...more recent posts
September 7, 2001
"Right now this plastic skirt is frying my butt."
Thank you, New York woman, for your weather forecast.
August 30, 2001
Today I am in awe of the painkiller. I took two and was again amazed at their efficacy. They take away the pain. Something in me resists their easy cure, but when I fold to their charms I feel like lighting a candle, singing a chorus, skipping a little. I’m just talking your basic advil at this point. Not even the killer painkillers, the percoset, the percodan, the demerol. When there has been discomfort, for who is to say it was really pain, and the body is cleared of that discomfort, the whole being feels polished. Every pain brings a great love of that part when the pain goes away; to feel it fresh again without pain makes that part seem limitless in its beauty and efficiency.
Initially I blamed Bob Dylan. I went to hear him play in a GAA (Gaelic Athletic Association) pitch in Kilkenny on my last day in Ireland this summer. I went up to the front to see what this creature looked like close up now that he is sixty. It was very loud. I couldn’t hear in one ear the next day and then I got on a plane to New York. I couldn’t hear properly in that ear for weeks. And then it went away and I could hear again and hearing with two ears was miraculous. But it wasn’t Bob Dylan, I can’t blame him for my temporary deafness in one ear, nor for the strange sensation that remained, the conviction that there is something amiss with the lower half of my face. They have a term for it, but I’m less interested in the term than in the fact that I just can’t seem to take my jaw for granted any more now that it has this odd malaise. Apparently I have been gnashing my teeth (isn’t that supposed to be reserved for hell along with wailing?) at night, which leaves the teeth and the muscles of the jaw irritated. All day long I wonder what to do with my jaw. Where should it sit? I don’t know where it belongs on my face any more. It may detach and fly through the air, liberated from its uncomfortable socket. A bloody but relieved comet. I feel like Dora Maar after Picasso got at her—reluctantly Cubist. I would happily bandage my jaw to my head like one of those cartoon toothache sufferers; I have the odd, and apparently incorrect conviction, that this would help. My friend Kate, who had the same problem, says you have to keep the lips together, the teeth apart. Advice when very young on how to give a decent blow job and advice on how to deal with TMJ when middle aged appear to be the same. Meanwhile, I’m going to take another two advil and marvel at how it feels to have a face. Incidentally, Bob Dylan at sixty viewed from where I was standing on the Kilkenny GAA pitch is a reassuring mixture of the ancient and the ageless. A ravaged boy.
August 29, 2001
A letter from my father:
“Mature Summer has arrived, a sense—almost—of youth departed. Now we slide down towards September. I am more acutely aware of the passing seasons as I get older. More acutely aware, too, of the passage of time. Perhaps like some bird species we should reverse continents, exchange one hemisphere for another. Arrive in Australia for Spring! Love from Dad.
The proclivity for purple prose, his obsession with the seasons (note capitalization), the reminder of his chronic SAD (seasonally affected disorder)—the DNA, it will get you in the end as well as the beginning. But beyond the juvenile reaction to one’s own blood, it seems like a pretty good idea: Australia for winter.
Unbeknownst to him I had spent some hours surfing—surfing seems too elegant a term for what is involved in the search for information with my computer and modem—staggering about the web, regarding light therapy devices. For about $300 it appears that you might be able to convince yourself that you are in Australia for the winter by staring at a special lamp for half an hour every morning. The hope being that the attendant winter mood troughs can be avoided. Sounds like a bargain.
August 23, 2001
Sometimes I wonder about Jim Nightingale. I wondered about him last night at a party full of oenophiles. I’m sure Jim Nightingale drank beer. Jim Nightingale was the most exotic thing that ever walked up Gray’s Lane. Jim Nightingale lived three houses up. He was married to Ida Kohn, the daughter of Ziggy Kohn who sold Singer sewing machines. None of these people were Irish, which was, in the Ireland of 1970, a remarkable thing. Jim Nightingale was dodging the draft. He fixed your household appliances if they happened to be manufactured by Novum. Jim Nightingale was the Novum man. There must have been a lot of Irish housewives—they were still housewives then—who were very glad that they had purchased a Novum appliance and that it had subsequently malfunctioned. We didn’t have any Novum appliances. But on a regular basis Jim Nightingale would post two tubes of Trebor Sherbet through our letter box, one for my mother and one for me. Trebor Sherbet was a delicious concoction. It consisted of a cylindrical cardboard tube wrapped in faded yellow paper with weak red type. The contents were a white, fizzy powder. From the twisted top of the cylinder poked a black licorice tube that you could bite the top off and suck the sherbet through. I thought my mother ancient, beyond such things, but once, when Jim Nightingale put ice cubes in her wellington boots that she had taken off during a visit to his house, I saw her blush and giggle in a way I thought foreign to my mother. Jim Nightingale moved to Canada and eventually disappeared. When I was fifteen he sent me a photo of himself in an outdoor shower in the wilds of British Columbia, head, torso, and lower legs emerging from the wooden structure. Soon I will be the age my mother was when Jim Nightingale put ice cubes in her wellington boots.
August 21, 2001
One of the advantages of being abandoned by your spouse in a steaming parked van is that you are forced to take in your environment. He had gone into the Rite Aid on Clinton and Grand streets to redeem coupons for an $11.99 three pack of Mach III razors. There’s something about the mere sight of shopping coupons that elicits emotions that I’m not proud of, disdain, impatience, anxiety. Nevertheless, we both have bits we like to shave, him since he shed his beard, me since I can no longer take the rantings of the Eastern European waxing women (my last regular just exiled her teenage son back to Roumania for being insolent to her; just think what she could do with a tub of hot wax). So I was secretly delighted that he was buying fresh razors. The light was leaving the sky and I noticed the Empire State building from a new angle. I am proprietary about the Empire State Building having worked on the 27th floor for close to ten years. It was a terrible place to work. But if you look up towards the top at a certain hour of the day, to the viewing platform—even from the distance of Grand Street—you can see the light bursts of tourist’s cameras flashing into the late summer twilight air. They were out of Mach III razors and the offer ends tonight. The cashier issued him with a “rain check coupon” so he could come back and get the $11.99 deal at a later date. Now I would never have thought to ask.