unwelcome intrusion. But it doesn’t have to control me. It doesn’t have to change me for the worse. I can function on 5 hours’ sleep. I can go to all my classes and work and still get high every day. I can do these things if I insist to myself that I do them. And so far that’s what I’ve been doing. Procuring, holding, preparing, smoking, and enjoying weed is the only thing that I know, without qualification, that I enjoy. I know it isn’t good for me. But I love it. I don’t even want to smoke with anyone – I just want that nighttime ritual on its own. Just me and the spliff and the silence and the comfort that comes when I’ve got what I need in a place where no one is going to care about my having it. I suppose, if pressed, this would be my dream – a job with 2-3 122
Although, of course, it isn’t.
months vacation each year in a place where I’m at least mildly interested in the culture and the way of life and where I can smoke with relative impunity. There you go. That’s it. It’s amazing how little you need when you realize you don’t want anything. But it’s tough to put that on a CV, or express it in an interview. And if that’s the loftiest dream I have come up with 33 days before the completion of my Third Life Cycle, then almost it’s not worth sharing with anyone. Frankly, it’s a bit embarrassing. In the largely forgettable film Click, the lead character, played by Adam Sandler, comes into possession of a remote control which operates the world around him. He can rewind, pause, or fast forward through parts he doesn’t like to get to the ones he does. In the process, though, he finds that while he’s fast-forwarding through a part, to the outside world he seems like a non-responsive blob. He subsists, but he doesn’t really participate in the proceedings. That’s somewhat the way that weed makes me feel. I know I’m less exciting, and less excited. I know I’m less involved and less concerned. I know I am definitely not “being all that I can be”. But – I don’t care. What am I supposed to be? What am I going to do anyway? I only need a few friends to feel fulfilled. I’m not chasing love. I’m not climbing a career ladder. I’m not extending myself anyway, or in any way. So why not be high? “If you’re happy where you are, you don’t have to do anything,” I said to my father last night on the phone. There’s nothing much to report on my time here. I’m stoned, so I’m not sad, or at least, if I am sad, I’m not aware of it. The DP is cancer and marijuana is the chemo. And, like chemo, it kills some of the good cells, too. But it’s worth the trade-off. Because the alternative isn’t attractive, either. I work hard to avoid working hard. I care a lot about not seeming to care a lot. Nothing about my situation is all that special. I stopped making that claim of my existential angst a while back. If these sentiments were in any way unique, then it wouldn’t be so easy to find scripts and texts everywhere I look which sum them up so succinctly for me. Even my profoundest pains aren’t special. Nowadays, there’s so much media product out there that, with little searching, you can find something that analogizes whatever situation you find yourself in frighteningly well.
You can’t even write the definitive story of you. Nowadays, most people don’t care which way you go. They only care if you don’t go any way at all. In the US, Christians accept Jews, Muslims accept Hindus, Mormons accept Buddhists, more or less. But an atheist raises everyone’s eyebrows, because it’s like saying “I understand the rules of your game, but I don’t believe that it needs to be played”. The missionaries visited a chief who was very wise. The chief, a quiet, fat man, listend without blinking to the religious propaganda that they had read to him in his own language. When they finished, the missionaries awaited a reaction. “That scratches. It scratches hard and it scratches very well.” And then he added: “But it scratches where there isn’t any itch.” The analogy holds for sexuality as well. True, there are many people who have a problem with homosexuality. But I would have to say that, to all but the most zealously misinformed fundamentalists, homosexuality is more understandable than what I’ve become, which is no sexuality at all. Everybody can understand the need to have someone. But not many people can understand not needing anyone at all. And I have You to thank for that. Among others. 3 of the last 4 women I’ve been with, I don’t even know their names. I didn’t even know their names at the time of having sex with them. In Phnom Penh last summer, I had sex with two different girls on consecutive nights. But even in doing it, I realized that it was only so that when I got back to Korea, I’d have a story to tell. Looking back, I probably didn’t even have to go through with it to talk as though I had. Maybe I didn’t. You tell a story long enough, it isn’t a story anymore. Being with someone now would require a monumental realignment of my priorities and my world view. And who’s really worth that? Sex and money – both seem a lot more important when you haven’t got them. If you have sex frequently, it becomes less of a commodity. Its lack, however, fosters an unhealthy view of its significance. If you know you can go out and realistically find someone to be with on a semi-regular basis, then it’s not a big deal. For the average single person, life is a
series of relationships, without much space in between.123 But I’ve been with one person in the last 6.5 years. This is a fundamental difference between men and women. A woman, even a marginally attractive one, can go out and have sex right now. If you are a woman, you have to realize this – if you wanted to have sex tonight, it could happen if you made even the most minimal of efforts to that ends. It may not be good sex, or meaningful sex. But if a woman goes to a bar, a club, or even a shop, and acts mildly flirtatious, she can end up in bed with someone literally within minutes. An average-looking guy, on the other hand, probably has to work a bit harder. An average-looking guy has to have the confidence to approach a woman, and the knowledge of what to say. An averagelooking guy has to know how to handle rejection and not let that bother him. For an average-looking guy, picking up is like hitting a baseball – even the best players in the world still swing and miss 70% of the time. For an average looking woman, picking up is like shooting a free throw – the worst player in the league sinks two out of three. For an average-looking guy, it is very easy not to find that girl who will be willing to help you break a dry spell. Most likely, she isn’t going to come looking for you. There are many advantages to being a man. This is not one of them. When I was 20 and a sophomore in college, I remember taking mushrooms and panicking as the trip went bad. I sat listening to trance music in my dorm room. 124 I remember arriving at a point where I felt as though I was at the edge of a precipice, looking downwards into a great blackness, trying to find meaning in its depths. And I got stuck on this horrible nihilistic earworm: “What does anything mean about anything, about anything about anything at all?” Nothing made sense. It was the first time I had consciously felt that. Even when my mother had died six years previously, I hadn’t felt so lost. The trip ran its course and there were good ones that followed after it, but I never forgot how I felt for that brief moment. 16 years later, I would only amend that mantra semantically: “Nothing means anything at all. Nothing about nothing about nothing means anything at all.” I think I realized early on, even if subconsciously, that chasing money was never going to make me feel right. I think I knew from the beginning that was a game I could never hope to win. And now when I see ostentatious displays of wealth and luxury, I just laugh at them. It doesn’t matter that I can’t have fancy sports cars – I don’t want them. It doesn’t matter that I can’t have beach houses – if I had one, I’d get bored of it and want one somewhere else. Jewelry, designer clothes, baubles – it’s not even sour grapes. I’ve just become a person 123 124
And sometimes probably none at all... Which, in and of itself, would be enough to give me a bad trip now, psylicibin or no.
who doesn’t desire these things or feel a lack by not having them. Periodically dad will advise me to get a credit card. “It’s good to build credit,” he’ll tell me. He even forwards articles to me on the topic. “But why do I need credit if I don’t want to buy things and I’m not in debt?” I ask him. “Well, maybe you don’t want to now, but you never know,” he will say. But I do know. It’s not changing. Life is halfway over, if not more. I will be renting rooms from here on out, just as I always have. If someone dies and wills me a house, I will sell it and rent one somewhere else. Your possessions end up possessing you. I learned very early and painfully that you have to decide at the outset whether you are trying to make money or make sense. I remember a reunion with an ex- in Barcelona after we hadn’t seen each other for two years. When we met, she was in Spain having fun for a year; I had stuck around and made that ‘fun’ my mission statement. She told me she wanted to buy a house, because then she would be ‘free’. How is commitment freedom? Perhaps when I finally am no longer able to move, then I’ll stop. But by that point I don’t expect to have much more in the bank than I do now. 31 days till I Can’t Believe It’s Halfway Over. Perhaps, when it ends, this is how you are judged: There is a Tally Sheet upon which all your deeds are recorded. And when things end on earth, you go to some Divine Accountant and he balances the books for you. And all the times you’ve lied, or cheated, or been spiteful, or pretended that you were sleeping so you wouldn’t have to give up your subway seat to an old woman, those go into the ‘negative’ column. And all the times you’ve been honest, and fair, and done something to help someone out, and been a good citizen, those go in with the positives. And when the calculations are done, if you’re in the black, everything’s ok. But if you’re in the red, well, too bad for you. Perhaps, when it ends, this is how you are judged: If you have ever, even once in your life, done one completely selfless act, then that’s enough. It doesn’t matter how evil or how miserable you’ve been over the years, but if you are decent enough to have displayed even one shred of genuine humanity, then whatever eternal rewards exist are bestowed upon you. Perhaps, when it ends, this is how you are judged: You confront the person who you have treated worse than any other during your time on earth. You confront them, and they know
everything that you have done to them. And they are not angry with you, nor do they recount for you all the ways in which you wronged them, because you know, and they know you know. We never forget the worst parts. And you have to explain yourself. That’s all. You don’t have to justify your actions, though you can try. You just have to explain what was going through your mind when you did what you did. You have to talk, honestly, about how you felt afterwards, about whether or not you felt remorse. And you can’t lie because they’ll know. And you can’t hide anything, because they’ll know. And when you are done speaking, then they are the ones who decide where you’ll end up, and you cannot appeal their decision. Perhaps, when it ends, this is how you are judged: You are shown a replay of your lifetime, but an alternate version of it – one in which you didn’t exist, a lá A Christmas Carol. You see your family, your lovers, your friends, your coworkers. You see every life you affected as it would have passed had you not been there to affect it in the first place. And when this viewing is over, you get to hear from all of the people in the production. Since both you and they know how things did turn out with you in the world, there’s no need to recapitulate those arguments. Rather, one by one, they talk about the two versions of their life that have now been presented, the With-You life and the Without-You life. And together, you decide which one would have been better. The choice should be clear to both parties, even if it may be painful for you to accept. In the end, if more people feel they would have been better off without you, then Down you go. Would my life have been better without You? I would not have gone to Korea. I would not have ended up in Australia. I would probably have less money, but I also might not care. I quite possibly would either be 1) a full-fledged New Yorker or 2) somewhere else that I can’t even imagine. But I wouldn’t have so little faith in humanity. I wouldn’t have lost the sense of trust at its deepest level. I wouldn’t have spent thousands upon thousands of hours drowning in semantic satiation, with ringing earworms rehashing the same conversations, the same proclamations, the same obfuscations, again and again and again and again to the point of sheer absurdity. Nothing but nothing means anything about anything about anything at all. Perhaps, when it ends, this is how you are judged: Your body is cleaned and embalmed, or cleaned and burned, and then you are placed into a big box if it’s the former and a small one if it’s the latter. And some people may come to say goodbye and the newspaper may run a small obituary but you won’t know because sentience ends with biological life, and the only judgment is that which
takes place every day of your life, by yourself, and by those around you. I am a deist, after all. Or perhaps it’s just Fade to Black. My father brought this on me, but I on no one. It’s better to do the exciting things before you’re aware of your own mortality. At 23, in Cairns, I jumped out of a plane. It was amazing. Today, I don’t know what would encourage me to think that risking my life for a thrill is a ‘good’ idea. Every day I put a few more bricks into that wall which separates me from the rest of humanity. It’s getting so I can barely see over the top now. Maybe the most potent discoveries are reserved for last. Why is Love sui generis? If any other human pursuit resulted in failure in such a high percentage of attempts, surely it would be abandoned by any sensible person. Why do we continue rushing in to attack guarded positions, aware at the outset of the inadequacy of our tactics and the futility of our mission? If, in any other field of endeavor, the results were so consistently painful and unfulfilling, we would be derided rightfully as fools if we persisted again and again. But Love, it gets a free pass on stupidity. We can make the same mistakes time after time and no one thinks we are the least bit foolish for it. On the contrary, most people would feel that this behavior is what makes us normal, functioning members of the species. It’s when you say “Fuck this, I’m not playing anymore”, and you actually stick to that conviction. That’s when people think you are strange. Even in Melbourne, I long for Melbourne. For as much as I do like this city, and for as much as I am ok with the life it currently affords me, there are some definite cracks in the walls that become apparent if you stick around for a little while. And, no matter how I might want to romanticize the place, they don’t really go away. It seems as though the nation is so obsessed with maintining what it sees as the Quality of Life that it is turning into something of a police state. There are lots of rules here. There are lots of rules everywhere, but in most places, you can get away with not following the little ones. Not
so Australia. To wit: You can no longer drink outside after dark, as signs in all the parks and parts of town with bars warn. You can be fined $250 for improper disposal of a cigarette butt and $170 for riding a tram with an incorrect ticket, two horrific crimes against the State of which I’ve already met castigated perpetrators here. I have seen an old man receiving a summons for jaywalking. Last weekend, the Canadian Girl told me that if they stop you at a booze bust, they can search your car without any reason at all, and they can test you for drugs. If you test positive, they can make you go to a hospital to take a more thorough test. In addition, though I only watch television while on the treadmill or the elliptical at the gym, it would seem that roughly a third of the commercials do not advertise a product or a service, but rather a warning or a ‘suggestion’. There is a commercial urging consumers to use debit cards instead of cash, with the tagline, “You don’t know where your money’s been.” It shows a woman waiting in the queue at a pharmacy and the guy in front of her is scratching his neck and complaining of a rash before he hands his money over to the cashier. There are countless commercials advising you of which superannuation fund to choose. There’s a campaign against smoking, and another against drinking, and another against drinking and driving, and another against gambling, which shows a woman digging giant holes in her yard in a futile search for buried treasure. There’s a campaign telling you to walk more for your health. There’s a campaign telling you not to ride the trains without a valid ticket. Cigarettes in shops can not be displayed with any colors at all – the convenience stores are allowed only a black and white sign advertising brands and prices.125 There are billboards up all over town telling you to be careful for trams, which evidently weigh as much as 30 rhinos. There is a plan proposed to tax restaurants and bars which place space heaters outside for patrons seated there in winter. Pellet guns were outlawed a few years back, and all toy guns are required to have a 1-inch orange tip on the end of their barrel, so as to avoid ‘confusion’. There is also new legislation proposed to fine people for cursing in public in Victoria. Give me a flipping break. In addition to the Nanny State tendencies, the Internet doesn’t work. On Tuesday, I couldn’t log on with my laptop on campus. I found out that my account has been frozen because I exceeded the 1GB usage quota allotted students each week. I did not know such a quota 125
Though you could put them in a black pack with a skull and crossbones on the front, and call them Tumors, and smokers would still be lining up to get them.
existed, and I also did not know how I could have exceeded it two days into the week when I hadn’t even used the computers on campus to do anything I haven’t done during many other weeks. Moreover, it is somewhat offensive that I am paying $23,000 a year for an education and I could have internet access denied me because I watched a few clips on YouTube. When I phrased it thusly to the guy who answered the phone on the Academic Computing Department’s helpline, he didn’t make much of an attempt to empathize. When I put a recharge on my mobile phone last week, I called my Oldest Friend and was confused when the $30 credit ran out in 30 minutes, because I have a plan that allows you to call the US for 3 cents a minute. I rang the customer service number, and was told that I had bought a ‘normal’ recharge voucher, and not a ‘flat rate’ one. If you purchase a recharge dollar amount ending in ‘5’, then you have the flat rate. If you don’t, your phone changes to the ‘normal’ rate, which is far more expensive. The girl at the supermarket who took my money certainly hadn’t told me this. Nor had anyone told me that this was even possible when I bought the phone in the first place. Nor would you think that your plan could automatically switch to one far less favorable simply because you didn’t recharge in a numerically prudent manner. After an animated discussion with India in which I questioned the legality of running a company this way and said “Please don’t tell me that you don’t get people making this mistake all the time” and was answered with a “Yes, a lot of people do make this mistake”, they put the credit back on my phone and changed me back to the plan which I had (and which I thought was the only one that existed) but only after I put more credit on the phone so that I could switch to the ‘flat’ rate. I suppose I should consider myself fortunate. The Chilean told me he’d been charged $350 for going over his monthly usage limit on his smart phone a few months back. Cultures, like poems, shape by restricting. Because there’s a lack of real danger and genuine crime, the little rules that the government has created are doggedly enforced and even the most petty of offenders are persecuted in the most petty of manners. This is why I was being chased months after I left here in 1998 for a camera-related speeding offence committed in Tasmania. My father got a parking ticket here traced back to America, and this was way before the Internet made such things easy. And, regarding the ‘little rules’ in the private sector, there isn’t the same customer service ethic here that there is in the US. Which is why a phone company can do what it pleases and shrug its shoulders if you protest. Or why a university can charge you full fees and then put its fingers in its ears when you attempt to inveigh against policies which serve no one, least of all the customer, the word which applies most appropriately to Melbourne University students, full-fee paying
internationals as 2/3rds of us now are. Maybe sticking around here isn’t as attractive an option as I want it to be. Or maybe I’m calling the grapes sour when they’ve just been picked off the vine simply because I know I won’t get around to eating them anyway. There’s always going to be something wrong because I’m always looking for something to be wrong. “Dude, you should create a game and call it ‘Six Degrees of Alienation’”, the DP told me the other night as we were smoking on the back patio. “I’ll give you a hypothetical living situation, and I’ll guarantee you you could turn it negative in six steps.” “Why would it even take that many?” I asked him, blowing a smoke ring into his face before passing him the spliff. Touché. The point at which I realized that I could change literally everything by moving to another place, and all the potentiality that this knowledge implied, that there were countless ‘what-if’ worlds out there awaiting only the introdcution of my character to turn them real. It was at this point that I began to become drunk on possibility, and, eventually, crippled by the freedom I have so forcefully asserted again and again and again. Compulsory freedom leads people not only to ignore limitations but to defy them. My capacity for wonder has been diminished to the point of almost complete elimination. What would surprise me now, in a good way? What sights, what events, what emotion? Almost, I can’t even imagine. You can have so much experience that you lose all appetite for more. Everything eventually reminds you of something else. One thing here that even I can’t complain about, though, is the weather. Over the past two weeks we’ve had at least 10 days which all would have qualified as the best weather day in Seoul all year. And you don’t even have to breathe the Yellow Dust. It reminds me of Barcelona, where the weather was so good so often you almost hoped for rain once in a while, just to break things up. Where you felt guilty lying in bed all day hungover because it was too pretty to keep the shades drawn. Unfortunately, my school doesn’t have windows in the classroom. Though I’m out every day by 2.30, which still leaves me a while to enjoy the light.
After spending the day convincing myself all day that I don’t need to smoke, I go home and have 3 joints in rapid succession. The easiest person to trick is yourself. Then I sit down to watch Community, my newest favorite show. It is the first sitcom I have ever seen that moves so fast I don’t get all of the jokes. The weed doesn’t help, but it still feels strange to accept the notion that something could be too quick for me. Though, to be fair, I’m no longer in the 18-34 demographic. This is what it feels like to get old. You can only be young once, but you can always be immature. After thirty, a man wakes up sad every morning. At a party in Seoul a few months before I left, I ended up in the company of several North American girls in their twenties. As I didn’t know them as well as they knew each other, I listened more than I spoke (a rarity) and was shocked and humbled by the flippant way in which they discussed their liaisons with guys around town. “I’ve been with him a few times, but I don’t want anything serious,” one said, and the others voiced similar opinions. One Canadian girl who was there with a guy she was clearly seeing spoke openly of her boyfriend at home. Who were You dating in the 8 months before I arrived? I mean, besides the people You told me You fucked? I ended up feeling there, for the first time, very old in the company of people 10 years my junior. These girls had espoused an attitude about sex that I wouldn’t even condone in men. The rules of the game have changed. And I don’t know them anymore. I don’t even want to play. What doesn’t feel worse as time passes? The great social upheavals of the 20th century, in liberating love from sex and sex from procreation, left no instructions about how to weave new meaning into this most elemental experience. You ain’t drunk nigga, You a punk nigga, And I’ma smoke your ass like I smoke skunk nigga. My rhymes are hi fi, Yours are a tape deck I’m going full sail And you’re a ship wreck... These verses come out of my mouth as I am lying in bed, stoned, apropos of nothing at all, proving once again that one of the many,
many things I have a weird proclivity towards, but lack the desire to pursue, is a career in rap. Maybe when I’m 40. Playin’ the game from A to Z, fiendin’ and leanin’, wheelin’ and dealin’, cappin’ and blowin’, restin’ and dressin’, I’m drivin’ in a Cad with four doors and four whores, one pimp in the trunk, sniffin’ cocaine and smokin’ dope and drinkin’ champagne. Basque rap group Negu Gorriak were big fans of the anti-establishment nature of Public Enemy, even going as far as to quote the group in English in some of their own tracks. PE played Bilbao in 1992, and took the stage yelling, “Hello, Spain!” They were perplexed as to why this was met with a chorus of boos. Even our heroes don’t necessarily want to be our heroes. Everybody’s trying to sell us something, even if it’s just a message. I am not a role model. On Friday, I go to the doctor and get my ears cleaned. This is something I’ve been doing for the last 25 years, perhaps longer. Everyone has ear wax; any number of sources will tell you that it’s healthy to have an amount of it there, and that it builds up slowly over time. But with mine, it gets to the point where I literally can’t hear every 18 months or so, so I have to get it flushed out. The process is actually mildly enjoyable, in a sort of hangnail-pulling way. The doctor usually uses a syringe filled with warm water and shoots it into your ear until the plug pops out into a basin held below it. In the absence of a nurse, I hold the basin there myself, and in so doing get to feel as though I’m helping with the procedure. In Japan, there are young women in upscale salons who remove the wax by hand and provide a ‘nurturing’ service as they do it. Would the happy ending result in an eargasm? There was one time, I forget where, that the plug was so big and came out so fast, it stuck onto the tip of the syringe like an orange handdripped candle. “Ew”, the doctor said. I actually grossed her out. There have been a few times when the doctor has told me “I don’t know how you were able to hear” upon completing the procedure. But it is time for a cleaning now, because for the last few weeks I’ve been noticing a decrease in auditory ability. I go to the Student Health Clinic, getting an appointment two hours after I phone them. A pleasant fiftysomething doctor asks me if I am ill, and I tell him “No, I just can’t hear”. He completes the procedure in five minutes, but I’m a bit disappointed at the size of the plug that comes out. Perhaps I’m just becoming deaf. The whole thing is so quick and easy that the doctor himself seems
surprised. As I’m on the national health care service, there are no bills to pay and no forms to fill out. “It’s nice to be able to do something to help people” the doctor says to me on my way out, as though he’s never solved a patient’s problem so quickly and succinctly. Until I was in my mid-twenties, my hearing was so acute that it was actually a liability. When I worked for UPS over the Christmas holidays 126 , I remember carrying a package around the back of someone’s house to leave it on their deck. I heard a piercing, highpitched tone as I neared the house, but the driver, who was carrying another package and accompanying me, didn’t. When I got to the deck, I saw a sign advertising the presence of a dog deterrent alarm installed on the premises. When I was young, I’d hear the ‘supersonic’ sound of alarms in shops. Then I started going to raves (with earplugs in most of the time, for what it’s worth), and now I have difficulties hearing people talk to me in crowded rooms. Adult life is nothing more than the slow ebb of one’s faculties. In old age a man resembles a retired actor who sits in the auditorium glumly watching others playing his favorite roles. Senescence. At the gym, I am subjected to coverage of the Royal Wedding. An Australian TV reporter is camped out in front of Buckingham Palace. 127 She claims that “2 billion” people will tune in to watch the ceremony, but when the camera does a 360 degree pan, the crowd is only about 5 people deep, and there is not another TV crew in sight. Maybe she’s overshot the mark by about 1.98 billion. Does any event rank higher on the “Lack of actual importance:Amount of coverage given” scale? The royal family has no powers anymore. Even those which they possess as figureheads is almost nonexistent. All over the world, people look to them as nostalgia from an era in which most of them were worse off. Is colonialism really something to be commemorated? I read an article online a few days ago which opined that it’s actually un-American to care about the proceedings. And for once, I felt like doing the ‘American’ thing. I have another date. It’s not from anything I did, per se, and I now go on dates the way people who want to stay on the dole go to job interviews – I should get the girl to sign a sheet to prove I was there, so I can keep receiving my benefits. 126
On breaks from life in Melbourne, Version 2.0 If that’s even what it is – my proud lack of knowledge regarding most things British sits in stark contrast to my generally respectable level of knowledge about worldly matters. Basically, when it comes to the Crown, if it wasn’t alluded to on Peep Show, I don’t need to know about it. 127
Whatever those are. But I’m on this website that I’ve been on since Poland, when at the request of my then-girlfriend I joined in order to take a ‘Slut Test’ which subsequently caused a fairly animated tiff because I got a higher score than she did, even though I was eight years older. That was the kind of relationship we had. I still have a profile there, though, and I’ve answered some questions to pass the time, and I look at the site once in a while, when I feel that I should be putting more effort into dating than I am (i.e., none). There have been a few times I’ve liked someone’s profie (read: photos) enough to send a message, but these almost never get answered, and if they do they never lead to an actual meeting because I must be doing something fundamentally wrong in my e-courtships to scare people away. As opposed to my real courtships, which don’t even happen at all. However, I did update my details to reflect the fact that I’m in Melbourne now. That was how The Redhead found me a few weeks ago, and how The Special Ed Teacher has found me as well. What’s good about Australian girls is that they aren’t shy. I remember seeing this clearly the first time around when the Ex-Girlfriend first attacked me at a college ball. I realized she’d given me a bloody lip from seeing the blood on hers. It’s funny, because we hadn’t talked more than a few times, but I still had a hunch that we’d get together. I just had a feeling. I never, ever get feelings like that anymore. What did we have in common? In retrospect, not much. Enough to be together for 9 months. Enough to be in love for the first time, and to lose my virginity. But not much at all. If I met someone like her today there’s no way I’d start a relationship. I’m not even attracted to her. Anyway. The Special Ed Teacher is waiting for me at a bar in Brunswick when I arrive. She looks more or less like her photo, which in internet dating is never a given. She has blonde hair and blue eyes. When she stands up so that we can go and sit in the patio out back I realize that she is not a small woman. I don’t mean she’s fat, but she’s my height and not petite in any way at all. I also notice, in apprehending her face-to-face and subsequently walking behind her, that she is possessing of a most unfortunate combination of physical attributes – a small chest and broad hips. There is no way possible I could get it up to have sex with a body like that. So the night becomes an event devoid of any pressure on my part to impress. She’s a relatively quiet, easygoing girl. We drink a few beers and have dinner. We play Scrabble and I make a 2-letter word that you shouldn’t make with someone who doesn’t know the 2-letter words you can make to score a lot of points.
You never liked it when I did that to You, either. In fact, You gave up playing with me, eventually. Our relationship gradually became a series of things We could no longer do together. This girl lives next to her sister, and down the street from her mother. She’s travelled a lot overseas but never contemplated living away because she loves her family. She was actually born in Brunswick. Natives are hard to find anywhere nowadays. I explain to her briefly why it’s easy for me to travel around the world – no family, no ties, the field ‘requires’ it (or at least allows it). Again, it doesn’t matter, because I’m not attracted to her so I have no vested interest in currying favor. She asks me what my plans are for the future. I give my standard, honest answer, which is that there are so many things I could do that I am fairly crippled by my indecision. But I like my job, wherever it’ll take me. I might as well just say I have herpes, and that I’m married. I can’t imagine teaching mentally handicapped students, so I ask her about it. What happens in an average day when your students are hardly even able to speak? She teaches them functional things, like how to use a utenstil. She teaches them how to dress themselves. She wants them to be able to write their own names, and this is one of the class’s goals for the year. I get angry when I teach someone a grammatical form once and they don’t remember it the next day. She uses musical therapy with them. She plays several instruments. She looks a bit like a Turkish friend I had in Barcelona who was actually quite attractive, but probably because that girl was never a dating option. That always makes women a lot more attractive to me. After a few hours, though, I start getting that ‘need to be home in bed’ feeling, even though it’s only 10PM. I get that feeling now even if there’s no weed waiting for me in the house. I don’t know how to say goodbye in situations like this. A handshake is impersonal, but I don’t want to kiss her. She kisses me on the cheek and I don’t really attempt to return the gesture. The Redhead did the same thing. I suppose she is interesting enough to see again, but I don’t know what that would do for either of us. Most things are never meant. This is now the third opportunity I’m willfully passing on since I’ve come here. For those out there who are counting. I walk home next to the DP, mildly buzzed and feeling suddenly like it might be nice to cry for a while.
Dating Paradox #272 – If I am honest with a partner, then I will be a burden. But if I’m not honest with them, then why would they want me in their life? Dating Paradox #273 – either a woman isn’t attractive enough for me to consider, or she is too attractive and thus out of my league. Dating Paradox #274 – I wouldn’t start a relationship now unless I thought I’d want it to last. But if I met someone with whom I thought I’d want something which lasted, I’d act in a way which frightened her off because I’d declare my intentions too soon or overplay my affections. When We were in NY, You were the one chasing me. Then You went to Korea and realized You didn’t need me. Then I went to Korea and realized I did need You. And that was that. There is most assuredly no ‘I’ in ‘team.’ No ‘u’, either, for what it’s worth. At home, I hear the TV upstairs blaring the royal wedding ceremony. No surprise that a pair of drag queens would take interest in the empty pomp and over-dressed circumstance of such an extravagant and meaningless event. The day after the nuptials, I find that my wife has posted a Facebook album of photos commemorating a royal wedding party she attended. Though she has lived in the US for over 10 years, she knows less about the country than even the poorly-educated products of our public schooling system. Which is saying something. She didn’t know how many states there were, or the population of the country within a factor of 10. Good thing our marriage has allowed her to stay there for the rest of her life. In North Korea, every household and every business has a governmentissued radio which broadcasts news/propaganda 24 hours a day. It has a volume control but no ‘on-off’ switch. Although there is a greater selection of programming, though, neither do the televisions in my father’s house, I’ve often noticed. A large-scale survey yielded the information that a significant percentage of the ‘super wealthy’ (as defined by those who have more than $25 million) are still very unhappy. They feel that they don’t have enough money to be secure, that their children will begrudge them if they aren’t given enough, and that people expect them to give significant presents on holiday occasions, and are disappointed when they do not do so. Even the things you think will make you happy don’t make you happy. But those who are wealthy are also far more likely to leave a job when it no longer suits them. They don’t have the need to ‘work through’
something, so they bounce around from one vocation to another and end up feeling unfulfilled because they never persevered at any one task. They never stick around to see something through. It’s uncanny how I can espouse the negative attributes of a group to which I don’t even belong. I’m not rich, and I never will be, but I’ve never been poor enough that I had to do something I didn’t like just to get by. So as soon as something becomes unlikable, I just quit. At some point, I believe I wrote “I’m not running away from things, I’m running towards new things.” The easiest person to fool is yourself. Just because everything is different doesn't mean anything has changed. I may travel far and wide, but I will never escape myself. Even the most casually introspective of persons is likely to end up dissatisfied with his lot, though. Grass is, by definition, greener in inverse proportion to its fence-related positioning. What would be an interesting social experiment, then, is a large-scale trading of places. 128 Members of the upper echelons of society should, for a time, willfully submit to an exchange of position with those on the opposite end of the spectrum. Not with those in abject poverty, because it’s safe to say that what could be ‘learned’ from such an experience would be learned quickly, and if you haven’t grown into fending for yourself on the street, chances are you won’t survive long if you’re made to do just that. 129 Rather, the rich should swap places with members of the lower-middle class, those with jobs but who live check-to-check. Those who have homes but no discretionary income to speak of. Those who are perpetually one trip to the dentist, one twisted ankle, one flooded living room, away from a tidal wave of credit card debt which has no hope of being buffeted. Lawyers could be involved, contracts could be drawn up, to the extent that only “X” percent of the estate of the wealthy could be spent during the course of the endeavor. In a sense, besides the quotidian trials each party would be sure to face, this agreement would be essentially ‘no risk’. The period of exchange would have to be long enough to engender an appreciation of what it means not to have. It couldn’t be a week, or a month, or a reality-show season’s duration of 22-minute episodes set to popular, emotive music. The rich would literally have to do a shit job, live in ramshackle accommodations, and not be able to buy their way around problems and back into their comfort zones. An author tried this a few years ago, but she quit the jobs too soon, she wasn’t really rich to begin with, and she only did the whole thing in order to write 128
I believe Dan Akroyd and Eddie Murphy attempted this cinematically nearly thirty years ago... 129 See also: dogs and cats.
her book. Better yet, have the wealthy exchange places with people in a Third World nation, so that the experience of “not having” is complete and total.130 Would these existential holes expressed by the rich still exist after a year of working 50-hour weeks with no respite and network television and franchised food as their only escape? Would their lives of luxury still seem so empty when they returned to them? And wouldn’t most members of the lower-middle class jump at the chance to have a year or so free of the nagging worries that taunt and torture them on a daily basis? Sure, it would be hard for them to go back, but most likely neither side is going to lose more than it would gain in appreciation for what they have and what they don’t. Where do I fit in here? I’m neither poor, nor rich. But I have never had to work a job I didn’t like out of necessity. I have never had to do anything out of necessity at all. In my mid- to late twenties, I was pretty much broke all the time. But I was working 12-hour weeks and living in Barcelona with abundant access to beaches, $2 liters of wine, and any illicit substance I cared to ingest in a consequence-free environment. In fact, there was only one time in my adult life when I’ve really done something I didn’t want to do. And that was when I moved to Korea to be with You. And it made me so upset that I was an intolerable person the entire two years I was there.131 Perhaps if I knew what it was like to have to do something earlier on, I would have more appreciation of what that means. That’s why they call it “work”, ‘cause it ain’t fun. I can even lament not being worse off than I am. On a T-shirt hanging in a restaurant where I have lunch: “I’m not suffering from mental illness – I’m enjoying it to the fullest” It is now one month to the day before the end of the first half of my life. It’s that point where you’re climbing a mountain, and you can see the summit, and you know it’s close, but the steps just keep getting harder and harder. No turning back now, though. I waste a few minutes on an app that purports to calculate zodiac signs and determine the number of Facebook friends I have in each. Astrology holds about as much empirical validity as reading tea leaves, but avoidance tactics combine with a fascination with statistics, and I 130
Access to health care notwithstanding, the lower-middle class in America have more than the majority of those in the rest of the world – after all, they are not living on $2 a day, even if it may feel this way to them. 131 Though the general misery of life in Korea did not help.
find myself taking 10 minutes out of my day to engage in a meaningless act of electronic onanism. To perform the calculation, though, I have to uncheck the Facebook friends I’m “not really friends” with. As I start, I realize I am unchecking everyone. This becomes more interesting than the information provided by the app. I begin asking myself: “Would I want to talk to this person on the phone?” “If I found myself in the same town as this person, could I crash at their house?” “Would I even want to meet them for a drink?” I have two Facebook friends I’ve never met, several dozen Facebook friends I’ve met once, and more than 200 Facebook friends I’d never really want to see again. We’re all alone together, I guess. It is May. 20 months since We weren’t Us anymore. 19.75 months since You defriended me, in real life and on the innerwebs. It’s Sunday morning and when I wake up the DP is sitting in the chair by my window, leafing through a magazine I’ve left on the table. “I thought we’d spend some time together, Bro,” he tells me, in a way that is more threat than offer, and then he proceeds to follow me around all day, from the Vic Market to the library on campus and back to my house again. The cloud in my head is so thick it’s hard to think straight, and I don’t know where it’s come from, except that by early afternoon, I’m convinced of something which comes as a surprise: I don’t want to be in Australia. Maybe it’s because of all the ‘rule noticing’ I’ve been fixated on. Maybe it’s because I know I won’t be able to stay anyway. Maybe it’s because, with each passing day, less and less matters. As soon as the thought crystallizes in my mind, though, the DP, everclairvoyant, starts jumping up and down pumping his fist in the air like he’s just hit the home run that’s won the World Series. “Two and a half months!” he cries. “It’s a new record! I had ‘4’ in my office pool, but I’ll take it.” I have no answer for him, so I retreat to the gym, where I push myself with the weights and the elliptical machine until I am too tired to be sad. It’s surprising that it’s surprising to find I feel exactly the same way about Melbourne in 2011 as I did the first time around. There is nothing wrong here. It’s remarkably comfortable. But as long as I stay, I’m going to wonder what else is out there. On sunny days, the grass here is downright verdant, but still, on the other side... I have dinner with the California Girl and her boyfriend and the South African Girl in Brunswick. The food is Thai and quite decent, and the conversation is animated and somewhat intellectual. The boyfriend is an academic, and we chat about the sorry state of Melbourne University and the perils it faces due to the yellow invasion.
“Hanging out with some Chinese friends” – how I now refer to going to the library on campus. It’s odd how when I discuss this issue frankly here, it still doesn’t feel racist. No one is saying Asians aren’t welcome in the country; I’m saying (as a student and as a teacher) that the most prestigious university here shouldn’t be money-grubbing and lowering its standards to allow in a wave of students who have no interest in integrating into the community, don’t possess the English language skills to engage in classroom discussions or do the written work without assistance, and don’t add anything to the college except fat stacks of foreign cash. So it goes. For some reason, even though I haven’t smoked today, the words just don’t come out the way I want them to. I’ve had a few glasses of wine with the meal but I’m not drunk. It’s hard to accept that the inevitable, time-bourne dulling of my faculties has already begun. And I’m still 29 days from the middle of things. Senescence. The inexorable march towards the void of senility. At some point soon, I’m going to research existing medical means of maintaining what brainpower I have left. I’ve taken all manner of drugs in my life to alter my moods – why not take something that might actually do me some good? It’s a warm night with a drizzle so light it’s pleasant, and I walk home with the South African Girl. We chat the whole way down Lygon Street. She’s 11 years younger but doesn’t seem it. She’s into the art scene, volunteering at a gallery. Her accent sounds like she’s making it up as she goes along, but most South Africans sound that way to me. When we part ways, we share a kiss on the cheek. My glasses get tangled in her hair and almost get stuck there. I really shouldn’t even bother. I get an H1 on my first paper. I expected it, so it doesn’t feel particularly fulfilling. Though in the past few days, not much has. There’s always going to be something wrong because I’m always looking for something to be wrong. Real misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the world, since it is experience of life, and not philosophy, which produces real hatred of mankind. Osama bin Laden is dead. I read this on the Internet and it provokes literally no reaction. There was a time not long ago when an event of such media-noted magnitude would have spurned me to write a long and biting diatribe against the powers that be. I would have railed against the futility of our quest to “end terror”, and scorned the foolish
celebrations that broke out spontaneously across the nation, because if you’re celebrating the death of this figurehead as though it means something, then clearly you don’t understand the bigger picture here. But I can’t be bothered anymore. Activism is hard when you are utterly passive. I make a sarcastic wall post instead, and leave it at that. All great men are bad. I talk to dad. He tells me he’s going to start putting some money in my account on a monthly basis, because he and his wife are helping her daughter buy a house and “it’s only fair”. My “stepsister” 132 has 3 boys and lives a wonderfully normal life with a man who takes them hunting and ATV riding and hockey playing and whatever else it is northeastern rednecks do. “Yes, but she’s working towards something,” I tell him. “I’m not. I don’t need it and I’m not going to do anything with it. I’m fine.” 133 This charity makes me feel more indebted to a relationship which I already feel bad for neglecting. I would prefer it if I were just cut off. I would have cut me off years ago. Oh well. It’s American money – not like it’s worth much anymore anyway. He asks me if I want anything for my birthday. Of course I don’t. A fringe benefit of not caring is that possessions don’t mean much. If money were no object, there would still be nothing I’d want to buy. I’ve done a pretty thorough job of eliminating desire. Funny, but I still don’t feel enlightened. To cease wishing is to be dead. Getting there. I counsel the other teacher at my school. He is Australian and he came back from China a few months ago to attend to a mother who is in what I understand to be the final stages of some form of cancer. He is a good guy – energetic in class, and helpful with the students. But outside, he is very honest about what he views as the flaws of the institution where we are employed. In a way, he’s quite similar to me. Today, though, he comes into my class after the day is over and is clearly out of sorts. He tells me some of the things that are bothering him, and some of the things that the school is doing which aren’t even legal according to the status that the institute has (such as putting students of two different tested levels of ability into one class, something which I’ve actually gotten used to). 132
Quotes here because it’s odd to bestow the appelation on a person I’ve met perhaps a total of 8 times and with whom I have pretty much nothing in common except the union of a respective parent. 133 Monetarily speaking.
“But that’s what this business is,” I tell him. “And you know that because you’ve been working in it as long as I have. Schools all around the world do things that aren’t in the best interests of anyone except their own ledger book, and teachers have to make do with what they’re given. If you leave every school where you don’t agree with what’s going on, you aren’t going to be anywhere very long.”134 Or words to that effect. He wants to look for other jobs, and I tell him that I would too, but with uni, I don’t have time. Though really, since my semi-inadvertent attempt at getting the DOS shitcanned, not only has he been nicer to me and less weird, but no one seems to bother with me at all. I’m with the same group 20 hours a week but I’m given complete autonomy with what I do in the class and no one checks that any of the students have made any progress. As long as no one complains, no one says a damn thing at all. The paperwork is minimal, the hours are unobtrusive and pretty much I can wear whatever I like. There are times when even I find it difficult to find a downside. I sympathize a bit, and empathize a bit, and end up sounding like I’m the ‘team member’, quite possibly the first time in my life that I have had an exchange on a work-related topic which turns out this way. In addition, when I’m at work, the DP almost never comes into my classroom. If there is one facet of my life in which I do not regularly question my previous decisions, it is my career choice. Remarkably, I’m sanguine. The difference between Buddhist Enlightenment and utter inability to give a shit is a difference of perception, not kind. My Oldest Friend calls. “I don’t think I want a wife anymore,” he says. You and me both, Brother. But his situation is slightly different, in that his wife actually is his partner, but the marriage was precipitated and occurred at least partially because she is from Finland and her US visa was running out shortly after they first met. There is no need to recount the conversation here. The précis is that she is not the person he wants to expend money and emotional effort on. And when you get older, once you’ve realized this, the only reason you stick around is because you’re too afraid to be alone. See also: My Two Dads. This is a feeling with which I suspect You have some familiarity. I wasn’t even the first guy You promised to marry and didn’t follow through on. But that’s no longer here nor there.
134
My own resume is now at 3 pages after 12 years in the field, and I’ve omitted a handful of places where I didn’t stick around long enough to list them without it looking suspect.
We talk about Osama and television. We talk about his job, which now “sucks” even though when we last spoke a week ago he told me it was giving him the opportunities to develop a range of new skills. Problem #439 with relationships: When things are shitty, the crapstained glasses they leave you wearing unkindly color your view of everything else. I expound on my issues with the free pass Love is given in the canon of human endeavors. It’s a bit I’m working on at the moment. Our formative years are thus titled because it is when we form the categories with which we will subsequently view and intuit the world. Our tastes, our prejudices, our faith, our dreams – most of these come to us really early on. It doesn’t take much for an opinion to form and, subsequently, become entrenched. Opinions are like bones – pliant and able to self-repair early in life, they quickly ossify, calcify, and become rigid in later stages. Ask yourself: when was the last time you had a change of opinion on something significant? Not a type of music, or a food, but something important, something self-defining. Chances are, it happened a while ago. Chances are, you’ve been thinking the same things you’re thinking now for a very long time. Epiphantic moments are far and few between. Especially if you know who you are. Similarly, the next time you find yourself engaged in a debate with someone and they offer an answer which is even somewhat polished and well-formulated, realize that in all likelihood, they have had this discussion many times before, if not with others, at least then with themselves. Realize that most of the time, most of us are not saying anything new. Most of us have spent years rehearsing and refining our views. Most people, they aren’t listening, they’re just waiting for their turn to talk. I realize why my Oldest Friend is my oldest friend. We are the same age.135 When we met, we were in roughly the same place regarding our worldviews. And we have both aged accordingly. Neither of us gets excited about anything, for ideological reasons or emotional ones. Two times in a 3-hour period I have provided counsel. My first major in college was psychology. It’s a pretty obvious course for those who have a panoply of issues to work through on their own. 135
He’s a few months further from the summit, but by this point, that small disparity is irrelevant.
Free therapy, in a way. I cook a fairly uninspired dinner, and the DP helps me with the washing up. “I know you aren’t going anywhere,” I tell him. “It’s just that, increasingly, I don’t care. Do whatever you like to me. This is life.” I wash, he dries, in silence. The difference between detachment and not giving a shit is one of perception, not kind. My new earworm. What is the sound of one man failing? There are but three events in a man’s life: birth, life and death. He is not conscious of being born, he dies in pain, and he forgets to live. A young monk sought the advice of a wise Brahman who had sequestered himself in a monastery atop a hill. Every day for 6 months, and then every day for 6 months more, the young novitiate came to sit at the feet of the old man, who sat in the lotus position with his eyes glazed over, lost deeply in the meditative realm. “Being or Becoming, Being or Becoming,” the young monk would whisper as he attempted to enter his own meditative state, the soft mantra a question, imploring the elder for some scrap of advice, however small. One day, without warning, as the young monk sat, eyes closed next to his master, the old man leapt up, grabbed a switch lying beside him, and began to strike him with it mercilessly. “Fool!” he cried. “All is Becoming. And you are becoming a pain in my fucking ass!” T minus 24 days. All systems, irrevocably, still go. The Ex-Flatmate calls on Friday morning. We had tentatively made plans to meet today, but I really don’t feel like it, and I have shit to do. She tells me she’s been back and forth to the doctor’s a lot recently – her kid has eczema. I tell her it’s probably stress-related. I forget that most people don’t like to make jokes about their children’s health. People who have kids speak a different language. And I don’t have much interest in learning that language. I stay in bed and read for a while. In his book Poor People, William T. Vollman travels all over the planet to meet and interview people in the lower classes of society. He talks to prostitutes and street urchins young and old, to drug runners and
the wrongly displaced, to people living in the choking clouds of an oil refinery and to those whose lives remain affected by Chernobyl 25 years after the accident there. It is a fairly straightforward, unpreachy text of reportage (as objective as a text based around interviews with individuals can be), and offers no solutions as to “what we can do” about poverty. It is a record, many records, in fact, and as honest an account as the answers the author received allow it to be. Throughout the book, Vollman questions our ability to define “poor”. Everything depends on our definition of “normal”. If you live in a oneroom hut with 8 of your family members, with no electricity or plumbing, and no income to speak of, but the people in the house next to you, and those in the houses all up and down the street, are living in the same conditions, then are you poor? If you don’t think of yourself as poor, are you poor? If you aren’t unhappy with your situation, then are you poor? If you don’t want anything that you haven’t got, then are you poor? If you haven’t lost hope, then are you poor? Socrates, laughing in a market, saying “Look at all the things I do not need!” Diogenes, homeless, sitting in a bathtub outside, when asked by the king if there was anything he needed, replying, “Yes, please move, because you are blocking my sunlight.” In recent years, it has become increasingly difficult to be economically well-off, well-informed, and liberal at the same time. There is empirical evidence to the claim that ignorance is bliss. Though I believe also that knowledge is power, and it would seem that one of these two statements need not be true if the other is. It goes without saying that I consider the woman who spends her days behind a water buffalo to be as worthy as I. I can easily suppose her to be as happy as I, or happier. Why then do I fear to become her? It can only be because I judge her situation inferior to mine – Again, the situation is not the person; it’s not she who’s inferior – but most pleasures I prize – reading, writing, appreciating reality’s variety in my own way – all these require money. To which I would add, true, but not a whole lot. Certainly not as much as most people in the Western world would feel that they need for ‘happiness’. I can read, I can write, and I can think. What more do I need? Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects. One of the most pernicious, system-reinforcing lessons that Western living teaches us is what it is we should have.
After all, the people on TV have it, and look how happy they are. Though I have had brief periods where I’ve been “broke”, by any fair measure, I have never been “poor”. However, recently, it has often felt as though I am impoverished. When I think about futures possible and imaginable, and I realize that I don’t want anything at all, that I am not jealous of those who have more, and certainly not of those who have less, when I realize, in short, that possessions are not the key to anything, I am reminded again that, within reason, your lot in life is not the important thing – your perception of it is. And, though it’s difficult to trace an idea to its exact inception, its specific genesis, it has felt, during the last few days, thankfully, that a sense of equanimity has entered my life again. If I don’t want what I don’t have, then I’m not poor, in spirit, or in mind. If I choose not to chase the trappings of wealth, then I require very little to survive. I gain more by wanting less. To be satisfied with little is hard, to be satisfied with a lot impossible. Do not regard as valuable anything that can be taken away. And if I am meant, in life, to simply keep wandering, and observing, and thinking, and living, and reading, occasionally writing, or connecting with another, however briefly, then perhaps that is what it is, and nothing more. Perhaps the Choose Your Own Adventure book of my life simply doubles back on itself again, and again, and again, like a Mobius Strip. Perhaps my Arequipa is not a place, but rather the act of remaining in perpetual motion. But if I’m ok with that, then it’s ok. If it is gone, and you are alive, you didn’t need it. I get an SMS from the DP: “U keep talking this nonsense, ese, u ain’t gonna see me much, no more” “Exactly, puto,” I respond. Everything militates toward separation of the classes. The places where we never go are the invisible places, and it is the business of police authority, economic pressure, self-preservation and simple habit to place aliens there, so that they become invisible. Parents and teachers and self-help gurus have it all wrong. You can’t be anything in life. You can choose your dreams, but your ability to fulfill them is dependent on your place of birth and your gender and your race and your health and a whole lot of variables that some
would refer to as “luck” and others as “fate” and others as “statistical probability”. From the moment you are born, there is a very finite set of possibilities which you can realistically hope to attain. And with each subsequent decision, that set becomes even smaller. And yes, there are outliers, and black swans, and envelope pushers, but most likely, you’ll end up not far from where you started off. You won’t advance the human race. You won’t really be remembered. And by some standard of judgment, this is really for the best. Those who are born poor aren’t necessarily sad and those who are born rich aren’t necessarily happy but for the most part, we are comfortable in our class because it’s what we know. Class is the new race, and, like race, it’s nearly impossible to change it, and it’s not without severe psychological repercussions if you do. Just ask lottery winners and Michael Jackson. One tautology which so many of us are so reluctant to accept is the old Popeyian mantra, “I am what I am.” You must be what you are, because you can’t be anything else. And if you try, you’re only going to feel like a phony. It is with this right-mindedness that I approach my day. Without a certain degree of stability and reliability of one’s model of the world, including oneself, one faces the threat of succumbing to a serious destabilization of either one’s conceptual system or personality structure. Life is an extended camping trip. With a leaky, inferior tent one runs no more risk of rain than anyone else; but if it does rain, the person in the cheap tent chances soaking his sleeping bag, and possibly dying of hypothermia. My tent may not be that strong, but I have chosen to live most of my life in places where it doesn’t rain much. We believe, for instance, in saving for the future, but in the future we’ll be skeletons. We look forward to the weekend, meaning that we seek to overlook much of the remaining five-sevenths of life. When survival requires drudgery, then experience can be improved by further diminishing consciousness, either selectively or entirely. Does the patient prefer a local or a general anesthetic? As helpful as the Stoic approach may be when anesthetic is absent, wouldn’t most of us rather have the choice? The one who refrains, do we admire him or find him freakish? It’s not what you don’t have – it’s what you don’t want. I’ve been prepared to die tomorrow since I was six years old. And I wake up every day pretty much surprised that, um…everything
is still here. Perception is reality. Since hope dies last, why not place it first? The terminal cancer patient who believes in cures, isn’t he better off? The “healthy” soul who looks forward to tomorrow, which is a day nearer the grave, the man who knows that the Americans will do something, the homeless men who marry prostitutes for money, the strivers and the opium addicts alike, the devotees of placebos and the strategists who can solve all difficulties provided only that it is give to them to dispense more aid, better directed, why not cheer them on instead of pity them? I propose that false hopes are as good as true, provided that they cause no harm; and that anyhow between true and false we can but infrequently tell the difference….Until he’s dead, who am I to say that the cancer patient was truly terminal? Life is a placebo effect. Semantic satiation. He who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave. Today is the Ex-Girlfriend’s birthday. She invited me to a party at her house, and when I looked on Facebook I noticed that the invitees included several people from college who I haven’t seen yet this century. It’s a birthday party, so I assume I should get a gift, though I’m somewhat stumped as to what would be affordable, appreciated, and marginally more than simply token. Wine just gets drunk, chocolates just get eaten. Flowers die fast, books work if you know what the person likes to read, but in this case, I don’t. At the Vic Market, my new favorite place to shop, I buy a cactus in a colorful pot. Nothing says “I had no idea what to get you but at least this is unlikely to offend anyone” like a house plant. As I enter her house for the second time, I see a baby crawling across the floor. I hear children screaming from rooms unseen. I walk into the kitchen and see a bunch of people I don’t know at all. Even the hostess isn’t there, and neither is S_____, her partner. I see her daughter, J_____, who recognizes me at once. “I thought you were in Spain,” she says, apropos of being 8 years old. “No, just at uni,” I tell her. I ask how her birthday party was, and offer small condolence that she didn’t get the pony party she’d requested when last I visited. I ask where her mother is, and even this seems odd, referring to someone by a different title than they are to me. There are adults all around but suddenly I have Social Anxiety Disorder. Very
late onset. I find the birthday girl on the back porch, and start drinking beer to relax in a situation of middle-aged middle-class suburban normality, an environment which, in theory, I should find far easier to assimilate into than I do. Her brother H_____ arrives with his wife. The last image I have of H_____ is as a long-haired 16-year old in Ballarat who I felt slightly guilty about smoking pot with because I worried he was too young to be doing that. At 21, I was already age-conscious. But now he’s cleaned up and married. He just bought a house a few suburbs outside of the city. He’s a graphic designer. Now I’m the one who seems a bit young. Except that I’m not. As I’m talking to H_____ on the patio out back, an old couple enters with an amped-up Jack Russell terrier. It takes a few seconds to register who they are, the mental Rolodex spinning futilely through a long procession of faces from pasts long abandoned. Then it dawns on me. They are the Ex-‘s parents. I remember going out to Ballarat to stay in their house and meeting them. I remember how her dad didn’t like me at all, simply because I was American and he was a working-class Australian from a small town who didn’t trust me. Ultimately, the distrust wasn’t misguided – I broke his daughter’s heart, at least for a little while. But that’s water under a bridge which has long since crumbled into a river in a forgotten land. When I go in to greet them, her mom recognizes me right away, but her dad looks at me like he’s either drunk or confused. I suppose my father would remember the Ex-, though it’s not as though there have been very many girls who’ve met any member of my family over the years. And, for what it’s worth, I’ve only met the parents of three girls I’ve been with since her. In 14 years. What’s it worth? We chat for a while, amicably. There are thirty people in the house, and I’m the only non-Australian. I also appear to be the only person who’s not married, or at least with a partner. H_____ has settled down and found his place. The Ex- and her man have settled down and found their place. I re-meet a Chinese kid from college who lives up the street with his wife and kid in a house they’ve just bought. Everyone I ask about from college has found their place, even my old flatmate P_____, who was 26 and in the seventh year of a 4-year uni program when I lived with him and didn’t know how to wash a dish. Everyone, eventually, finds their place. Except me. Perhaps that IS my place. My Arequipa is a literal u-topia. There is, quite literally, no place like home. Because I could be here with the Ex- in what would now be our house, with our children, but that wouldn’t be me, and when I think of all of
the things I wouldn’t have done if I had this unactualized present as my own, I feel as though I’ve lost little in the exchange. Most things, it’s much more fun to fantasize about them than to actually do them. And with You, if not for You, sure, there would have been no Korea, and that, at surface level, would seem undeniably a better state of affairs than having endured the two arduous, misanthropic years I spent trapped there. But with no Korea, there would have been no return to Japan, no China, no Cambodia, no Laos. No writers’ club, no saving enough to do a master’s program without it affecting my bank account. No knowledge that my place in the world is to be out in the world. Still, though, it would have been nice to have a travel partner on a few more legs of this perpetual world tour. Though in the brief times that I have, it didn’t suit me, either. And what I feel at this party is not straight nostalgia for a past which no longer exists, but rather a curiosity about a time when I wasn’t this -, whatever ‘this’ is. The few people who know me here know a me who wasn’t the me that I have become. They know a me who still possessed the ability to be “normal”, by far more people’s definition of the word. Beers are drunk, ping pong is played, banter is exchanged. Time passes. Eventually, the Ex-’s kids prepare for bed and they are hugged and kissed and passed around by their parents and their uncle and aunt and grandparents and even by their friends. J_____, the older, is a really cute kid but it would be totally inappropriate to even hug her, I fear. Though all physicality in general continues to skeeve me out now. Which I know doesn’t seem right, except that feelings aren’t ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ – they just are. I have always been uncomfortable with physical contact. When I was young, I remember squirming out of my mother’s grasp when she tried to kiss or hug me. It was such a severe aversion that when I went to visit her in the hospital as she was receiving chemotherapy and I was told I couldn’t touch her because of the risk of infection, that part of the situation didn’t bother me at all. I always had to be coerced into kissing grandparents, and I distinctly remember how I didn’t like their smell or the feel of their wrinkled skin. Even now, when I hug dad, it feels like there should be a director behind us, jumping up and shouting “Cut! Now, do it again – with feeling!” And this happened just because it happened. I am what I am.
I take the tram back down to Brunswick Street and stroll for a brief while among the Friday night revelers. It is not even midnight, but I feel very much like it’s past my bedtime. I don’t even need to get stoned to feel uncomfortable in public now. Willie Mays turned 80 today. I read a laudatory editorial in which he is described as possibly the best player ever to play the game, something which I’ve long opined myself. It’s not baiting to play the race card in explaining why Mickey Mantle memorabilia is worth twice what Willie Mays things are. 136 The steroids era of the mid- to late-90s has tarnished many reputations and records beyond repair for many fans of the game 137 , and stories have emerged about the ingestion of ‘greenies’ and uppers and speed and whatever else the pre-steroid era athletes could take to help them get whatever edge existed. Pete Rose gambled, Babe Ruth was a drunk, Ty Cobb was a complete dick who may have killed a guy. Even DiMaggio was standoffish and overly private, though he was nice to me when I met him in Uncle J_____’s bakery nearly 30 years ago. He loved those cannolis. But Willie Mays, nobody ever had a bad thing to say about him Although he retired two years before I was born, and although he never played for any team that I liked, when I was growing up, he was my favorite player. When other kids were buying Topps wax packs looking for Don Mattingly and Mark McGwire, I used to buy 25-year old cards of his at card shows. Like many other passing fads of my youth, I had no explanation for this. When I was 12, one day mom let me skip school and we went into New York to meet him at a signing of a book he’d written. He would have been 57 then. I’ve got a picture with him, smiling in all my young discomfort, and a few copies of the book. I don’t think I had the courage or desire to say a word to him, besides “thanks” for the autograph. That was a good day. Even I had them, as a kid, from time to time. “I won’t go if you don’t want Me to.” That was a good day, too. “When I see the way you look at me, the love in your eyes, I know nobody else is going to look at me like that again,” You said, one time before we weren’t Us anymore. And that. 136
That, and the fact that The Mick was a Yankee. Though I’m not one of them – sport is entertainment – we want to see Ruthian feats – does it really matter how they are achieved? And if you were a professional athlete, and your very livelihood depended on your ability to hit a ball harder, or throw one faster, or move with greater force than it is generally humanly possible to do, and someone offered you a magic elixir which would do just that, and around you, you saw that everyone else was doing it, then how stupid would you be not to take it, too? 137
In baseball, America cares if you cheated; in basketball, they care if the DA ended up filing charges. But alone among practically all endeavors in this country, the Super Bowl is like war -the winner gets everything, even his own version of history. I’ve won at every level except college and the pros. Shaquille O’Neal, in 1996. My father is getting a colonoscopy tomorrow. It’s routine, but because he has a defibrillator and diabetes and two bionic knees and other assorted maladies, he has to do it in the hospital. He isn’t worried, but he did have a bit of blood in his stool a while back and his mother died of colon cancer. I want to say “I love you” before hanging up the phone, but I know that I won’t, because I don’t do that. I don’t. What it all comes down to is that we are the sum of our efforts to change who we are. One of the hardest things about getting older is that you know your faults but you know just as surely that you won’t do anything to change them at all. Of this, I am living testament. We try to make virtues out of the faults we have no wish to correct. I don’t dislike her enough to fuck her. This thought entered my head, unsolicited and sincere, today, RE: a girl in my course. Bergen County, New Jersey, was one of the first counties in the United States to offer somewhat regular access to a satellite television service. For some unverifiable reason, I want to say it began in 1972. Today, the significance of this fact is negligible. But for me, a child born in Bergen County in 1975, it meant that I never lived in a house that didn’t have at least 30 channels. Even when nothing was on. Television is the best dad there is. We eat imported emotions as if they were canned sausages, while the young children of television, trained to watch life instead of making it, shrug their shoulders. I had no brothers, no sisters, and no V Chip. I watched violent things and sexy things, and a host of other things I shouldn’t have but did
because they were on, and the TV was always on, and what are you going to watch if you aren’t watching TV? I remember soft-core porn on a wavy screen from a scrambled channel we hadn’t paid for when I was far too young to understand the stirrings it engendered in me. Our lifelong affections begin early. Mork and Mindy, Gilligan’s Island, Laverne & Shirley. I watched jokes I didn’t understand until I got them. But what are the effects of being raised by television? Besides having the referential humor arsenal of someone 5-7 years older than my chronological age.138 A good portion of my childhood memories were filtered through the warm glow of a cathode ray tube. Significant moments, I remember not only what I felt, but what was on the screen. I watched Rain Man the night my mother died. Definitely Rain Man. Yeah. Watership Down and The Who’s Tommy each caused recurrent nightmares when I was a child. I watched them when I was too young to understand them, but old enough to be afraid. My cued fears. My traumatic phobias. I watched the Challenger explode and Towers 1 and 2 fall live and I only missed the Berlin Wall because it fell two months after my mother did and I don’t remember doing much in that period at all except feeling a horrible, knawing emptiness inside that, to a 14-year old, was impossible to comprehend. Nowadays, we don’t ask, “Where were you when such and such happened?” We ask, “What was on?” For a long time in my early international travels, I lived without a television at all. Japan. Most of Spain. Poland. But by the time I got to Brooklyn, not having a television didn’t mean I wasn’t tuned in. And Korea, well, Korea was just a succession of DVD marathons to blot out the unattractiveness of the outside world. You even lent me a few shows. I still have them, FYI. Series I have watched their entirety in the past 5 years: The Sopranos Deadwood The Chappelle Show Bob and Dave’s Mr. Show Family Guy Seinfeld 138
Syndication was big then.
12 Oz. Mouse The Venture Brothers Flight of the Conchords Boomtown Six Feet Under The Wire Dexter Oz Mad Men Breaking Bad Friday Night Lights The Office (US and British versions) Peep Show Jersey Shore That Mitchell and Webb Look Glee Community Plus most of South Park and a good deal of the Daily Show. And I’m sure I’m missing a few. Some of these shows, I didn’t even like. Some of them, I watched at a rapid-fire clip which made ‘liking’ them almost a logical impossibility. In Korea, so many expats tune in and drop out, when you leave, you realize it isn’t normal for someone to have watched every decent series of the past 10 years in its entirety. A fundamental attribution error of a different, but sad, sort. Everything I do, I just want to finish it. Before there were movies, with what did people analogize when they witnessed something that defied explanation? I think I was trained from a young age to be content watching moving images. Though in this, I am simply a member of my generation. However, now my societally-induced ADHD has reached a point that it’s difficult to watch anything in real-time without the benefit of a ‘pause’, ‘rewind’, or ‘fast forward’. I multi-task even when I am interested in something, and a feature-length film watched on my computer screen (how else?) seems inordinately long, so much so that I find myself checking the time remaining with regularity. I want my entertainment to come in 20.5 minute bursts, with no commercials and credits that can be skipped over with a mouse click. Part of the reason I’ve watched so many Australian films here is that I wanted to be sure I can still ‘endure’ an entire movie. In the cinema, I often just fall asleep. Though if they didn’t want me to do that, they wouldn’t make it so dark and comfortable.
Kiki Kannibal is a girl in Florida who started posting provocative pictures and videos of herself online when she was 14, with her parents’ knowledge and consent. She became an internet icon, amassing millions of fans. She dated one of them, an 18-year old who repeatedly forced himself upon her, and eventually killed himself when she broke up with him. She also began to get hate posts, death threats, and menacing phone calls. She earned the ire of a 28-year old, who launched a website to post exploitative photos and videos of underage kids he culled from other sites. He has threatened to kill her, while telling her parents they have raised her wrong. 139 In an attempt to avoid harm, Kiki’s family packed up and moved to another city, but Kiki, now 18, still actively exists online, posting videos and content. “How do you even meet people?” she asks, “Like, how do you CONNECT with people?” “If she were to go offline, her link to the world would disappear. This is a girl with 12,000 Twitter followers whose actual life is empty of real relationships.” People now have most of their repressed emotions freed. So much so that they run around having emotions about things like laundry detergents and soft drinks. Our parents had Vietnam, MLK, and two Kennedy assassinations. We have reality TV, made-for-television wars, and memes. I can haz efemeralitee? Yesterday, I saw Ronnie Magro’s photo in the newspaper here. The South African Girl told me that Jersey Shore is very popular in her country. They don’t think it’s a real place. Our family has a house 5 minutes away from the boardwalk where they live. I’ve passed every place they go in the show, but when I watch it on the screen, I don’t know if it’s a real place, either. When I was here 15 years ago, I remember teaching several Australians the meaning of the epithet “douche bag”. I had to explain its etymology, and when I did so, it made the already ludicrous expression sound even sillier. Now I hear it here all the time. More people say “dude” and “bro” than “mate”. But I’ve seen American television characters say “No worries”. And in an episode of Community, someone told Chevy Chase he had a “full on” erection. As you do. This is the linguistic side effect of globalization. We are all speaking bastardized versions of the same language, misappropriating each other’s phrases and distorting contextuality and place. America may no longer have the military or financial might it once did; in fact, these are powers lost which quite possibly will never return. 139
Though in fairness, he doesn’t really seem like a very solid moral barometer.
But And And And
we still make the movies. the music. the TV shows. the fast food.
Fascination-Disgust Complex, the term I’ve coined for how the rest of the world feels about its lone, dying hegemon. All that is required for social life now is to pass the cans of Pepsi or Coke seen in competing ads, and to repeat something heard or read or seen on television in the last twenty-four hours. America – it’s what’s for dinner. A child will have seen upwards of four thousand hours of television before he or she ever sees a school. It’s not that American public life is more idiotic, it’s that so much more of America life is public…everything is documented, and little of it is edited. With mere weeks to go, the DP comes down hard on me. He’s been leaving notes on my pillow the last few days, small reminders of my futility. In watching Strictly Ballroom, I am reminded that I don’t do anything really well. Nothing at all. There is no environment into which I can walk and feel like I am a pro, where others will be envious of my abilities. And this will never, ever change. At the best, I’m only ever going to be a spectator. I haven’t mastered anything. I sleep with the light on. It doesn’t help much. The startle reflex is potentiated by darkness. Sadly, the middle of the night is also the moment when one is most acutely aware that one will now never get around to accomplishing these undone things and that one must be content with one’s lot, as it now stands. I have nothing to say to anyone, really. I am not inherently interesting, a fact I have obscured by living in so many places that people can’t help to be somewhat impressed at my migrations, even if they themselves would’ve stopped years ago. It’s far easier to cry about a movie than something in real life. Movies are so much more real.
There is no such thing as a famous novelist now, any more than there is such a thing as a famous poet...According to authority, to be famous is to be much talked about, usually in a favorable way...Yet thirty years ago, novels were actually read and discussed by those who did not write them, or, indeed, read them. A book could be famous then. Today the public seldom mentions a book, though people will often chatter about the screened version of unread novels. What, after all, do we most love to talk about? Movies. Yes, we all need to escape. The hours are long and must somehow be filled until our death. And there’s just not enough glory and excitement to go around. Things quickly get drab and deadly. We awaken in the morning, kick our feet out from under the sheets, place them on the floor and think, oh shit, what now? It’s gotten cold. A prevailing dampness means that Melbourne cold always feels worse than the temperature would indicate – it wears you out. I remember this from before. Maybe that’s why I haven’t gone to the gym in 3 days. Maybe that’s why I’m exhausted at the end of a 5hour work day. The gym is like any other addiction – you feel worse when you don’t do it and just normal when you do. All things considered, drugs are probably easier. And easy is, like, my M.O. Nothing, however, is coming easily to my brain lately. I could blame it on age or dealing with low-level English speakers for 6 hours a day. But I don’t remember names anymore. I don’t remember vocabulary. I feel sluggish and stoned and I haven’t even smoked in 10 days. Might as well, but I don’t have any. It feels like things are coming to an end. I don’t know why. “I am not good at anything, or even minimally decent, really. I don’t have any interests, and thus I’m not interesting”, is my earworm du semaine. I feel as though even if it weren’t for the sexual maladies I may or may not have and the physical unattractiveness and the lack of direction and the DP, even if all of those things weren’t there, there would still be no reason to get to know me. You are what you want. And I don’t want anything. I’m living memories from past lives which weren’t even that good and feeling worse for comparing them to the completely unacceptable state of the present. It’s not good now, and it’s only going to get worse and worse. What improves over time? Perhaps the breadth of our knowledge, but not the facility of its recall. Perhaps our perspective, but not our attitude.
I prefer the folly of enthusiasm to the indifference of wisdom. Nothing is important and I am too cynical to select a pursuit, a path, a person, out of the multitudes and follow that. I am crippled by introspection and lack of desire. And it won’t ever go away. It rained hard today. Most things are never meant. The only reason I don’t do anything severe about what I’m feeling is that doing something severe would be trite and would hurt a few people and maybe wouldn’t be right. But I’m saying, if a bus were going to hit me… I might not jump out of the way all that fast. The paradox is, when I am happy I am desirous. When I am content I want to maintain what I have. And knowing that I can’t will make me sad. I only wanted You when You left. You can’t miss someone if they’re right in front of you, after all. I’m only a hypochondriac when someone cares about me. Physically, right now, I’m doing just fine. Conversely, if I feel like this, then and only then am I truly ambivalent, in all the bad and the good ways. I looked online again today for jobs – anywhere. Except Korea. I saw a job in Iraq. I saw things in Turkey. I saw things in China. Does it matter? Of course it doesn’t. Nothing matters, so nothing matters. Either that, or everything matters. Which isn’t any better, because you can’t do anything about it. I haven’t been in the gym for 4 days. Perhaps I just need to sweat this out. Or jump off a bridge into the Yarra. But that’s probably a bit extreme. No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide. There is nothing dreadful in life for the man who comprehended that there is nothing terrible in not living. A witty saying proves nothing. Me quedan solo 16 dias.
has
truly
Freud said that love and work are the two things you have to do in life. Though I would disagree, as I’m living proof that you can avoid the latter in general and the former entirely. I see the Ex-Flatmate. I’m not sure why we still hang out – perhaps to remind each other of the fact that we used to be important in each other’s lives. Her baby is now 6 months old, and I think it’s still overwhelming to her how much he’s become the focus of her life. We go to the mall. She tells me about A_____, a guy we were both good friends with until she started going out with him a few months before I left. I kind of didn’t get it at the time – we were all buddies, and then all of a sudden, they were in bed together. I suppose because she was completely asexual to me, I thought he would feel the same way. A lot of guys really don’t have female friends they don’t want to fuck. I didn’t directly express my disapproval to either of them, but by the end of my time here he wasn’t speaking to me. They were together on and off for several years, but ultimately she found him to be as ill-suited for her as I’d originally imagined him to be. Though if they stayed together for several years, they were several years better suited to each other than I’ve ever been suited to anyone. She tells me she ran into him recently, and she’s smiling about it like a little kid. “I’ve got excellent news about A_____,” she says, and demands that I high-five her before she tells me. “What, has he got cancer?” I almost say. Then I realize that’s probably only schadenfreude to someone as completely miserable as me. The ‘bad’ news isn’t that bad. He’s living at home with his parents after a(nother) relationship which didn’t work out. He’s evidently bounced around through several jobs unsuccessfully. But he’s also looking for a house, and, because his family is rich, it shouldn’t be a problem for him to buy it. “I just can’t understand how you keep moving from one job to another, and how you can’t stay in a relationship. Just grow up,” she says. “Yeah, I suppose that’s what adults do,” I say. I don’t point out that the only differences between his situation and mine is that she doesn’t hate me, so she won’t begrudge me for living exactly the life she just described.140 Perception’s a funny thing. She drops me off back near the house. What’s strange is that when I see her, neither of us has much to say, but yet it’s still not uncomfortable. Almost like being with family. If I felt like that around family.
140
And my father isn’t buying me a house, but, to be fair, I haven’t asked.
We have a work dinner. One of the managers owns an Indian restaurant and seven of us meet there. The school is like the UN – there are literally not more than 2 people from any one country in the office, and all seven of us at dinner come from different countries. Besides being the first decent Indian food I’ve had in Melbourne, there is mention that the school is going to start running a teacher training program in July. I tell the manager that this is what I do. I tell him that he doesn’t need to hire anyone else to do it, because I will do it. I let myself care about something for a few minutes. I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like. Then I head down to the casino with the Spanish guy from the office. We’ve become friendly, but I was leaning towards just going home and calling it a night. But he won’t take no for an answer, so off we go. He’s my age, and has lived in several different countries working as a teacher and a recruiter of students. In a way, he’s a Spanish version of me. Which is to say, not much like me at all. I do cocaine in the bathroom at the Crown Casino. Cocaine which costs $250 a gram tastes and works no better than that which costs $50. At least now I know. We speak in Spanish at work and I pretend like I understand him, but he has that nasty Castilian habit of talking so ridiculously fast that it sounds as though he’s burping forth his words in clumps, a sentence at a time. I parrot his accent and maintain the illusion. But when it’s late or when it’s loud or when I’ve had a few drinks, my comprehension decreases significantly. At any rate, we go from the casino, where I didn’t want to go, to a Latino bar, where I really don’t want to go, in Prahran. I don’t want to go because around midnight, even after a line of coke, I’m getting that ‘bed’s a callin’’ feeling. And it’s not nearly walking distance home from there, even if it wasn’t a cold and drizzly night. I wax nostalgic about times when I liked to go out, but I know not much good awaits me at the end of the evening anymore. And it’s so easy to cut and run. But I get dragged along with the group, which now comprises a few Argentines and a few Spaniards and a few Filipinas, and we end up at a bar where the music is too loud for me to understand anyone’s Spanish and I’m too tired to even bother.141 141
It probably doesn’t help that I find Latin music entirely unappealing. This was a problem I had during the few instances in which I tried to befriend Catalan people in Barcelona. The Spanish have an admirable trait that I lack – they have a good time when they are in a place to have a good time. Just as the Koreans and Japanese instinctively thrust two fingers up when you point a camera at them, just as Polish men become belligerent after drinking (which is to say, always), if you put on music, Spanish people will dance. The concept of the music being ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is irrelevant. It is music; they are in a club. So they dance. And I remember a few times feeling like the pesado because I couldn’t share in their nonjudgmental joy. I get that a lot.
A Spanish girl shoves something up my nose and I realize that it’s a popper too late not to do it. It feels like someone has given me a headache for 7 minutes. Fine drug, that. I am reminded that my Spanish is a perfectly useless level for social gatherings – my grammar and my accent are too good for people to think I don’t really speak, but my comprehension and my vocabulary are too low to engage in witty or meaningful social discourse. So basically I just look lame. I’m the dorky exchange student. In addition, I am reminded that my voice no longer works in loud places. Since the polyp three years ago and the operation I had to remove it, if I am talking in a noisy room, it quickly begins to feel like someone is pressing two fingers down on the outside of my throat – not enough sound comes out, so I try to compensate by talking louder, but then that just makes my voice disappear even faster. To compound matters, saying “I can’t talk in loud places” to someone who has never had the experience of having a voice problem (i.e., 98% of the people in the world) sounds like the most bullshitty of fabricated excuses. I’m a real fucking party. In summer of 2008, I became hoarse. This was right after You left, coincidentally. It didn’t go away, and didn’t correspond with any other symptoms of illness. It persisted for over a month, until I went to a doctor. He stuck a camera on a tube up my nose and down my throat (not nearly as unpleasant as it looked or sounded beforehand), and told me I had a polyp on my vocal cord. Teachers and singers get nodules and polyps on their vocal cords a lot. I got a condition from talking too much. Objectively, this was about as surprising as a 2pack-a-day smoker getting lung cancer, or a 400-pound man having a heart attack. When I visited Korea for the first time, there were times I tried to speak but no sound came out. We both found it a bit funny. It still didn’t go away, though, and I had to have the first operation of my life to remove it. I had never been under anesthesia. Because You loved me, and because I loved You, I was convinced that I would die on the operating table. I’m only a hypochondriac when somebody cares. I wrote You a long, sad love note. Just in case. I still have it somewhere. By this time I knew I was coming to Korea. I had even received an offer for a job which I couldn’t take because of my condition (ultimately, they took me anyway, 2 months later). Oddly enough, I remember the day that I did the telephone interview was one of the only days in which my voice worked that winter. At the time, I took it as yet another sign that We should be together. You can find signs anywhere if you look hard enough. After the operation, I couldn’t talk for 5 days. I stayed at my father’s
house recovering, although there was literally no pain and I was jogging on the treadmill the day after the surgery. In his basement, I have a notebook with everything I said for those 5 days, which wasn’t much. When you’ve got to write everything down, it’s easy to end up keeping your mouth shut. Now, though, the lingering effects are that I can’t yell, ever, because I don’t want to aggravate my throat and cause the condition to occur again. And, at the end of some days, and in noisy places, I often become hoarse. This has also coincided with a decrease in my desire to go out in general. Correlation and causality may or may not be interchangeable in this situation. When I am well and truly uncomfortable in the bar, I leave it at 2AM, drunk and a bit of whatever else, and start walking in a random direction in an intermittently driving rain. I have no money in my wallet and the trams have stopped for the night. I walk down Chapel Street for the first time in 14 years and remember a few places I shopped at and danced in, several Versions ago. But this neighborhood was always too posh for me. There are plenty of people out, having fun, speaking English, but I don’t want to be a part of it. Tonight when I did the coke I was only happy about having the opportunity to do it, and the opportunity to say I’d done it. Perhaps there are parties I still want to go to out there, but I don’t know the right people to take me to them. And I’m tired of going out and then having to make up excuses as to why I don’t want to stay. Probably, I’m not going to find people who want to go and dance to the music I like, ever again. And probably, even if I do, I’m not going to be able to go to those places because I won’t be able to talk when I’m there. Stranger things have forced people into rave retirement, but not many. In the end, though, it comes back, again, to this: I’m not ‘fun’. I’m not the type of person you want or need to talk to at a party anymore. I’m not stupid, but I’m not particularly engaging. I’m not much more than the sum total of my travels. There are many times I have nothing to say. Things didn’t use to be that way, and I’m not sure exactly when they changed, but that’s how it is now. I remember being the cynosure of social gatherings. I have met more than one girl who had heard about me and wanted to meet me. 142 There were times when I was the type of person you’d want to invite to a party because of the vibe143 I’d bring. I used to be a pretty big deal. I am only realizing now that I don’t really know you…I am so confused. 142 143
Ok, two. And the drugs.
Because, selfishly, you have always wanted me to be the way you have imagined me in your mind. Though these are not Our words, they could well have been. I remember clawing my way to the top of Mt. Fuji in time for the sunrise and embracing a girl from Rhode Island there I’d met on the way up. I remember the last few steps up Chirippo, when my body, still suffereing from the lingering effects of pneumonia, couldn’t take in enough air to get me to the summit faster than one labored, jerky step at a time. I have fought and crawled my way to the tops of many mountains. But I have never pushed against my rise to a peak. 15 days remain, and it’s long been realized and accepted that there’s no use fighting against the inevitable here. I’m nearly halfway home. It is Buddha’s birthday. This is one day where it’s actually fun to be in Korea, with long parades full of floats, lanterns, and costumes in all the big cities. Last year I was in Daegu, in a sparse crowd near the end of the route, and when the children in the parade saw a foreigner I ended up high-fiving about 150 hands. Two years ago, We went to the massive fete in Seoul, Our images appearing on the huge television screen across from the Bell Tower. We smiled and kissed. One of Our last Kodak Moments. What happens as you get older and your sense of self becomes more defined is that you close doors with increasing frequency. When you’re a teenager, or in your early twenties, you try things because that’s why things are there. I went sky-diving once because I had an extra day in Cairns and nothing to do with it. I moved to Japan because I saw a newspaper ad which said “Would you like to teach in Japan?” But when you’re older and someone asks you to do something, if you’ve never done it before, your reflexive instinct is to politely refuse, and say “that’s not me”. Because it isn’t. If only we could approach the world with the wisdom of an old man and the sense of adventure of a young one. Experience is a good school. But the fees are high. Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. How many more things will I refuse to do, simply because I “don’t do” them? I try to have this discussion with the Hairdresser at dinner on Saturday night, but he’s a bit tipsy, and even completely sober I don’t know that he’s one to philosophize much.
Also, although he is 60, and he cannot see, hear, or walk well, and he has brain damage and falling spells, he told me a few weeks ago “I’ve only got 30 years left”. Optimism is the divine dominion of the simple-minded. One more thing to envy. Final Score: Perception 90, What Happens 10. It’s a rout. For the majority of people in the majority of the world, once you become an adult, you start doing something, and you stick with it, because that’s what adults do. That’s what “being an adult” means. No more playtime. You don’t love what you wake up every morning to go and do, but that’s called being a member of the human race. Life sucks. Get a helmet. It is ironic and misplaced that I, a person with absolutely no romance in his life, still feel crippled by romantic notions of what life should be. I’ve read somewhere that you have to be pretty rich to be a philosopher nowadays. If I were already burdened (the only suitable word here) with a wife and children, I wouldn’t have the luxury of introspective time – I’d be too busy doing whatever it was that put food on the table. Increased agency has only served to marginalize us, the fortunate, spoiled, familyless members of the modern petit bourgeois. We have so many choices that we are often rendered impotent in the face of our future. We choose paths less travelled, provided they still have Lonely Planet guides for them and internet access when we get there. Who can afford to go overseas for 1, 2 (15?) years to “find themselves”? I see now why You had to go to Korea – Your family is poor. Your parents never left the country. Your brother never wanted to, either, and Your sister did it on credit cards she hid from when she got back. You’re the first person in Your clan to step out into the world. Well done. So am I, though. I just had slightly stronger financial backing when I started doing it. If I lived in the 18th century, I would have been a (very) low-ranking member of the elite class, schooled in French and Latin, with a modest entourage of servants and guides to accompany me on my migrations. I’d probably write pithy love poems, and wax poetic on the White Man’s Burden. Some things, I suppose, are not all that different, then. An imaginative man is apt to see, in his life, the story of his life; and is thereby led to conduct himself in life in such a manner as to make a good story rather than a good life. Likewise, romantic love. For most of the world’s citizens, it is considered to be something best left to the foolish, to the young, and
to the Meg Ryan filmography. In the West, we turn up our collective nose at the notion of arranged marriages. The idea is an affront to our dignity, to our senses of equality and modernity. For many adults in the West, the thought of being in a loveless marriage is quite literally the worst-case scenario they could imagine. Funny, then, how many people end up just that way. There was a friendly British guy at my university last year in his midforties. He was fat, balding, and possessing of an imposing, birdlike proboscis. He also had diabetes and failing vision. And a 22-year old Filipina wife. The first time I met him, he told me about her, and said, almost proudly, “I didn’t really know my wife when I married her.” Pretty much, he found her on the Internet, and then went to pick her up. Cash on Delivery. He wasn’t stupid at all, and he wasn’t embarrassed at all, and, as a result, it didn’t seem like anyone else begrudged him his situation either. I met his wife a few times – they seemed like playmates. But that’s probably ok. Though we idolize it, how long can romantic love last? Most of the couples that I know well enough to answer the question for, I’d have to say “not very long”. Both of my mother’s sisters literally hate their husbands. The only cousin I have who is married went 7 years without talking to his parents because his wife didn’t want him to. He only came back to the family because his marriage had dissolved. My father and his wife seem amiable, but they don’t sleep in the same room and they did get married when they were both nearly 50, so you can’t really call what they have a ‘lifelong romance’. My Two Dads fight more than I thought it was possible for two adults to fight, and have so little in common I don’t understand what the attraction is. I understand that You didn’t want to be with me ‘forever’. I understand that You allowed me to put words into Your mouth that weren’t the ones You would have chosen, and agreed to go along for the ride well before You were sure that You wanted to. Though, in my defense, You acted the part pretty damn well. So what if, when I get fed up with being alone, if that happens, I just - take a wife? What if I’m ok with that? Would other people be as well? Does your partner have to be your best friend? If he/she is, doesn’t that put a lot of pressure on you? On them? When You left for Korea, I closed up so much that I ceased being a person. I neglected everyone. There was a You-shaped hole in my heart, and the only goal I had was to fill it and become whole again, something I knew I couldn’t do. Who the hell wants to feel like that? A few days ago, I ended the embargo on Facebook-blocking my Korean university students from last year. This would be largely insignificant,
except that the impetus for my decision was that one of the girls I really had a crush on sent me an email. She was one of the many beautiful, smiling, doe-eyed 20-year olds in my classes, but for whatever reason, the parameters of her face clicked with me enough to stand out a bit more than the others. I wrote back briefly, just to say hello, and that yes, I did remember her. Of course, then, her immediate response was that she wants to come to visit Australia. Who doesn’t? She’s not going to come. She’s 21 years old, and probably has no money. But what if she did? And what if I did see her? And what if I said, fuck it, why not? I don’t care about finding my equal – I just want someone who’s pretty and happy and faithful. You were at least one and a half of those things. Except that there’s no conceivable way I could see that making me happy for very long. When a man says that personality is important in a woman, he should add the caveat “as long as she’s also hot”. I like to think that I’m as interested in a woman’s personality as it’s possible for a man to be, and I still think it’s a 50/50 proposition at best, with ‘looks’ being a necessary prerequisite to make ‘personality’ a factor worth considering. I’m not getting into bed with your political views, honey. Not that I’m getting into bed with anything at all. I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I’ve never felt like I’m the same age as anyone. Partly, it’s just another one of the disadvantages of being an only child. I grew up around adults. I was a pretty smart kid, and so conversations rarely went over my head. And it’s not as if my parents hung out with intellectuals who would’ve waxed philosophical anyway. The year after I went to kindergarten, we moved to North Carolina. When I got there, my parents wanted to enroll me in a private school, where they said that you should be 6, not 5, for kindergarten. So I just went to kindergarten again. I don’t really remember if I was the same age as the kids there. Maybe I was just already that visibly immature that my parents thought it best to keep me back, and “you have to be six to go to kindergarten here” was just something they told me. The Illusion of Memory. When we moved back to New Jersey four years later, after a paternal heart attack and a maternal cancer diagnosis, there was talk of my skipping 4th grade. But I didn’t. So I was the oldest person in my graduating class. Which, for a while, was kind of awesome, as it meant I got my driver’s license before the summer of my sophomore year in high school. We spend the first 20 years of life wishing to be older, and the final
60 wishing to be younger. At college, I was never anyone’s age, because the other freshmen were younger and the upperclassmen were, well, upperclassmen. In Australia, this didn’t change, and then when I moved to Japan, the roles were reversed, and I was one of the younger members of staff. When I got to Poland to do my first MA, most of the kids in the program were just that – kids. I was friends with some of the American contingent, and my nickname was “Old Man”. I was 29. In my two jobs in NY, I was the young guy at one, where most of the other teachers were matronly fiftysomething Soviet emigres, and an old man at the other, where I was training kids who had just graduated from college. Then, in Korea, everyone was 10 years younger than me. Last year I was working with 20-year old university students who seemed like they were 10 and I began to realize that I’m now at an age that seems impossibly old if you’re 20. I’m a 35-year old man. I’ve never felt, looked, or acted ‘my age’. I don’t identify with people who are my age now because very few of them are at a similar life stage. In my inner monologue I posit myself as an “elder statesman”, but I’m neither a) particularly distinguished or b) particularly knowledgeable. In my inner monologue, I’ve long viewed myself as an “old man”, who’s still “got it in him”, whatever “it” is, and however wrong that assumption is. Who are my peers? It’s a fair question to ask. After 15 years of travelling and non-stop movement, I’m now living a life that virtually no one lives, regardless of age. I’m still an only child, even though I’m no longer a kid. You’re only a child once, but you can be immature forever. At some point joie de vivre starts looking a lot like unwillingness to accept the passage of time. I get caught up wishing I wanted to act like I used to, then not feeling comfortable when I try to, then getting angry that I can’t, and, ultimately, reclusive because I don’t want to do ‘grown up’ things, either. I have checkmated myself so many times I really need to either develop some new strategies, or stop playing. I talk to dad. I don’t have much to say. I’m just living a life. School and work, gym and sleep. There’s no news. A week before heading into the locker room for halftime, and I’m in desperate need of someone to deliver one hell of a pep talk. I get an early birthday gift. The Turkish girl who hates me finally finishes her time at the school. I can’t even be polite and say goodbye to her on her last day. Teachers are supposed to be abused – it’s just the way things go. I’ve had a lot of shitty students over the years, people who didn’t care
about what I was trying to do and didn’t appreciate that I’m actually pretty good at it. And in 99% of the cases, I can put on a brave face and smile on that last day. I can wish them well, even if I don’t mean it. But this girl was a miserable cow. She talked about me in Turkish, 144 she complained about me on the first day of class, literally after I’d been teaching her for 20 minutes. She almost made me quit, just because I didn’t want to deal. She comes late to class, if at all, and spends most of her time in the computer lab on Facebook. I understand that it wasn’t her dream to come to Australia – a lot of the immigrants here feel that way. She had to come and learn English for her job, but she managed to spend 7 months in the classroom (when she attended) and still leave without the ability to form a simple sentence, or to understand anything in English at all. Her utter inability to progress was almost worthy of a case study in the deleterious effects of a lack of motivation on the language learner. But she was also so untoward that her classmates didn’t even want to work with her. She exemplified everything that a bad student and a cancerous classroom presence can be. In future years, I will remember her as a benchmark for just how low you can go. When faced with a recalcitrant pupil, I will recall her name by means of comparison, and say, “Well at least this person isn’t as bad as N_____”. The only outward sign of acknowledgement I can muster during her brief graduation ceremony is my applause. It is hearty and sincere. Go the fuck home and be miserable somewhere else. They say time is gonna kill your pain, I say pain is gonna kill my time. I see a play for review for the website. The theatre is about the size of the one we used to use in Barcelona for our amateur and amateurish productions, and the quality of the production is roughly that of what we ourselves used to do on stage. Because I’m reviewing the show, the Head of House is super-nice to me. It’s great to be a critic before you’ve written your review – people feel the need to kiss your ass. The theatre seats 60, but half the seats are empty on opening night. I take the South African Girl because she’s into art and culture and I don’t know many other people here who are. Afterwards we have a few drinks at a bar across the street, which I’ve never entered, but have passed probably close to 50 times, as it’s only 3 blocks from my house. It’s a stylish place with a good selection of beer. The kind of place I’d bring friends who liked to go out if I had more of that sort of friend. We have a lot to talk about, and I’m not tired, for a change. I reminisce about my brief period as an Art Fucker in NY, and we talk about the merits of pragmatism. 144
Even when no one else in the room understood her.
New litmus test: If someone says something to the effect of “You’ve just got to have a positive outlook on things”, they probably aren’t going to end up being a good friend of mine. Positivity is for those who haven’t thought things through enough. She agrees. Again, I am wondering whether or not I find her attractive. Certainly not attractive enough to break the fast…but the accent is cool. Self-reflection is not a gift. I have seen many dogs and cats which have lost a limb, or are blind or deaf. I’ve witnessed the tragi-comical sight of a small dog whose back legs are paralyzed, strapped into a wheeled contraption which very much resembles a miniature harness racing cart. When an animal experiences such an injury, the physical pain is real. But there is no concomitant emotional scar. A dog with three legs will try and chase dogs of the opposite sex the same as before. A paralyzed dog won’t end up depressed and feeling that its life is over, that its best days are past. But people, we can’t forget. We can try, but we usually don’t succeed. Psychology tells us that repression is bad, but it certainly feels like the best way to go about dealing with something you can’t accept or understand. When I stop to consider my lot, I see I’m carrying so many scars that I feel like my own picture of Dorian Gray. The ability to forget and the inability to recall are altogether different skills. I start taking creatine. I don’t know why. The decision was researched for all of 30 minutes, during which I found several conflicting websites as to amount and method of delivery (pill or powder) but nothing which seemed to say that it was harmful. I feel like I’m lifting a lot of weights and not looking as big as the other guys around me. I didn’t want to choke down protein shakes, and I’m probably not going to change my diet significantly. But according to Wikipedia, where everything is true, creatine can increase muscle mass and energy levels, and maybe even cognitive performance. So I go down to a vitamin shop and buy a 1 kilo container of the odorless, tasteless white powder. I see a third of the guys in the gym locker room taking some kind of supplement, and if I see that many of them doing it there, it’s safe to say at least a good chunk of the rest of them are taking something similar outside of the club, too. I’d like more energy. I’d like bigger muscles. I’d like to feel as though my brain works better. I’ve become so cynical about the powers of any medicine at all that part of me just wants to be proven wrong. And increased muscle mass doesn’t seem to be something that you can placebo up. The gym is now a part of my life. At least something is.
I go to a braai. The South African Girl has invited a bunch of us down to her family’s house in Brighton. Evidently, a braai is just an excuse to eat a lot of meat. I swing by the Vic Market and pick up a kilo of kangaroo. I can’t explain it, but it doesn’t feel as wrong to eat kangaroo as it would to eat beef or pork. At least you know it’s free range. I know it violates my ‘no mammals’ rule, a dictate that has been in place since 1995. But also, there’s something cool and rugged about eating an animal you can’t get anywhere else. I’m not rethinking my commitment to not eating meat. But, like everything else in my life, my position is flexible. I take a train down to Brighton, and on a platform in South Yarra awaiting a change, I witness a shockingly vivid sunset. Her house is beautiful and empty – I’m the first guest. I meet her mother, and when the other guests do arrive, I end up manning the barbecue to cook the meat I brought. Odd that I’m cooking a product I’ve only eaten once, and that I’m not even a meat-eater, but with the barbecue, pretty much, you cook it till it looks like it’s done, and then it is. There are no alpha males in attendance to correct me, and I manage to do a decent job with it.145 There are more girls here than guys – only a few guys in total, actually, though one of them is a muscular young New Zealander who comes by himself, doesn’t know any of the others, and appears, maybe, to be something more than a friend to our hostess, if body language indicators mean anything. Not like I was going to convince myself she was cute enough anyway, but I am somewhat surprised she’s interested in a musclehead (and also somewhat surprised that that’s what I’m halfheartedly trying to become). There are a few cute girls there, and they are all teachers, too, but by this point I’ve long forgotten how to act if I’m interested in someone or how to pick up signs that they might be interested in me. The group finishes off about one bottle of wine per person, but since a few people are driving, that means those of us who aren’t have drunk more than our fair share, and this helps conversation along greatly until the supply runs out and all of a sudden I feel pretty damn tired. I hitch a ride home with the California Girl and her boyfriend, who are leaving to go to the US in a week or so. Home by midnight now feels like a remarkably complete night. In the car, I do a theatrical double take when I see the DP sleeping in the seat next to me. Sometimes I feel he’s around even when I’m having a good time. He’s like a chaperone and I’m a few years past needing one. Or an electronic ankle bracelet keeping my emotions under house arrest. 145
It all gets eaten before the South African sausage whose name I can’t even make an attempt at spelling does, so I suppose I didn’t do a bad job.
Feeling now like most of the major decisions have already been made. Even if they haven’t. Monday again. The last week of the first half. Another unwanted side effect of increasing age – you begin to feel as though you have to plan for contingencies. And everything is a contingency. I feel now like, whatever I do, I don’t want anything to go wrong with it. If I go to work and forget a piece of paper I need, that’s a major screw-up. If I go to the supermarket and forget an item, that’s a major screw-up. I’ve taken micro-managing to a degree which almost guarantees I’ll end up disappointed with myself when something ‘out of the ordinary’ happens. How advanced will this feeling be 10 years from now? In 30? I pass a building on the way home from work which I pass on the way home everyday, except that today, in passing, I realize with great certainty that it is a building which once housed my favorite restaurant. It was called Café Baloo, and they served giant portions of biryani in a fairly trendy setting for absurdly low prices. Or maybe it’s just the Illusion of Memory, again. This city still remains for me a land of lost dreams, some misappropriated, some unfulfilled, many more unknowable. There are still days when I wander around town and feel as though I have been transported into an extremely vivid Waking Life, Kaufmanesque dream world, and again I’ve stepped inside John Malkovitch’s head as John Malkovitch himself, and the world is my world but not my world but my world but not my world but my world but not my world... When you know what’s wrong, and you still won’t do anything about it, that’s when you’re defeated. I’ve felt that way for a while now. Interventions are only necessary with people of a certain age. Because it takes until you get to a certain age to feel like you know yourself well enough to be convinced that you know what’s best, even when everyone else around you may be telling you that you’re wrong. There are a lot of things I’m doing, thinking, feeling, that maybe aren’t “healthy”. But they’re part of who I am, and I don’t see myself changing. Geographical implications notwithstanding, there is also no group of people who could convene and say something which would make me think or act in a way different to that which I already do. There are very few people whose opinions matter to me, and they are all thousands and thousands of miles away from me and each other. I’ve thought of “talking to someone about things”, but never all that seriously. Therapy was forced on me for far too long as a child. That and having studied psychology for three semesters at college, put it all
in perspective for me. I remember being driven, and subsequently driving myself, to this rotund flower child therapist in Nyack, New York, every week during high school. This was a while past the time when the grief over my mother’s passing was still raw and visceral. By that point, I was just an angry teen. I remember being prescribed Prozac, in its nascency, and being told that it would make me feel better. I would take the pills from the bottle, put them in my mouth and then spit them out. Somehow, my father found out about this, and it culminated in a ridiculous wrestling match on the floor of our kitchen, something which still stands out as a low point in a relationship which has always been zenith-free. There was talk of my going to live with Aunt P_____ or with my grandmother for a while. But I’ve always felt that my feelings, no matter how horrible or debilitating they are, are mine. And I don’t want to ingest anything which is going to take them away from me. Marijuana, alcohol, ecstascy, cocaine, crystal meth, opium, mushrooms, and LSD notwithstanding. The idea of going to a therapist now seems absurd. I would be offended if someone made a claim about trying to know me better than I know myself. “But that’s not what a therapist does,” one could counter. “A therapist merely acts as a facilitator, to help you get to know yourself.” 105,000 words into this, I’d have to say my level of self-knowledge is pretty good, thanks. 30% of the food produced in the world is wasted. 1.3 billion tons a year. Almost one ton per Chinaman, to put it in vaguely racist terms. Even though I don’t want children, and I don’t care about people, I am proud at least that my carbon footprint is pretty light. Little meat. No driving. I don’t even buy new clothes. If everyone behaved like me, the world’s systems would be unsustainable. Though at least in this case, that would be a good thing. When I die, I’d like to be fed to wild animals. Is that a possible request? I don’t want to be buried – it’s a waste of space. I don’t want to be burned – it’s a waste of energy. I want to be eaten. I want my serviceable organs to be harvested, and then I want to be eaten like the meat that I am. How’s that for green? It keeps getting colder. Autumn has always been the most emotive of seasons. I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling this. There is something about the shortening of days, the drop in temperature, the browning and fall of the leaves. It feels, each autumn, like more than just a year is coming to an end. The air now reminds me of Melbourne autumns past, and on sunny days, still pleasant and warm, the daylight hours feel special and in
need of savoring, short as they are. In front of the house there’s a big tree, and as it sheds its leaves they pile up on the sidewalk outside my window. The crunch from their destruction under the feet of passersby is loud, and, at night, sometimes a bit jarring, but I welcome it still. It’s so easy to be here that the time has begun to go fast again. It’s been 3 months. The semester is over. Two months of what pass as ‘winter’ are coming. I’m not used to having an autumn birthday. This is my third year in the Southern Hemisphere, but still the months do not coincide with the temperatures my mind expects them to. The world is supposed to end today. Or at least the Rapture is supposed to happen. Even if I’m not taken, I wouldn’t mind seeing it go down. It would be something to talk about, at least. On the phone, I come out to my Oldest Friend re: my utter detachment. I realize now that nothing is going to change, because I won’t let it, and I won’t ever have strong enough conviction to allow myself to think that it matters. I’m just going to keep doing this, again and again, ending up in similar situations in different places. There will be friends, but they, too, will change along with my migrations. I will continue not to seek out someone to share my life with, because if I loved someone, I wouldn’t want them to have to share in what I am, in what I have become. I don’t think I’m a good person – I begrudge too many people their successes, I feel too detached from those who love me, I lash out regularly without regard for the consequences, I am racist and sexist and cynical and nihilistic. But I am a minimally decent person. And a minimally decent person, at least, knows not to do anyone any serious harm. If you only destroy yourself, you haven’t really committed a crime. You don’t owe the world anything, just as the world doesn’t owe you anything. If I brought someone into this life, though, then I’d be harming them. Perhaps not today, or this month, or even this year. But eventually. I am the Destroyer of Worlds. You didn’t deserve this. Regardless of the lies You told me, or the times You cheated. When You sent me that message after our course finished, 4 years ago, You had no idea what I was. But I did. And I let You in anyway. I’m sorry. I won’t do it again. I’m more comfortable when I’m not comfortable. There’s no other way to put it, that’s what it is. If I’m comfortable in a place, with a person, I’ll look for things to feel bad about. Or I’ll convince myself that I’m dying. I am the Destroyer of Worlds. Even if the only world I destroy is my
own. When I’m comfortable, time moves faster. Motivation, never at a premium anyway, disappears altogether. This weekend I’ve locked myself in to write the first of three papers that are due in the coming weeks. Tonight, stuck in the library, the weekend 2/3rds over and the paper not yet begun, I wonder what would happen if I just didn’t do the work. If I failed out. What does this degree even mean? When I finish, I’m going to go somewhere else. It doesn’t matter where. When I get there, I will go through the same cycles I’ve gone through everywhere else. Only the stages will probably pass even more quickly, as I’ve grown accustomed to them and cognizant of their order. Halfway through this story, and I can predict what happens from here on out way too well. More and more of – this. Whatever ‘this’ is. Life is not a series of adventures, but you have to have a lot of adventures before you realize that. And after a while, your threshold goes up so high that you’d have to do things you don’t really want to do to get off, metaphorically speaking. Or you can just stop doing everything, and content yourself with reminiscing. I’ve been reading a Great American Travel Writing book from 2008. Reading about exotic adventures that I’m sure were more enjoyable to write about than have. I know, because I’ve had some like that myself. And what this does for me, to me, is make me realize again that life is not here, in Australia. Because there is no ‘adventure’ here, and there never will be. I can be comfortable. I may even be able to procure a visa and forge a middle-class existence. There is nothing wrong here. People don’t complain about things much in Melbourne, because the things that people generally complain about in a place – weather, safety, lack of space/jobs/money – aren’t bad here. If I were the sort of person who genuinely considered staying in one place and being content with it (i.e., 99% of the people in the world), this would probably be the place I’d try and do it. But I’m not going to do that. I know it already, 3 months into my year here. I’m probably not even going to try and stay beyond my visa. The only way I know how to be is in flux. To keep breaking and making ties. To keep learning the ropes, and subsequently to be made antsy by the comfort I’ve created and then to seek out new places to explore. I’m more comfortable when I’m uncomfortable. I’m never going to be happy. Happiness isn’t even the goal. Nor, perhaps, should it be. Acceptance is the highest good I’m realistically
going to get now. But I don’t even think I’ll ever get to that point. At least not indefinitely. I’m always only going to want what I don’t have. I’m always only going to want something new, and wonder the way things are somewhere else. The DP will always be there with me, sometimes screaming in my ear, sometimes just mulling about in the back of the crowd, making sure I don’t forget he’s around. If someone acceptable comes into my life, I’ll find things wrong with her, with myself, with our situation. I’ll scare her away, just like I scared You away. And then I’ll be alone again, which will be fine, because I’ll have proven that I was “right”. I’m what’s wrong. I travel far and wide, but try as I might, I will never escape myself. Leaving home’s a cinch. It’s the staying, once you’ve found it, that takes courage. I have recently found it difficult to maintain my erstwhile position that I am not running away from the lives I’ve created, but rather, running towards something new. It was just semantic hair-splitting, at any rate. In the New History, the ideal became agreement, rather than welljudged action, so men learned to be competent only in those modes which embraced the possibility of agreement. The other day, my Oldest Friend recounted to me a falling out he recently had with his current supervisor over some trivial issue in which he was “right” and his boss was “uninformed”. I shared a similar anecdote about the DOS. “People are so reluctant to say what they think when it’s not something they think you’ll want to hear,” he said. Or I said. People will go to immense lengths to avoid saying what they mean. In contemporary First World societies, we have been raised to only approach potentially confrontational situations with either a stance of passive aggression or a circuitous arrival at the point of discord. We have become a world of people who are not saying what they are thinking and are subsequently left with anger and resentment at feelings of being misunderstood or unappreciated. My father had a heart attack when he was my age. He was considerably overweight, and he smoked, and it was in his bloodline to have heart issues, as his own father, a non-overweight non-smoker, died from an infarction at the age of 51. I firmly believe, though, that a good deal of what precipitated my father’s surprisingly early brush
with death was stress – just like me, he is quick to anger, and quick to feel as though he is being slighted. However, unlike me, I assume that when he was middle-aged and making a wholehearted attempt to climb the corporate ladder, he often bottled up his emotions inside, and let occupational pressures get the best of him. Partially because of this knowledge, and partially because I know of no other way to be, I release most of my negative sentiments immediately upon those who have engendered them. At most of my jobs since becoming an adult at age 30, I not only have no problem being confrontational, I embrace the opportunity for a bit of verbal sparring, looking only to maintain my calm while I say what others are feeling but do not have the gall to verbalize. Occasionally I end up with my foot in my mouth, but I never end up biting my lip. And as a result, these small releases seem to prevent a build-up of unwanted bile in my system. Perhaps it will keep me from advancing in my career, but, as I never foresee wanting to hold a job for more than a year or two, I fail to see how that really matters. Also, I break things. This is not a metaphor. I have always broken things. It is one thing that probably most people, even those who know me best, do not know. My father knows. He is, perhaps, the only one, and that’s only because when I was younger, in his house, I couldn’t hide it well. Many children, when they are little, throw their toys when they “don’t work”. Many children upturn a game board when they lose. I have never stopped doing this. From toys to joysticks, Atari and Nintendo, I have always slammed and broken things. During the brief time I played tennis, the only reason I didn’t break more rackets was because I didn’t have the strength to slam them into the ground hard enough. Ping-pong paddles, however, were no match for me, and never lasted long in my house. Once, I am pretty certain I broke a toe kicking a tennis ball retrieval hopper. Which didn’t require a trip to the doctor, because there’s nothing you do for a broken toe except limp for a while. Save my second shared flat in Barcelona, I cannot recall one living situation in which I did not, at some point, punch or kick a hole in a door or wall. I don’t know why I do this. It is almost a reflex. It happens even now, and the few times I have punched something here I am reminded that, because I am working out, my arms are now a lot stronger. No broken doors yet, but knuckles have been left red a few times. I have not allowed myself to engage in any competitive activities in many years. I can’t. The odd thing is, I have not once in my life been in a fight. When I was 13, during a game of dodge ball, after being hit in the head, I tried to hit a boy on the opposing team in anger, and he raised his arm to block my wild swing, cracking my wrist. I most certainly deserved it.
Other than that, though, I have never taken out my anger on a living thing. Trees and the occasional plant notwithstanding. Since adolescence, I have rarely displayed this horrible temper in front of anyone. You probably never even saw it. I can control it, but I can’t control it. There are times when the anger builds up inside me, and there are other people around, and I begin to think, “Something has to get punched. Something has to get broken.” But I can hold it inside, until no one is around. If I can hold it for a while, why can’t I keep holding it? It’s just another one of my gifts. The less you realize you want, the more you realize you have. I do not understand money. When I say this, I don’t mean that I don’t understand how to conduct a financial transaction. I understand what a price is, and I, in the minority when considering the debt-riddled lives of many of my fellow First World citizens, understand what it means to have or not have enough money to purchase something. As my father said, “It’s not what you make – it’s what you spend.” With my newfound Buddho-nihilistic detachment, there are so few things which I want that I have ended up becoming, in a manner, quite rich. When I say that I I don’t understand This fact seems to things are how we
do not understand money, I also do not mean that why people in the modern world find it attractive. me self-evident – it can be used to buy things, and self-identify in the modern world.146
The most successful celebrities are products. Consider the real role of American life to Coca-Cola. Is any man as well loved as this soft drink is? No, when I say I do not understand money, what I mean is, I do not understand how the human race came to evolve into one in which all wealth – literally all of it – is speculative. Though I undertstand the mechanics of a financial transaction, I do not understand how we have come, as a race, to agree that a piece of paper or a small fistful of 146
I would have written “the Western World”, but in my travels through China and my interactions with Koreans and Japanese, I find that the neo-materialist attitudes of the emergent nations of the world are so inexorably tied to acquisition and ostentatious displays of same that the axiomatic notion “Americans are materialistic” is as quaint an uninformative as one such as “Asians are hard-working”. Every major city I visited in China had a Rolls Royce dealership, and outlets for Gucci, D & G, Vuitton, and on, and on. A peasant pushing a cart laden with dirty recyclables past a shop in which a single product would cost more, many times over, than what he could hope to earn in ten years was a photogenic, but not uncommon, sight. And the greatest preponderance of upper-end vehicles I have ever seen in an urban setting was in Kiev.
metal can be exchanged for a tangible, consumable good. I do not understand how early civilizations made the leap from realizing that shiny metals and gemstones were pretty to the wholesale, unflinching agreement that the possession of them connoted ‘Wealth.’ When the conquistadores went to South America, they were overwhelmed by the vast amounts of gold and jewelry which the indigenous tribes possessed. And promptly divested them of it. When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, “Let us pray.” We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land. But the point remains that evolving societies the world over, through independent genesis, have reached the same conclusion – that possession of these stones and metals equates with ‘value’. You cannot eat them. You cannot sleep in them. They have no intrinsic worth outside that which we have, again, collectively and universally, agreed to bestow upon them. It is the ultimate act of large-scale mimetic transfer, beauty! value, agreed upon by like, everyone. I have a good portion of my modest assests invested in the stock market, with the help of a friend. I neither know nor understand what he is investing my money in, but it is, to me, largely immaterial (and I’m aware of that double entendre). I have known this friend for a while, and I know that he has done well for himself with his investments. When he lived in Manhattan and I in Brooklyn, I would go to his apartment and do bong hits while playing Scrabble, and periodically, he would get up, go to the computer, click the mouse a few times, and come back, smiling, and say “I just made $14,000.” I trust him, and his acumen, and I trust that he will not invest too heavily in any companies whose moral import is egregiously lacking. However, I do not understand how the stock market works. Again, I don’t mean that I don’t understand how shares are bought and sold, or what ‘insider trading’ is. I know a fair amount of the terminology, and could even, if pressed, explain what ‘put options’ and ‘call options’ are, simply because I’ve asked the aforementioned friend and he’s told me. What I don’t understand, again, is how the entire society has agreed that buying ‘shares’ 147 was a sensible way of investing one’s money in the first place. Countless pyramid schemes and large-scale defraudings and the recent falls of many ‘venerable’ major trading houses would attest to the fact that the stock market is not understood by the majority of those who trade in it. 148 Buying stock is somewhat like betting on horses, except Which are just a concept, and can be divided or devalued, without warning, as per the dictates of ‘The Market’, which is also just a concept, and not a concrete entity, like a fruit market, or a meat market – your shares are not ‘at’ the company or ‘at’ the stock exchange any more than your money is currently ‘in’ your bank. 148 Or at least not by those who aren’t doing pretty well in it. 147
that sometimes the race isn’t ultimately run, and sometimes someone might jump out from the grandstand to tackle the horse you’ve bet on as it nears the finish line, or sometimes the people maintaining the track might secretly improvise a hole in the middle of it into which your horse might fall, or sometimes the government might step in to declare your bet invalid before, during, or after the race, and all these things can happen, at the cost of your actual money, but people still rush to the track to play.149 I’m sure books have been written on the history of money, but I, ever the devourer of the printed word, feel no real need to read one on the topic. Because it’s not going to explain the human instinct that first led us to feel that shiny metal should literally rule our world. Is it innate? I was made to reflect on this in Argentina, when that smooth-talking, smoother-moving taxi driver exchanged fake Argentine money for Our real US bills. Upon careful inspection (and after having the bills refused at the counter of a religious theme park to which the unscrupulous driver had taken Us), the bills were clearly false, but it made me question not only the integrity of the taxi drivers of Buenos Aires (which I did every time We stepped into a cab), but the very concept of money. What is it? North Korea has long been suspected of counterfeiting $100 US bills that are so good that experts identify them because they are ‘too clean’. Why is one piece of paper ‘currency’ and another not? Because there is a national bank behind it? If even a minute fraction of the bills in circulation were brought back to the banks of a nation at one time in exchange for the value which they represent, that nation would immediately descend into complete chaos.150 When the EU countries switched to the Euro on January 1, 2002, old currency reverted to simply being paper. For a few months, you could still use the old stuff or bring it back to a bank to exchange for Euros, but after that, it became kindling.151 Money is paper, but it’s also an agreement. It’s an agreement we must perpetually renew, lest our entire society fall apart. But it’s based on, what? Gold? In tenuous financial times, many advise investing in precious metals. But what makes them ‘precious’ in the first place? If I cashed in all the ‘worth’ I currently possess, I could purchase roughly 4 pounds of gold. 4 pounds, which would be around 6 pieces less than half the size of a 149
Which raises, fairly, many of the same questions about the validity of horse racing itself, analogy or no. 150 Which is what happened in Argentina in 2001, I think. 151 And what was bizarre was how fast all the national currencies disappeared from sight. I was in Spain on 1 January 2002, and within 5 days, you never saw the peseta again. ATMs started dispensing Euros, and any time you paid in pesetas, change was returned in Euros. It just goes to show how little cash people carry with them in the modern world.
standard house brick each. What would that mean? What would that do? Why should that be worth anything to anyone? And what would happen if people started to decide that it wasn’t worth anything? Any transaction more complex than ‘goods for goods’ or ‘goods for services’ is merely symbolic. However, barring an apocalypse, we won’t ever alter the extant symbolism again. You’re only as rich as what you feel inferior for not having. Some days, I feel very much like a millionaire. There are so many narrative strands in life which don’t get followed. X1, in fact, with X being an infinite number of unknowable value. Life must backward.
be
lived
forward,
however
it
can
only
be
understood
Life is the dress rehearsal for life. I passed a woman today on the street near work who looked very much like You. Same stature, same hairstyle. It engendered in me surprisingly little emotional effect. It’s not about You, You know. Well, it is about You, because You were the person I knew, and not someone else, in which case it would have been about Her. But that story would have ended in the same way, with only the details differing. Still not one of the Choose Your Own Adventure endings you’d be happy to get. It was You, but it could have been any of the other three women in the course You were in who I found more attractive than You, and I’m not saying that for spite, I’m saying it because it’s actually true, there were three very attractive girls in your class, one a Riot Grrl with a dirty little smile and lots of tattoos, one a beautiful red-haired Russian student of literature and of the world, and one a buxom Latina who was a video game dork and wanted to go to Japan. If any of them had sent me the message You sent me, I would have answered them before I answered You. Again, I’m not saying that to be spiteful or revisionist, but rather to point out that everything that happens is really quite random, when you come to think of it. Either everything matters, or nothing matters. Or something in between. And if I had been the type of guy that most guys are, I probably would have tried to get in touch with one of those other three girls, because I had their contact details from the course and I know they all at least thought favorably of me because I’m a good teacher and that was the role in which I presented myself to them. I have, at times, used the fundamental attribution error for personal
benefit. But I’m not that type of guy, and I don’t do that, and even when You sent me an email with Your phone number and told me to call You, even then, I still hesitated, because I wasn’t sure if You were my type, and then I called and You didn’t answer so I left a message and then by the time You called back later that night I had already smoked a joint so I was high and really debated not answering the phone, but then I did, and then We talked for two hours, and then, and then, and then, and then... I cook spaghetti for dinner. Every time I cook spaghetti, I remember a time when I was in Spain (perhaps) and I was cooking spaghetti, and I didn’t think about the fact that the flame coming up around the sides of the pot was too high, and since I didn’t break the strands when I put them into the boiling water (because, for some reason, I feel this to be wrong), some of them got singed at the end which was sticking out and I had to throw them away. These are the types of mistakes which plague me for years and years. I remember a World Cup match in 1994, and a guy, probably in his twenties, waving a German flag sitting next to us, and he wouldn’t stop waving it above us, and it was in our faces, and my father told him to stop, and the guy was an aggressive dick about it, but I was literally between them, and in no time at all, pushing ensued, above me, I didn’t move, and nothing really bad happened, except that my father’s sunglasses got knocked off and ended up several rows below us, and then we moved seats, and all I’m left with, nearly 20 years later, is another reason to feel shitty about myself because a 19-year old boy really should be able to defend himself and his father. My impotence spans a far wider range than simple sexuality. In a small Czech village in the early hours of a sunny spring afternoon, I found myself walking the streets of the town center, trying to experience Life. Suddenly, I saw an old man across the street from me slip and fall. It was a wide street, so I wasn’t very close to him. I am not sure if he even knew I’d seen his fall. I stopped. He didn’t appear to be moving, he did not even struggle to get up, but I could see that his eyes were open, glazed, and staring ahead. I started to cross the street towards him, then paused, realizing that I couldn’t speak a word of his language, and that I couldn’t be of any real help because I wouldn’t even be able to explain to someone else that there was a man who had fallen and was in need of assistance. I walked away, turned a few corners, and tried to forget about it. Retroactive anxiety. There is always, always something to feel bad about. Usually, you don’t even have to look that hard.
I have been teaching an ethics course online with my college in Brooklyn for five years now. Every semester, in the second half of the course, we apply the theories we’ve learned to real world situations like euthanasia, abortion, homosexuality, pornography, legal justice, etc. Every semester I field the same dismissive, pseudo-passive, self-denying, milquetoasty “I can’t tell nobody what they should think” evasions of the questions I ask. I read the same “only God got the right to take a life” posts. I am subjected to the same “it was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” arguments. Nothing can contribute more to peace of soul than the lack of any opinion whatever. A few semesters ago, I put a link to an article in the New York Times about the widespread prevalence of homosexuality in the animal kingdom. I connected this to a discussion forum in which I ask my students whether or not they think homosexuality is natural. Every semester since, I still get “Adam and Steve”. I still get “it just ain’t natural”, even after they’ve just read an article from arguably the most respected print source in the English language which says that it’s natural. I still get “If people choose to be homosexual, that’s they own choice”. I still get “If a man and a man have an adoption, they baby gonna turn out gay.” Evidence stands very little chance of holding its own against Belief. And our formative years see to it that most of what constitutes Belief is accounted for pretty early on. You could plausibly argue that no one ever really convinces anyone of anything they weren’t already prepared to believe. Young people don’t want old people telling them the way it is because they think they know themselves, and old people don’t want young people telling them the way it is because they have lived, and how the hell can ideas hope to compete against experience? It’s true – it wasn’t Adam and Steve. But it wasn’t Adam and Eve, either. It was microorganisms, then things swimming in the ocean, then reptiles, then birds and mammals, then a lot of other things, then us. As Christopher Hitchens said, the onus shouldn’t be on us to prove that god doesn’t exist – it should be on you to prove that he does. But what is ‘proof’? I am no better. If today I came face-to-face with a man who looked like the prototypical Jesus character of lore, if that man sat down with me and told me things that it was not logically possible for someone to know, if he told me things I’d never told anyone, and then told me I had to repent, and to believe, and to spread the word, upon his departure, I would go not to a church, but to the office of a psychologist, where I would explain what happened and ask for a prescription for something very, very strong.
If there were a devil, faith would be his greatest invention. Get people to believe in that which does not exist, and have them use that belief to destroy everything of value in the world. Or if I have a brush with death, and in the event, lose consciousness, and see a white light, a tunnel towards which I am being called, and I am subsequently saved and my sentience returns, I will not feel a sense of comfort in knowing that there is something bigger out there, because I have read that when you lose the oxygen flow to your brain, you hallucinate. You see that white light because that’s physiologically what happens in that situation. I am beyond salvation. But please, don’t pray for me. And, while it would be polite to say I respect different views on this topic, it wouldn’t be true. When I meet someone who professes a genuine degree of faith but yet still seems moderately intelligent, the only thing I really want to say to them is, “No, but really – really – you don’t really believe in that, right?” Jesus is the Tooth Fairy for adults. Muhammed is Santa Claus for Muslims. Praise unto his name. We live in a world where everyone is firmly convinced that they know the answers. And if their answers don’t correspond with yours, then yours are wrong. And if logic and empiricism are your thing, then that’s fine. But if they aren’t, then, quite likely, even better. As the guy who comes on after Jon Stewart said, “The facts may change, but my opinion never will.” When people grow older, they come to be responsible for what they know. If they then continue to refer to an iconography of excrement, they have to embrace excrement as worthy of their attention, and direct the enthusiasm of their fellows to excrement – not just to the discovery of the truth about excrement, but to excrement. At least a few people who have died in the last 48 hours in tornadoes in the midwestern US must have had, as part of their last thoughts, “Man, that apocalypse thing came after all, just two days late.” And it’s probably safe to say that the guy who predicted The Rapture on May 21 is still hoping, just a little bit, that the winds don’t die down just yet. I have a cold, and it isn’t getting worse, but it isn’t going away. Working 4 days a week and studying at the end of the term is such a drain on my time that it’s making me angry. Today I didn’t go to the gym because I’m just too tired. I have an assignment that will see me in the library again until midnight, and this weekend I’m not even going out because there are two more papers to be done in the next
two weeks and I haven’t even begun the research for one of them. Being busy is a good way not to think about more important things, but it also gets old fairly quickly. Who am I, though, to complain? What percentage of the world’s workers toil daily in Sisyphean misery, without respite for the entire of their working lives? How must it be to wake up and know that all of the time in your day, and the time in the days and weeks and months after that, is accounted for? What must it be like never to have time for introspection? Asks the author, 110,000 words in. Lonely people see double entendres everywhere. “For the same reason I can pick up this pencil, tell you its name is
‘Steve’ and go like this-” [breaks pencil] “and part of you dies, just a little bit on the inside. Because people can connect with anything. We can sympathize with a pencil, we can forgive a shark, and we can give Ben Affleck an Academy Award for screenwriting. People can find the good in just about anything but themselves.” Oprah has her last show. The world weeps. It makes the front page of the newspapers, even here. I knew someone who used to go to sleep counting, not sheep, but people against whom he had grievances – bullies from childhood, kindergarten teachers, back to nannies, even, bossess, employees, anybody awful up to the preceding day. When they were rounded up in his mind, he would machine-gun them down. If it turned out he had left out anybody, he would have to start all over. Round them up. Gun them down again. Slept without difficulty. Judgment Day may be compiled of private arsenals like these. I no longer read my favorite authors. I no longer listen to my favorite music. I no longer watch my favorite movies. I have no affinity with my favorite animal, baseball player, or singer. The delineation ‘favorite’ says more about how you want people to see you than how you actually feel or think. Sometimes, I “Like” things I don’t even like. My favorite pair of shoes is one which I like so much that I never wear them, for fear of dirtying them or getting caught in the rain. As a result, no one knows they are my favorite. “Anything processed by memory is fiction,” said Freud. Freud also said, “We have no memories from our childhood, only
memories that pertain to our childhood.” What does this mean? It means for me that memory is a dream-machine; composition is a fiction-making operation; history is the conventional wisdom the victors tell.” I sometimes like to walk behind a beautiful woman, not to observe her without her notice, but to observe the looks on the faces of passersby coming in our shared direction, as they try not to make evident their own stares. Kundera’s famously posited conundrum: would you rather promenade down the main street of your hometown with the most beautiful girl in town on your arm, but not be able to have physical relations with her, or would you prefer to have physical relations with this same woman but be bound by secrecy never to tell a soul about what you’d done? For large chunks of our relationship, We hardly had what would be called a ‘normal’ level of physical relations. But still, it felt good to parade You around. The rest of the town didn’t have to know. Here’s the story: life is a dream. It’s all a story we’re telling ourselves. Things are dreams, just dreams, when they’re not in front of your eyes. What is in front of your eyes now, what you can reach out and touch, now, will become a dream. The only thing that keeps us from floating off with the wind is our stories. They give us a name and put us in a place, allow us to keep on touching. Reality is just the most vivid dream we’re having at the moment. When we reminisce, what we are longing for is a version of ourselves in a place at a time with other people at that specific time and place for them, too. You can return to an address, to a physical location. You can return to the company of someone you’ve known before. You can recreate every part of an experience. But you can’t recreate a time. Not knowingly, not by accident. Rivers. See also: the stepping in of. When I’m missing You now, who is it that I’m missing? It’s clearly not the physical You, because if, somehow, You ended up here before me, it would be powerfully uncomfortable for Us both. Even if, by some magical twist of fate, a You appeared to me magically transformed back into the You that made one half of Us, it wouldn’t ‘count’. It wouldn’t be the same, because I’d know it wasn’t the same. When I’m remembering You now, who is it that I’m remembering? It is nothing more than the You which I created, the You who presented
herself to me at a time, in a place, in a certain physical and mental state. A You whose river can no longer permits be stepped in. A good deal of the emotions I thought You felt were, upon further contemplation, fabricated. They were projections of what I wanted You to feel, of what I thought You would be feeling at a certain time. They were manifestations of how I framed You. Reality? I’m not sure. All I’ve got is the view from these two eyeholes. I said, “We don’t know each other.” David said comfortably, “We’re brothers. We don’t need to know each other.” Today I went to the Melbourne Museum again, this time with my elementary level class. We entered a hall filled with a series of exhibits outlining the geological and biological history of Victoria throughout the millenia. While most of the students played with the touch screens and took photos of fossils, one young Brazilian girl looked at her surroundings and waved a dismissive hand. "I no believe this," she said. "I believe God." "Ok" I said, because that's the only thing you can say to someone who feels this way which will a) make any sense to them and b) not cause offense. Even if their English isn't elementary level. To the fundamentalist, the historical museums of the world must be fantastical places indeed. Short stories I’d like to write right now, but won’t: One about a blue-collar guy, maybe a construction worker, who finds out, while sitting in a café one morning having breakfast and watching TV, that his ex-girlfriend, with whom he’d had a bad break-up, but really bad, has died in an accident. And the people he’s having breakfast with, they don’t know who the girl is, maybe he dated her before he started working with them. But he just kind of gives a little laugh, and smiles, and he thinks, “It’s going to be a good day”. And one about a married guy, and we start (of course) in medias res, and he’s in a hospital bed, and his wife is being horribly cold to him considering the apparent circumstances, as he’s recovering from an accident in which he was hit by a car. We find this out in snippets, and we don’t know why she’s being so horrible to him, except that it’s slowly revealed that the accident that hurt him also killed their young child. Perhaps it happened when he was getting off a tram, and a car speeding by didn’t stop, and the rub is, he feels as though he would have had time to react, but instead of turning in a way that would have made the brunt of the impact borne with his body, he jumped back, instinctively, and the kid got hit instead.
And one about a guy and his wife, and they are on holiday in the north of Spain152 , and they are away from their two kids for a change, to ‘rekindle the romance’. And they catch up with an old friend of his and his wife, a Spanish couple. And the back story is that the guy did a year abroad and the Spanish guy was his friend from back then. And we follow them over the course of a few days of their holiday, and there’s a lot of flashback, and in the end, they fight about nothing at all, and he ends up down on a bench overlooking the majestic northern coast of the Cantabrian Sea, smoking a joint of hash he’s bummed off a few local kids and wondering when things will feel right, if ever again. But why write these stories? Why take the time and effort to resort to artifice, to elaborate fabricated details, to constructing ‘believable’ dialogue and ‘genuine’ emotion? Why should I do this, when what I really want is just to say that sometimes, when somebody fucks you over, you kind of wish they were dead, and wouldn’t be all that sad if you found out that they were? Or that if you have kids, society expects you to value their lives more than you do your own, which to me is simply absurd? Or that if you get married, even if you think you are with the “love of your life”, you most likely will reach a point where you question that assessment so strongly that the doubt becomes crippling? Isn’t it more interesting and valuable to simply say what you’re feeling in a direct, honest way? Isn’t that what reality television and blogs and memoirs and tell-alls are all about? Don’t we, as a society, want to know what’s really happening? Why not let our narratives be genuine and our fictions be truly fictional? Why not let our cultural product fall into one of two diametrically opposed categories, the dirty, banal realism of 16 and Pregnant or the dragon- and sorcerer-laced fantasy of Harry Potter? Why go out of our way to construct fictional worlds that seem believable, when we have so much source material to use without all that production? ...isn’t one’s pain quotient shocking enough without fictional amplification, without giving things an intensity that is ephemeral in life and sometimes even unseen? Not for some. For some very, very few that amplification, evolving uncertainly out of nothing, constitutes their only assurance, and the unlived, the surmise, fully drawn in print on paper, is the life whose meaning comes to matter most. You can take the first book you lay your hands on and with your eyes closed point to any line and say: A book could be written about this. 152
I actually started this one a while ago, mission aborted 8000 meandering words in.
When you open your eyes you will seldom find you are deceived. The photographer Jeff Wall spends many thousands of dollars recreating meticulously-detailed quotidian scenes on studio lots and then photographing them. A few years ago, I went to an exhibition of his at MoMA. He spent a quarter of a million dollars designing a vacant building to look just so run down, and then hired people to stand outside of it and pretend like they were waiting to get into a club. And it looked just like the real thing. I Can’t Believe It’s Not Art. We’re on the planet for a very short time. Writing is our one chance, or perhaps our best chance, to understand what is really going on in another person’s consciousness. Don’t waste this opportunity telling me a good-night story. I sit in on the last lecture of my semester. Besides three projects to be submitted in the coming weeks, the first half of the course is done. It does not surprise me that it does not surprise me how relatively unimportant my stated purpose in coming here has been to the overall tenor of my stay in the country thus far. 36/72nds of the way home. Rounding second. I am still dealing with the lingering effects of a cold it seems the whole town is sharing. I am tired. The group goes to an end-of-semester dinner which I had no intention of going to even if I’d felt fine. I am somewhat disappointed with the way the program is being run, and don’t feel like breaking bread with the professors and administrators and putting on a happy face, something I’ve never been able to do, even when I’m feeling just splendid. At home, in my room, I overhear yet another fight between My Two Dads. These occur, if not on a nightly basis, at least a few times a week. Often the impetus is dinner – I hear the Hairdresser calling the Paramedic downstairs, and then the latter saying he’s not hungry, literally like a child, in a child’s voice. I have seen him literally stomp downstairs, then say, “Nup, I’m not hungry,” and run back upstairs. It is very, very hard to believe he is not acting. Tonight, as is often the case, I hear them hurling expletives at each other. F-bombs are dropped, insults spoken which, between two minimally sane and self-respecting people would constitute a major fight. But they are both very damaged goods, and so these exchanges are normal. At some point in life, we just want someone whose scars complement our own.
It goes on for a while, and gets interesting. I hear “shut up”, several times, at varying volume. I think I hear “drop dead” (if not tonight, I have definitely heard it in arguments past). Then I hear the Paramedic calling out, “H, H – I want my H,” and the Hairdresser answering, with authority, “I’m right here.” I put my ear to the door to get a better listen – if I open it, they will hear me and (perhaps) stop. I would literally give $50, put it right on the table in my room and have it disappear, to have a live CCTV feed of the scene in the kitchen right now. It’s reality television in my own home, and I can’t see the screen. After a while, it subsides. There are not many couples I know well which make me feel remose at not being part of a couple. I put in earplugs, just in case things get heated again, and go to sleep. I’d like to say to the Paramedic, “When I came to see the house for the first time, in the foyer, on my way out, you said to me ‘You’ve just got to be nice to people’. That’s what convinced me I’d like to live here. But you aren’t. You aren’t nice to people, or about people. You fight all the time with your lover, over literally nothing, you say horrible things to and about your family,153 you are racist and xenophobic and flat-out miserable at times.” But there’s probably no benefit in saying this. I don’t think “you’ve got to be nice to people.” In fact, I pretty much maintain the exact opposite position. “Being nice” doesn’t make the world a better place. It doesn’t make us feel better as individuals, either, because it often means we have to repress something in order to exude ‘niceness.’ Am I a better person than my flatmate for not pretending to espouse a position which I don’t? Linguistic nutterings. Nowadays, “literally” is most often used to mean “figuratively.” (e.g., “I literally shit my pants when I heard the news.”) “Actually”, as well, is usually employed in a metaphoric sense. (e.g., “I actually threw up in my mouth there a little bit.”) “It may sound racist” is played as an immunity card which allows the speaker to be racist without fear of reproach. (e.g., “It may sound racist, but aboriginals are just lazy people.”) “I could care less.” Well, if you could, maybe the matter under discussion is important to you. Most things are never meant. 153
It is not worth listing the things I’ve heard, but one representative example should suffice: “I’m not the type of person who has it in me to kill someone, and I know it sounds bad, but if I were going to, my mother, I would just slip her some poison or something.”
Illocution vs. Perlocution. I spend the morning of the last Friday of the first half of my life in the library, grading final exams for my online students in NY. There are so many things I have to do, it’s easy to engage in avoidance tactics and still be productive. Although to be fair, everything is an avoidance tactic for something. I chat online with a guy from my writing group in Korea who’s now in Colombia. He’s having a great time, but he’s broke. He can’t find enough work, and the work there is doesn’t pay a whole lot. Though in Colombia, even if you’re down to your last $50, you can still buy 10 grams of coke. He disappears from the chat, and I want to go have lunch, so before I sign off, I tell him that, if he’s at a point financially where he’ll have to go home, that I could help him out. He’s 10 years younger than me. I remember being broke at that age, but I had the Bank of Dad. After all, it’s only money. Which, like sex, seems a lot more important when you haven’t got it. At home, I end up in a ridiculous discussion with the Boys about the zodiac. It does not merit recounting, though at one point, the Hairdresser asks me, “What sign do you think I am?” and I tell him, “I don’t know, because I don’t even know what the signs are. That’s how unimportant it is to me.” I knew you were a Sagittarius! I knew you were an idiot. Talking about belief systems with people who don’t share yours is as fruitful as a tourist yelling at a taxi driver in a language he doesn’t understand. It’s like debating whether red or blue is a better color. Whether 3 is a more interesting number than 8. One person’s ‘fact’ is the other’s arbitrary declaration. Believers, be they in god, chakras, energy forces, stars, or wood sprites, are either so dogmatic as to make the impossibility of sustaining intelligent discourse a foregone conclusion, or they've been rendered milquetoast by what they would mistakenly term “being polite”, but which is, in reality, a fundamental inability to think critically about an issue from another point of view. Ultimately, all they can muster is a noncommittal "everyone has the right to think what they want and I ain't gonna tell nobody what they sayin' is wrong." Further discussion is rendered superfluous. And really, if we cannot agree on the terms of debate, any subsequent discourse is pointless anyway. God is not a person or a man or even a being of any kind. God is
loving other human beings. God is treating everyone you meet as if you love them. God is forgetting we’re all different and loving each other as if we’re all the same. God is what you feel when there’s love in your heart. It’s an awesome feeling. And it’s the real God. The only real God. At the gym, after my daily teaspoon of creatine, I work out. I don’t think I’m getting more energy, but the powder does seem to allow the weightlifting to go straight to your muscles – when I use the machines now, my biceps strain at the material of my shirt. Even afterwards, I feel this extra weight around my upper arms, and it’s still sinking in that it’s mine. I now go to the gym 5 times a week. I take a muscle growth supplement. If I read the proceeding two sentences one year ago, I would not have believed that they could apply to me. But now they do. And they seem ‘normal’, because they are. For me. Now. We all think that what we do is about right and what others do is extreme. We are all petits Aristotles, living to our own (perpetually revisable) Golden Mean. But anyone can go to the gym every day and grow muscles. Not everyone can go to the library every day and grow a brain. Intelligence is something to be proud of, but it isn’t exactly something you can cultivate or destroy. Kind of, you play the hand you’re dealt. For what it’s worth: For a long time, I wanted to work with my voice. When I came here for the first time, I got a radio show. This was something of a dream of mine. I played hip hop music, and I was, I believe, the only East Coast hip hop DJ on FM radio in Melbourne at that time (1996-1998). It was a student radio station, but it was, as we proudly announced, full frequency. 154 One time, when I was working in Melbourne Central selling portable audio equipment, a young kid who was a customer recognized my voice and said to me, “Hey, do you have a show on the radio?” It was probably one of the highlights of my life to that point. And maybe since. When I moved to Japan, I had a show, too. It was pre-recorded and played on a satellite radio station that I believe at least 5 to 12 people in the Tokyo metropolitan area listened to. It was a great thing to say, “I’ve got a radio show.” It was even better if the people I was saying it to couldn’t listen to it and hear how ordinary I was. In Barcelona, I was a DJ for a while, but I never had the dedication to the music to become good. 154
Though I guess they never did get their full-time broadcasting license, or at least, if they did, it’s not on a frequency I can find. The old one is now, interestingly, a gay and lesbian radio station.
A recurring theme. But really, I wanted to work with my voice. One time in Spain, I did some educational recordings. Only once. The best job I ever almost got was to read the English dubs of porn movies from other countries in the EU. Evidently, in the early 2000’s, much of this work was done in Barcelona. I went to an audition in a wood-paneled studio. They told me my voice was fine, but that I needed the residency papers that I never did get around to getting in order to do the job legally. In Poland I answered an ad in a bookshop and got a once-monthly gig reading words off a list to be used on an educational DVD produced by a church-related organizacja. 155 I have copies of the DVDs. At some point in 2005, Polish children pointed and clicked on beach ball and boat when I said them. I wanted to work with my voice, but the problem was, and is, that my voice isn’t that type of voice. It is not rich and buttery. It is not geographically-neutral. Perhaps I don’t sound like my aunts and uncles, who sound like the people on The Sopranos, but I don’t sound like the people on the radio, either. I remember one time saying, “The people on Seinfeld don’t have accents.” Because to me, they didn’t. Now, I don’t know exactly how I sound. After a very short while back here, people I met stopped saying to me, “Where are you from?” Either they don’t care, or it isn’t that obvious. When I go back to the US, though, I’m sure that for a while I will not sound like anyone else. When I watch American TV shows and movies now, already I keep thinking that the cars are on the wrong side of the road. It’s easy not to belong anywhere. I complete 2/3rds of a GTL. I wash different pieces of my bed linens at different times. Sometimes the pillow cases. Sometimes the fitted sheet underneath. Sometimes the blanket. So something always smells fresh. Shit doesn’t happen. Shit is caused by assholes. I go out to the goodbye dinner of the California Girl. She is going back to the US, and then to Chile, with her Australian boyfriend. I may see her again, but I don’t know how or where that would be. In the space of 2.5 months, I’ve begun and ended yet another friendship. We eat Thai food at the Thai restaurant we went to a few weeks back, which, I am now reminded, is an almost inconceivably loud place when crowded (which it is tonight). There is a table a few down from us where about three families with attendant children are finishing up a 155
In Poland, most organizacjas were.
meal. A few of the children are literally screaming as they are running around. The parents don’t seem to be nearly as bothered by this as I am. At one point, I catch the eye of a father, who is probably roughly the same age as me. I stare at him so fiercely that within 1.5 seconds of our eyes locking, he reaches down abruptly to one of his children and says something to quiet her. I’m like, real good at that. “All acts are acts of aggression, we know that,” the professor said. “The point is to give them other properties.” There are not many children I see who make me feel remorse at not having a child. Then we go to a karaoke bar where I am reminded that: 1) I don’t like karaoke and 2) I am tired. The “more comfortable when I’m uncomfortable” axiom doesn’t, unfortunately, apply to social situations. I peel off at midnight, and am happy only that I’m not the first one to bail. Tomorrow is another day. It promises to be no more exciting than this one, or any other. What if you have a child, and he/she doesn’t turn out the way you want him/her to? Maybe you have a child, and it’s born with a deformity, not enough of a deformity to make abortion necessary, maybe not even enough of a deformity to be detectable before birth. Then what? You live with the child for the rest of your life feeling bad wishing that he/she were ‘normal’, then feeling bad that you feel bad, because many kids with disabilities are ‘just fine’, though ‘just fine’ isn’t really the desired ceiling for our progeny. Or maybe you are intelligent, but your kid isn’t. Or maybe you are intellectual, but your kid doesn’t want to be. Either way, you can’t share books/ideas/theories/etc. Then what? You shake your head, get your stimulation elsewhere. Maybe you love travel, but your kid doesn’t even want a passport. Or maybe you have spent your entire life in the town where you were born, but as soon as your kid is old enough to leave (or maybe sooner), he/she is gone, on a bus/plane/train/thumb-garnered ride to Get Me the Fuck Out of Here, population: Not You. Then what? You wait for postcards/emails/Facebook updates. You become a spectator in your own blood’s life, if that. Or maybe your kid turns out to be gay, and you aren’t ok with that. Or maybe, your kid turns out to be gay, and you are ok with that, but your kid isn’t ok that you’re ok with that, so he/she still does other things just to piss you off. Then what?
Or maybe, you do everything right, you give your kid everything he/she could reasonably want, everything you can reasonably (or not) afford, and he/she still goes and steals money from your drawer, or takes the car and wraps it around a tree, or gets heavy into drugs and alcohol and ends up in jail, “or worse”, or throws a house party when you and your spouse go away for the weekend and destroys the place. Then what? Or maybe you do everything right, but your kid still, for whatever reason, just fucking hates you, and everything you stand for, even though he/she doesn’t even know what you stand for, and you feel that he/she is just hating you because it’s what kids that age (whatever age that is) do. Then what? Or maybe your kid is good for a while, but then he/she hits puberty and starts dating someone you can’t stand, or someone who seems ok, but fundamentally changes your child, and the more you try and coerce/cajole/advise, the more distant your child becomes. Or maybe your child isn’t even a child when he/she meets this person, but rather he/she is old enough to make his/her own decisions, and then he/she decides to marry this person, and it’s a person you and your spouse hate, or a person who hates you and your spouse, and, like, that’s it. You don’t gain a son/daughter, you lose one. Then what? Or maybe you don’t believe in god, and that’s important to you, but your kid does. Or maybe you do believe in god, and that’s important to you, but your kid doesn’t. Then what? Or maybe everything is fine, and your kid loves you, and you and your spouse feel that having him/her was the best decision you have ever made, and then one day, your kid just gets run over by a car. So that happens. Then what? Or maybe, your kid grows up, and just doesn’t have time for you anymore, ‘Cat’s in the Cradle’ style. And when you get old, that kid is not going to take care of you the way you took care of him/her when he/she was a child, and there’s nothing you can do to change his/her mind, and the more you try and guilt-trip him/her into feeling something, the more evident it becomes that this tactic has no real power, and that as soon as your child is financially independent of you, he/she no longer needs you in any real sense. So you’ve spent all this money, all this time, all these efforts, and there are no Hallmark Moments©, there are no fishing trips, there is no shared joy in mutual growth. You sacrificed a whole lot, and got a fat load of jack shit in return. Then what? Or maybe, your kid grows up, and just doesn’t care. He/she just doesn’t get it. And by ‘it’, we mean, Life. And there’s nothing you can say or do to change this, and, as any good parent feels the pains of his/her child more acutely than his/her own, you are just beside yourself. And you didn’t do anything wrong. And it wasn’t your fault on any level. But you look at your kid, and you just want to take him/her and grab him/her by his/her shoulders and shake him/her, saying “Just enjoy the good stuff! Life is ok!” But you can’t, and you
know it wouldn’t have an effect anyway, even if you did. Then what? “I think I made a bad investment” my father said to me, some months ago, re: having me. I did not disagree. Nor did I feel as though knowing this from him would alter the course of my actions. Having a child is unique. It’s not like other Big Decisions. You buy a house, you can sell it. You quit your job, you can find another. You get married, you can get divorced. But you have a child, and, for at least 18 years, legally, if not morally, well, you’ve got to deal with that. I wake up without an alarm clock, which is suddenly and not the norm in my life. I still don’t feel 100%. Though, to be fair, I don’t think anyone over the age of say they do, relatively speaking. Lygon Street at 9AM on a Saturday morning looks planned a dinner party for 400 people but forgot to invitations.
the exception 16 could ever like someone send out the
On the last Saturday morning of the first half of my life, I go to market. Shopping in an outdoor market engenders a sense of community that most First World city dwellers don’t often experience anymore. Commiserating over produce with an appraising squeeze and a learned eye, comparing prices from one vendor to the next. The Vic Market has been around almost as long as the city itself, and some of its customers look like they may well have been there when the opening day ribbon was cut. I chat with a guy about cherries. I buy two carrots here, four onions there. I say “sorry” and “excuse me” when I bump into someone. For a brief time, I am again a member of the human race. …people do, as a rule, equate self-worth with, or at least partially measure it by, the degree to which they feel included in society. Languages in which I’ve completed market transactions: Japanese Spanish Polish Korean English (American and Australian) While living in Brooklyn, it seemed odd to measure produce in pounds. They don’t weigh much. I wonder if You are aware that tomorrow is my birthday. Four years ago tomorrow night, We went out to dinner at a place on
14th Street, over on the West Side. We sat out at a courtyard and drank wine. I can’t remember the name of the place, but I know I had fish, and I know it was good, and I know I never went back. There are a lot of restaurants in New York. This was 6 days before I was due to go to Spain for the summer. I wanted to walk across the country for the second time. You never step onto the same Camino twice. Nothing had happened yet between Us, but pretty much, We knew. What did We know? I remember touching Your hand at the dinner table, because We were already at that point. I remember saying that Your hands looked old, which was a wonderfully inappropriate thing to say to someone with whom you are about to embark upon a relationship. I’ve never really been good at this. In my fairly weak defence, it was the first time I’d really looked at brown skin up close. On the street, after dinner, when We were about to part, You back uptown to Harlem on the 2, me to Bedford Stuyvesant on the Brooklyn-bound A, We did not want to say goodbye. We were holding hands, laughing nervously, and doing a little awkward dance that would’ve been appropriate for two people half our age. Which would have made me 16, and You 12.5. We kissed, then, I think after saying “We should probably kiss”. We did this a few times. I wanted to put my hand on the back of Your head, but you can’t do that with black people’s hair. I had, at that point, a lot to learn. I hadn’t kissed anyone in nearly a year and a half. It provoked a very unexpected, very full, erection, which I tried to hide from You by pulling away a bit. Though I’m sure You noticed. Then we said goodnight. On the way home, I realized I was no longer as excited about spending the summer in Spain as I had been earlier in the day. It was always going to be easy to remember Our anniversary. It was, arguably, the best birthday I’ve ever had. Correction: not that arguably. We met again one time before I left. You came to my house, and spent the night. It was unseasonably hot, and I hadn’t bothered to get the air conditioner out of the basement and install it in the window. After all, I was leaving for the summer. I got to second. And then We went to sleep. And then I got on a plane and left. Somebody’s always going somewhere. And then. And then. And then. There was a time when I didn’t think about Us ending. I suppose it seemed like Roll Credits, to me. If something already happened, then it wasn’t impossible.
You have now been out of my life as long as You were in it. Though it doesn’t really feel that way. 3 sitcom seasons. 1 drama season. 36 Australian films. 18 books. All consumed since arriving here. Who says I haven’t been productive? Sunday. Only a few steps till the summit now. Wrappin’ it up here, Boss. Wrap it up, now. One never finishes a work of art, one abandons it. I walk half an hour to an ‘independent art fair’ that I can tell isn’t even worth entering as soon as I arrive. I do a 30-second turn about the place and deliberately avoid the gaze of the guy who gave me the flyer for this event last night in a bar, where he told me he was an organizer of the fair. He seemed like a nice guy. I could use some friends who are doing things here. At many other junctures of my life, I would have gone over and chatted with him. But recently, I don’t even want to see the people I want to see. Have You Seen This Cat? Yes, in fact I have. On a poster just like this one, about three blocks back. I walk back downtown, on a day that is wintry Melbourne gray like I haven’t seen in 13 years. Back down the road that leads to the colleges, to the uni. Back down Memory Lane. Some afternoons, sitting on a park bench and crying for a little while doesn’t seem like the worst way to pass the time. Though I wish this were being felt for literary effect. As it is, I have to speed up my walking pace to reach a bench far enough away from the normal park goers before I begin to sob. Go on, make a wish. Sometimes it makes you sadder to see someone that’s really happy, really engaged in life when you have detached. I'm alive, I'm alone, and I never wanted to be either of those. Sometimes the rain cloud rolls in, and it just settles down for a while.
Today it’s not bad, though. Just a few tears, a light drizzle. It’s not crying like I cried last year when I lived in exile in the mountains outside of Seoul, with a job that was too easy and provided too much free time and nothing, literally nothing, to do, but walk up and down the same desolate main street, eat at the same handful of restaurants, take the same hike up the same mountain, and spend hours immersed in my own head, a most dangerous place to be, especially at the time. There were days when I felt it building inside me and I knew I’d have to cry, the way you feel a pressure in your bladder when you have to urinate, and I’d make sure I was home with the door locked before I began. One night last winter, near the end, let’s say it was a Friday when I hadn’t taken the bus into Seoul because I couldn’t be bothered spending money on yet another night of unfulfilling socialization, I just lie on my bed, and when the sobs came, they didn’t stop, and my body literally shook with them, to the point where it hurt, to the point where I was nauseous, to the point where I reminded myself of how I used to cry 30 years prior to avoid going to school, to the point where I was able to see myself outside myself and marvel in awe at how strongly these tremulous rumblings of despair needed to be expressed, at how long and hard I needed to let them out, at how much there was inside of me. The DP just sat in the swivel chair in front of my desk and shook his head, speechless, until finally, he told me, contrite, ”Hey, man, you don’t deserve this. Really, you don’t.” A point came where nothing was frightening because everything was. And as ridiculous as it may sound, sometimes all any of us needs in life is for someone to hold our hand and walk next to us. So relatively speaking, today’s emotion isn’t all that bad. At any rate, for the last several years, the majority of moments in my life in which I recall displaying any real emotion, that emotion was sadness. Life is simply what our feelings do to us. I see the football oval where the Blues used to play. Now it’s an amateur ground. There’s a match going on inside. I don’t feel like paying for more nostalgia when there’s so much on offer free of charge, so I continue down Royal Parade. I see Ormond College. I see the exit where I hit a girl on a bicycle, with my old neon yellow Celica. 156 I see the dormitory building in which I lost my virginity to the Ex-Girlfriend. I see Naugton’s again, the pub we used to go to on Monday nights, which is still boarded up, awaiting conversion into something trendy and devoid of history. Inside, all the tables and chairs still remain. It’s like there was a 156
She was fine, and going too fast on the sidewalk in front of the blind driveway exit from the college grounds, for what it’s worth.
nuclear bomb, and all that’s missing now are the drunken college students. And what of this? Sometimes, when I write about a feeling, upon finishing, I look at what I’ve written and realize that I no longer feel that way at all, that I may never have truly felt that way, or that I was simply waxing hyperbolic for effect. In these cases the written words signify nothing more than themselves. They are a mimetic desire to express an experience, but relate little of the experience in its actuality. Even the most ordinary experience of a thing or event in time can never be fully or adequately described in words. Conversely, at other times, after writing about an emotion, I realize that I feel whatever I’ve written all the more strongly for having articulated it. In these cases, the written word serves to crystallize previously inchoate feelings, to give them form and structure and a conciseness they lacked when they existed only in the thought-realm. When this happens, I often refer to my own words later on in conversation. I quote myself, because I feel that I have said it best. Into which group fall my reflections about You? Into which group falls all of this? Must I wait for Time to make that determination? “Whatever feelings I harbored then – no longer exist. They all either passed or changed.” Pushkin’s disavowal of earlier writings at age 30. Much of the story of my life which I wrote 8 years ago seems no longer applicable. How will I feel in 2019? There was an abandoned pharmacy/soda shop on the main street of an insignificant town next to the insignificant town in which I grew up. It must have closed up in the 1960s, but in the 1980s, it still sat as it had on its last day of business. Chairs and tables intact. Goods on the shelves. A one-room diorama of a bygone era. No one ever broke in or looted it. These were different times. If I had been older, I think I would have tried to do something about opening up those Al Caponean ethnocultural vaults. At 12 years old, I was just curious if there were any baseball cards inside. Any time I’d drive past, I was sent wondering what it would’ve been like when the soda jerk was flowing and the jukebox was on. I was sent wondering what it was like to live in an America where people sat down and socialized in pharmacies. A perfect time capsule, buried above ground, with viewing windows for all.
Kind of, I thought, that’s how it might be coming back here. Can a man ever be truly satisfied with his life? P.F., Seattle, Wash. Dear P.F., No. Unless that man is Bono. Or Jay-Z. Bono and Jay-z, I imagine, are satisfied. And if they aren’t, they should keep it to themselves. Things I Have, at the End of the First Half: My health A job I don’t mind going to every morning A career More in the bank than, with my current desires, I conceivably need A big comfortable bed A house with a patio Nine more months on a visa for a country in which not much is wrong Things I Don’t Believe In, at the Culmination of my 35th Year: Fate Religion, organized or nonAstrology Faith Coincidence Idealism Shaving Cream Luck Objectivity That about covers it. On the last page of the last book I read in the First Half, the lines: ...what if one’s son (or, and this seems unimaginable, daughter) simply, from the first and in every way, doesn’t turn out right, or is unhappy all his life, what then? Indeed. As if the knowledge that someone else has made a similar observation imbues my own with more objective validity. Mom was diagnosed with leukemia in her 35th year. Dad suffered a myochardial infarction in his which nearly ended his
life. I have made it through relatively unscathed. At least from the neck down. I guess I’m just neurotic. Nothing else seemed to work quite so well, to be so serviceable and friendly. You don’t care to. I don’t care to. It isn’t a New York obligation. There’s already somebody. I don’t like the way you talk to waiters. I’m not an agency. You’re not an agency. Whatever. I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. The task of the novelist is not to narrate great events but to make small ones interesting. A few weeks ago, I downloaded the entire ouevre of Yo La Tengo. The name popped up somewhere and it made me recall Luna, a band I like, who were often mentioned in the same breath as Yo La Tengo, presumably because they existed contemporaneously and both bore the moniker ‘Indie’ while it still maintained a semblance of meaning. I downloaded six CDs in one torrent. 94 songs. And I put them on my Ipod, but it’s been hard to connect with them. Not because the music is bad; it’s actually the kind of music I would have liked when it came out, had I known about it then. But when you download music in a block like that and drop it onto a computer, there’s no context. There’s no album art and no liner notes. You don’t know which album came first, or what the songs’ titles are. I didn’t have to buy each of these CDs one at a time, and listen to them at a time when music was finite and funds for its purchase even moreso. A time when I would have been forced by financial need and lack of alternate options, to play the CD a few more times that I’d even wanted to. And when that happened, that’s when I would really have built a connection to the music. That’s when I would have started liking a track or two I didn’t like at first simply because liking them made it easier not to skip tracks on the album. The music would have grown on me. I would’ve had an important moment or two, or a good high 157 , while listening, and that would have formed part of my personal narrative with the group. We would’ve “been through things” together. I would’ve re-listened to the older catalogue in anticipation of a new album coming out, and built a musical arc for the band through discussion and reflection. I would’ve compared and critiqued. It’s entirely possible I would feel today about the band as I do about some of those which are among my favorites. But nowadays, it’s 30 seconds a track with a finger on the fast-forward, just in case. It’s one time through an album, on shitty computer speakers, and if it isn’t the best thing you’ve heard in a while, you 157
Effectively one in the same, here.
drag that file to the Recycle Bin and never think about it again. We’re all viewing the world on TiVo now. Sunday night. The final track on the “A” side. How I imagined it would be, two days ago: On the last night of the first half of my life, I sit down to a quiet dinner with the DP. I haven’t seen him much of late. I’ve been too busy. We share a bottle of wine. “I don’t really mind you, you know,” I tell him. “Yeah, and that takes a lot of the fun out of it,” he responds. “You know, I’ll always be here,” he tells me. “There isn’t much I can do about that,” I concede. Resolved: There is no Arequipa. Resolved: When this visa ends, so does my time here. No sense in watching the same movie twice. Even if I really liked it the first time. Resolved: Soy quien soy. Everyone could have been someone they aren’t. Everyone has unactualized realities which, sometimes, in the dead of night, play little games with their heads. No one has lived a life devoid of “What ifs”. Though few have ever deserved one as dominated by them as mine. I could’ve been Derek Jeter. I could’ve been Danny Fogelman. Though, if I’m to give myself any credit at all, there are probably a few things that I’ve done which they haven’t, too. I could’ve been married by now with children and real estate and a whole set of answers to questions I don’t even ask anymore. But I’m not. One day I may take a wife, and that will be the best way to describe it. It will be just as random and ultimately unrewarding as any other major decision I’ve made in my adult life. And if there’s a pill that would make me not feel this way, then surely I don’t want to take it. Because that would be a pill which obscures reality as I see it, and have for quite some time. Perhaps I am to end as Marcel Marien, whose tombstone reads: “There is no merit in being anything at all.” How it is: I spend the afternoon in the library, and go home to rest. The next paper isn’t due for 10 more days but if the reading doesn’t get done now, those days will pass quickly and uncomfortably. I go home when the sun goes down and rest for a bit. Then I pick up my computer again, planning to eat a pizza from the place across the street and then go and sit in the library to keep on ingesting information.
On the way out, I run into J_____. I haven’t seen him in 3 months. Better put: I met this man once, three months ago. He’s got his weed box in his hand. We exchange greetings, and I apologize for not being able to stick around. I am fairly committed to spending this night eating a pizza in the park and then reading until I am ready to pass out. Happy Birthday To Me. I get the pizza, and eat it on a bench on a pretty path on campus. I spend two hours in the library. But I don’t have to do this. I don’t have to avoid even the people I want to see. I don’t have to prove that I’m ‘right’. So at 9 o’clock, I pack up and go back to the house. I can smell the weed two steps past the door. I sit down with the boys and smoke a few joints. The Paramedic acts like a drunk asshole again. The Hairdresser tells the same story he told last time about how he grabbed a drunk guy’s cock in Brunswick St. during a festival while he was dressed in drag. I feel silently guilty about having called a kid to see a room on Lygon Street tomorrow. I thought I needed a change. But I can’t move. This is, for the moment, my life. This is, for the moment, home. Everything is only ever for the moment. I smoke till I should go to bed, and then continue on a few hours more. Midnight strikes, but I tell none of those assembled that it is now my birthday. J_____ leaves, My Two Dads go to sleep, and I stay up one solitary joint more. The last sip of a cup of honeyed tea, where all the undissolved honey aggregates at the bottom of the cup, then slowly slides mouthward when the cup is inverted, is far and away the best. Life, however, is not a cup of tea. Not mine, at least. THC has a remarkable ability to make the shallow seem profound. Alone, I lie in bed, and wait for sleep to come. I do not write any of this to garner pity. I do not write any of this to engender sympathy. I write all of this simply to present an account. That these things happened. That I felt these feelings and thought these thoughts. That I was.
That, for now, I still am. With or without You. Perhaps it would have been better if every writer had the ambition to write a single story in his lifetime, and worked on this story until the final moment of his life. We don’t get to choose what or whom we love...we just don’t get to choose. And you never really stop loving someone, either. For what it’s worth. Love is different for every person. For some it’s hate, for some it’s joy, for some it’s fear, for some it’s jealousy, for some it’s torture, for some it’s peace. For some it’s everything. I pass out. I wake up. It is Monday morning. I have reached the summit. I rub the sleep from my eyes. I take a brief survey of my surrounds. And then slowly, cautiously, unavoidably, I reach out my foot, and plant it firmly on the ground.