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October 9, 2001
The potato boiling authoress’ book party reminded me of something that I had forgotten about her. She is one of many good looking sisters. A many sibling’d splendor. Her closely shared DNA can be found orbiting about her in many permutations. In a room she and her family are their own galaxy. One sister is present at the party with two of her own offspring; two girls stamped in their familiar gene foundry. The leit motif of feature, a varied palette of eyes and hair, but all with the echo of their own blood. Displaying that ability some families have of apparently subsuming the other half of the genes: “look no daddy, we cloned them.” Celebrating the way that a large family derives a degree of buoyancy from its own mass, creating a mythology out of its members.
I once had a roommate with a similarly large, predominantly female family. There were six sisters. I couldn’t keep the sisters names or the various strains of their soap operatic lives straight in my head. I was drowning in sisters, apparently I was living not with one sister but with all of them. Such proliferation of life both fascinated and repelled me. My own family always felt like a drifting triangle, winding down, two-stepping with entropy. Being without siblings, without offspring, and at the end of a series of small, withering families perhaps I merely console myself with this theory out of cold necessity, but somehow it has always felt like a suitable arrangement to me. I harbor a perverse pleasure in the fact that we are dying out. Relieved that the tribe is ready to relinquish its double helix at the gates of extinction. Prepared to revel in the ecstasy of dénouement, the accelerated pleasure of ending. To clock out from the factory of evolution. A delicious blasphemy.
A friend’s grandmother used to say on bringing her and her siblings to one of the vast Irish beaches and finding other humans present on it, even two or three, “Eugh, people....” She would turn on her heels, dragging the army of small children she had custody of for the day and seek out another beach. Fortunately for all involved it is not impossible to find an Irish beach empty of people. There she was with her tribe, gregarious with her own flock but not willing to descend onto the planes to mingle with the great soup of humanity. I have missed out on this grandmother’s conviction that one’s own are more than merely “people”, and on the pleasure she derived from being surrounded by the delicious infinity of variation she witnessed in her family, that which rendered her extended family simultaneously transparent and acutely visible to her.
I was looking down at the beach delighted that there were people there, people that looked very different from my own tribe; I went and joined them.
October 4, 2001
An invitation to a book party. The author, a friend unseen for years from college who resides in Ireland, has written a children’s book being published in the US. When I first lived here, in a self-made Irish ghetto on Flatbush Avenue Extension, she came to stay in what we referred to as nightmare dormitory. Whether it was a long standing thing or something that developed in the close quarters of the walk through apartment I don’t know, but she developed a passion for one of the permanent occupants, another friend from college. She would get up very early, before the staggered stagger to the bathroom, and boil potatoes. The potatoes were intended for the loved one’s breakfast. They would sit dry and floury in a pot waiting for him to arise and for her to fry them to perfection. Her attentions, particularly the potato boiling, irritated him. Living six to an apartment, boiling potatoes, drinking whisky. It would be a play to avoid on, even off, Broadway. Somebody I had developed a similarly misguided crush on once made a remark about the potato boiling authoress. It must have been spring or summer as she wore a series of slightly anachronistic cotton dresses that all featured a cut out triangle on the upper part of her back. He asked, “Where does she keep all of the triangles?” It endeared him to me even further. These things and her good skin came to mind when the invitation arrived.
October 3, 2001
I’ve been wondering what the nation has been dreaming of late. It’s probably not the time to commence taking a medication with the documented side-effect of “vivid dreams and nightmares.” But a visit to Dr. Sleaze, who I really think I have to fire, resulted in just this. Ever the pessimist, I have been going to bed expecting to be churned through the subconscious mill with a vengeance. I had heard from fellow patients that Sustiva® rendered horror more colorful and apparently three dimensional than any DVD player. I had even heard that it was being sold as a street drug. Perhaps my lifelong inability to endure a movie with anything stronger than a gremlin in it is paying off. The dreams are vivid but thankfully the horror is absent. They appear to be art directed by Gianni Versace and display a tackiness of subject, costume and color that is more reminiscent of pornography than horror. Last night I was part of a female burglary team. We infiltrated the parties of the rich and famous and in between making inane conversation about oil free moisturizers, sipping champagne, and adjusting our Yves Saint Laurent sandals strapped high on our tanned and well muscled calves, we discreetly pocketed the jewelry and personal effects of the household. All of this was blissfully without guilt or the fear of being apprehended. I awoke with the distinct feeling of a job well done, of finally having found a métier that I relished, and only vague misgivings about my own shallow, not to mention immoral, nature.
September 28, 2001
Today I set out to achieve two things. I failed at both. I had planned to avoid two things. Two situations where I had determined to utilize all my upper body strength to pry the collar of my coat off the smooth bronze nub of the proverbial hook. I had resolved to use deception, pleading and in one instance—if it felt appropriate at the time—a little half earnest bribery. One involved a doctor, the other a friend attempting to herd me into gainful employment. The particulars are not relevant. What is relevant is the failure of my intent and my subsequent relief at that failure. We may not be up to the job, stoic enough for the prescribed poison, but we can be shored up, bullied, and hoisted back up onto our hook. It might even leave us grateful. Permission, once again, to be sentries to ourselves.
September 27, 2001
My favorite part of the day is later than it used to be.
By ten p.m. I am almost convinced of a life.
As if the functions misfire all day and then hit their stride as bed looms.
Don’t get me wrong; I love bed.
My encouragement to myself daily, to leave that place, rests on the logic that if you don’t leave it you can’t get back into it.
But there is peace, or a sense of it now, here at the desk: no phone, the vehicle soundtrack muffled.
Scanning an article on James Baldwin by Colm Tóibín I read:
“He found odd jobs and then lost them, washing dishes, working as an elevator boy. He drank, he had casual affairs, he suffered a number of nervous crises.”
What reassurance biography becomes.
Today, I saw a completely naked man in Soho.
Neanderthal in Soho. Between two cars.
So in place.