One of the installments from Capital City Blues that I finished a few months ago. Never posted it, but thought some kind of personal reminder that I can at least sustain some kind of narrative for a few pages could potentially be welcome.
David dug up rocks.Ziploc bags.Small lengths of knotted twine.He dug up shards of glass from old beer bottles and scraps of newspaper articles that had yellowed and turned brittle.He dug up a torn condom wrapper, empty packs of menthol cigarettes and metallic joints that looked in some way automotive.He felt like an archeologist.An archivist.But also thought that he was erasing evidence.Clearing the way.
These are the things we do. These are the motions. We cover distances to be with each other. We take our shoes off in airports and eat at Ranch*1 and feel a welling in the back of our throat with longing.
The alchemy of shared presence sometimes does its tricks. Its various emotional somersaults. Even as our guts turn over in their own backflips.
I wrote some terrible poetry last year about the Lake, just because it seemed like the thing to do. Because it was new and so surprised me. I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the influence of the Lake on Chicago, and I didn’t expect it when I first arrived.
“If I come in, it’s going to be in my underwear!” Edwin shouted. He killed the can of Old Style and let it fall to the bottom of the paper bag. He placed the paper bag on the ground next to the others.
The Lake, freezing cold still. July. Hot days have no effect till August. Even now, with a string of sweltering humidity, the water would be around 60 degrees. Dragonflies everywhere. Purplish, green glinted wings off the sun. In the distance, the haze-enveloped skyline. It rains in the afternoons over the middle of the Lake. The rains wash out to the shores. To Chicago’s beaches. Icy cold. Cloud-direct.
He was thinking that he didn’t want to take his pants off, but the water looked clear and inviting. It was a calm day. No wind, but still cooler by the Lake than in town. Edwin squinted down at Matthew, who had bobbed over to two chicks with enormous breasts wearing small bikinis. They were about 40 yards out from the rocks and up to their belly buttons in water.
“You hear me Matty?” he yelled.
Matthew looked up at the rocks toward Edwin, but cupped his hand to his ear. He shrugged and said something to one of the girls. She threw her hand up to her mouth and seemed to bend over laughing. She splashed Matthew, who threw up his arms to defend himself against the water.
“Shit,” Edwin said to himself. He thought of his saggy tighty-white underwear, and then of the Lake. The thing is, you go in the Lake, and the rest of the day you feel cool. Impervious to heat. A superhero possessing a power over the summer. But until you’re all the way in, getting into the Lake is a daunting task.
“Shit,” Edwin said to himself. He stood up.
He took off his pants and laid them next to his shoes and socks. He stood up and held his hands at his side in his underwear. No one seemed to notice at all.
“Hey Matty,” he shouted toward Matthew, who had found a beach ball somewhere on the surface of the Lake. Matthew didn’t look over.
“Hey yo Matt,” he yelled again. Matthew had gotten into an all out splash war with one of them.
“Hey Marine!” he screamed, cupping his hands around his mouth.
And this time Matthew looked over and threw his hands in the air. And right then Edwin thought of himself, silhouetted against the sky, above the Lake. He thought of himself standing there in his underwear, saggy around him.
“You fucker,” Edwin said to himself. “You fucker, here I am. Here I am.”
Thunderstorms, heavy air, crickets, serious thoughts, freight trains, refrigerators, blondes, brunettes, Margaret, repressed memories, the father-son relationship, shotguns, Paris, London, Venice, Montana, New York, NEW YORK, the Subway, the El, the Metro.
Margaret, I want you to know: I have serious thoughts in my spare time. That is to say, even when I am not professionally obligated. I wonder about the densities of objects and look up articles on buoyancy. I understand how ships float, which is more than one can normally say about oneself, I would imagine.
I think a lot about planetary motions and about the swirling fluxes of goods as they circle the world. I read. I watch foreign films when they are free OnDemand. They give me some extremely fertile serious thoughts that come with various related cultural capital. I have interesting thoughts about cultural capital and its relationship to scarfs, but those ideas are still underdeveloped and are therefore not yet SERIOUS thoughts. They are only interesting.
Look, the thing is, everyone is watching these Isaiah Mustafa ads for Old Spice. These ads have won cosmicorgasmic approval, but it feels as though everyone is missing the essential questions….I think, at least.
What is the masculine ideal that Old Spice is trying to put on display and how can we compare it to the Miller High Life ads directed by Errol Morris in 1999-2000? I’ve posted the “Sally” ad from the series because of its focus on the chest/abs of a non-ideal body type.
“Is your name Sally?” the ad asks. No. But do you want to have this kind of body? Do you want to be the “High Life Man?”
There’s so much that could be discussed in the difference between the masculinity portrayed in the Errol Morris ads and the recent campaign by Tom Koontz, you might have a stroke.
Race? The black body on display as an object of sexual desire vs. the white body as an object of consumer ideal…that is, as as representative of “The High LIfe” constituted by consumption, rather than by, say, doing 1000 crunches.
Sexual Satisfaction? How do you satisfy your partner? Both of these ads aim at a hetero-normative audience. But what the is going on with the raised-eyebrow reading of both ads and their sly homosocial appeal?
Swan Dive!! The best night of your life? Who does this alleged night belong to?
Is ten years ago really that long ago? Where is American masculinity today? I think that the difference in these commercials should be discussed at least in part with reference to their different historical contexts…..
Really just some questions. I’m fascinated by the differences and want to come up with a coherent opinion about both sets….thoughts are really welcome.
Leveling. Here’s the thing. It’s hard to do this un-self consciously. There are considerations. I think about generosity, about selfishness. About the necessity, even, some would say, responsibility, to write for others. How to jive with the imperative to write, first and foremost, for oneself. How to think of oneself as both writing in a vacuum, without audience, and at the same time giving of oneself for the benefit of the other lonely bodies out there.
Picture, for a moment, yourself. Sitting, hitting refresh, cycling through the several pages that you frequent every day. Now, think of the writer. The someone out there who thinks, perhaps, his or her words have some sort of impact. We’re scared, we who attempt. And yet, even as we fear, we fear the fear because it gestures toward a possibility that seems too difficult to realize: that we might land a blow. That, somehow by flailing around in the dark like blind aunties with canes, we might stumble upon something that connects us to the reader.
What then? Downplay. That’s what. If words land their blows—if, at any rate, they can be considered weapons in the first place—then what are we to do? Sit back and enjoy our glasses of sauvignon blanc? Share our successes with whomever believed in us in the first place?
Here’s the deal. When I first started writing these things in November, it was for others. Now, as I poke through some sort of thick soupy darkness toward the clarity of writing again, I am stuck. Stuck at the justification to do it in the first place.
How do you write for yourself while being generous? How does a writer indulge in the narcissistic project of self presentation on the page while still being able to genuinely ask the questions: “Why do we hurt?”
Listen: I’m not into therapy. If my words ever make you feel better, reader, it’s an accident. Because there is no better. There is only the momentary contact with another. There is only an instant of remediation against the cold blankness of your consciousness. Or at least, that’s what some of the writers that I love most would have us believe. The trouble is perhaps that, as I sit here sweating at my desk in the un-air-conditioned apartment: I don’t know if I believe it. What if loneliness actually can be remediated at some deeper level? Maybe that’s what happens when writers get too caught up in the desolate mechanics of linguistic signification.
Like, what if, when we embrace, it’s really an embrace? What if, when we stick our tongues down each other’s various orifices, we’re really doing, like, something that means, I dunno, something?
Alternatively, and I mean to ask this only in a limited sense: what if, when we read the words of others, we feel momentarily as though we are (not BETTER, God forbid) connected to something someone some thought some someness that feels in some way familiar?
One time, I was in love and didn’t know it. One time, I got high with a maniac who kept knives in his closet. One time, I woke up on a stranger’s couch and the police were called. One time, I laid out in the sun and thought of beating my scoutmaster at chess. One time, when I got drunk to celebrate the departure of a friend, I thought to myself about the relationships that span time and place and distance. I thought of temporality and of love and of the finite nature of our intense moments of contact. I thought of drapes swaying in the spring breeze and about the inevitability of winter. I thought of you. I thought of us. I thought of the possibilities that never were, and of the unknown someones out there that I have yet to meet. I thought of the warm summer night and of the crickets and the inevitable morning. I thought of what comes next, and of how, in the infinitude of my inadequacies, someone might imagine how to write about all of it in some degree of specificity.
At the Washington Street Station on the Blue Line today, there was a guy playing Pachelbel’s Canon on the harmonica. I waited for an O’Hare bound train. It was right when rush hour bleeds into the time of day when no one takes the O’Hare bound trains, so we had to wait a long time. Everyone used their phones. I started to sweat. The harmonica notes bounced back and forth in the tunnel air.
The heat, as you might have guessed, had broken by this point. All around the city it felt as though someone had finally realized how uncomfortable the heat had grown. That maybe it was time to try something else.
The heat drives people crazy. Is this a secret? Of course note. WE all know what a nightmare it can be to walk out of your house and have the air envelop you like a wet sock.
Look at this. Writing about the weather and the guy with the harmonica. What do you think of this? Do you despair on my behalf? Do you wonder what emptiness could prompt the evaluation of such banalities?
Save these emotions and any impulse to run to the tissue box, Margaret. This is an exercise, okay? You, along with the motivations for writing in the first place, are a figment of the writer’s (in this case, moi) imagination. I write for you, I write for no one. I write nonsense about the weather and about the air, and it can just very easily vanish.
(But on a rather more accurate and meaningful note, I am in bed. I am in my underwear with the fan turning above me. I have my eyes closed to keep out the light. To close my own personal curtains around the world and think about the motions of my fingers across the keyboard. Every once in awhile I look up to ascertain the accuracy of my stabs at the keys. My creations of meaning. My efforts toward the exorcism of whatever monsters have kept me from writing in the past weeks, months, whatever. Are they gone?)
