I have been advised
by our collection staff that
your seriously delinquent account
remains unpaid.
As you have been
previously advised we are
reporting members of national
credit bureaus and
your account is now listed
as unpaid.
It is our intent to pursue
all avenues available
to us in order to recover
the monies
due our client. You must act
now to resolve this matter.
Cordially yours,
Sidney Stein
Vice-President of
Collections.
2009
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There is a point in Jean Anouilh’s Antigone where the chorus begins to talk about why we watch tragdies. “Tragedy is clean,” he says. “Tragedy is restful.”
This line came back to me today as I was driving to my favorite bar. I was listening to chet baker on the car stereo sing The Thrill is Gone and smoking a cigarette and I drove a couple of pretty young women. I didn’t stare but I did look. They were nice to look at so who wouldn’t. As I drove on, I saw that there was an old woman on the sidewalk. She was walking toward the two young women.
This scene, along with the soulful music of Chet Baker seemed to make the whole thing seem very tragic to me, which made me think of that line from Antigone
All of this made me think that in some ways to be alive is a tragic condition. We are bound to die. Those of us who eat healthy, those of us who don’t. Smokers and non smokers will all grow old and die. This is tragic
So I wonder if human beings are drawn to tragedy because we subconciously understand that the very fact that we live is a tragedy that is played out as our lives play out over time
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Ai Research – Creating a new form of life
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My life is a procession
of buildings and doorways
I have had my share and more
of the shape of the world.
I am geography without
a map. I am the man without
a country about which I dream
at night, my country my land
of doorways and buildings.
2008
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To His Lover’s Stomach
Please don’t tell her
we’re having this conversation.
She would say we are fools
for acting like young lovers.
But you and I know better, I think,
than to deny ourselves the music
of my callused hands playing
softly across your skin.
2008
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Sorry, faithful readers, for not posting anything. I have been studying for something that my college calls the “MA comprehensive exam” and it has taken up all my time. Now I am free from that burden and I’ll get down to some writing. For a little taste, here is a sample of a poem I am currently working on. I hope you like it.
A Small Vespers
for Jennifer
I. The Litany of Peace
You need this. Asleep on the train,
you are at peace with the whole
world; at peace with the wounds
of the day; at peace with the hand
that stings; the nation and it’s institutions
for which all are responsible; at peace
with the demands of the exact time
and the gentle rocking of the 5:09
out of the city.
sing a quiet psalm to your heart
while you lie in the seat with your coat
half open and the windows of section
eight houses begin to glow, like candles
under the cradling roof of the Chicago
to Elburn.
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Ok I want to know who found my blog by searching for “seventeen year old having sex”
When I saw on the dashboard that somebody found me with that search, I tried to google and yahoo that phrase and it didn’t come up, which was a relief. Anyway i’m just curious.
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Taking the Kids for Pizza
I’m sorry. I don’t mean to sound
thoughtful or sad, but you make
me thoughtful and sad and I think
that is good. What other reaction
so fits the world?
If we take your kids for pizza is it not
natural that I should think about evolution?
When I follow your daughter toward games
that shine like harbor lights, should I not wonder
at the tensile strength of life, so fragile and tough?
I know I think too much and talk
too much, like that douchebag
in Dover Beach. But it’s how I am.
I think now, as I watch your girl point
at a plastic fish, that I’m ok with it.
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The Berlin wall was torn down a few weeks before my eighteenth birthday. I can still remember the news footage of jubilant West Berliners tearing the wall down, some of them with nothing but their own hands. It was a joyful time. The cold war was over. It was finally over. This event made me sad and I feel that I should try to account for my reaction, since it was not typical.
In the early nineteen eighties, at the same time that I first discovered girls, I saw a lot of movies and television specials depicting the effects of nuclear war. Adults, it seemed, were concerned about Reagan’s tough talk and defense spending, and Hollywood was tapping in on the prevailing mindset.
When The Day After was broadcast on November 20, nineteen eighty three, it was a nation wide event. Across the country, families gathered around their television sets and watched as the United States duked it out with the U.S.S.R. Even my hyperactive step brothers sat still to watch Jason Robards and Steve Guttenberg slowly die of radiation poisoning. The Wagnerian scope of the devastation in this movie was just the thing to captivate an imaginative and introverted twelve year old. I had already learned, from my parents’ divorce that the world could change. It was only a small step in my mind to picture the world being destroyed in a brilliant white flash.
If you have ever seen The Day After, you will know what I’m talking about. In fact, almost every movie about nuclear war (and I have seen most of them) contains a scene where the screen goes white. This technique is probably used to its greatest effect in the film, Testament, where, in order to simulate a nuclear attack without using special effects, the director had the screen fade to white while Jane Alexander and her kids hide in the corner. When the camera fades back in, the old world is gone, and everything is different.
The point of the white was to simulate the intense flash of a nuclear warhead going off, but to me it was something more. It was an intervention; it was a moment of grace. There would be a heat so intense that it would block out everything. There would be a white intensity that you would feel coursing through your body. You would become sanctified, purified by the white fire that burned away your past and left you feeling new and reborn. The former world would have passed away and a new Earth would be yours to inhabit. It was like having sex, or so I imagined at the time.
I thought about sex a lot when I was thirteen and atomic destruction played a prominent role in my nacient fantasies. These fantasies would often include a fallout shelter or a submarine escape pod (for I was very interested in submarines at the time. I assume that all seventh grade boys are). The only two survivors of the holocaust would be myself and a girl named Rene, who had the desk in front of mine in language arts class. Rene was a pretty blonde who had a way of inclining her head and looking at you from underneath her bangs. I was deeply in love with her in the way only a seventh grade boy can be. Rene did not notice me. She was attracted to an athletic kid named Bobbie.
In order to avoid the nuclear attack, we would have left in such a hurry that Rene would have nothing to wear except for a matching set of pink bra and panties. She would sulk around the submarine in this outfit and treat me badly at first. Slowly, it would sink in that her handsome athlete, Bobbie, had been burnt to a cinder along with everyone else. She would finally warm up to me and we would kiss on deck. It would be a deep soul kiss, with the moon shining over the South Pacific, much like the couples would do on an episode of The Love Boat.
Eventually we would reach an island. The island would be a heaven on Earth. There would be blue-green waves crashing on a white sandy beach. There would be palm trees. Beyond the beach there would be a dark jungle that was lush with a wild and beastly life. There would be colorful birds. The air would be clean and free from contamination. We wouldn’t need our submarine any longer. My beautiful blonde lover and I would clime out through the conning tower and embrace in the warm, salty air. Then we would walk up the beach, hand in hand, ready to repopulate our brave new world. Of course that is not how things ultimately turned out. There never was a nuclear war and I certainly did not have a submarine. i never found out whether or not Rene had pink panties.
A couple of years later, when I was in high school, I crossed paths with her at a party. It was new year’s eve Nineteen Eighty Nine. She was stoned and I was pretty drunk. We said hi and made small talk for a few minutes. I thought about telling her the story of my fantasy and asking her whether or not she had pink underwear. I decided not to. I didn’t really know her very well and I was afraid that if anyone heard me asking her about her panties, I would get beat to t pulp by a gang of jocks. So I just told her happy new year and moved on. Eventually we all counted down from ten and cheered. It was Nineteen Ninety. I drove to Denny’s. I sobered up. I drove home.
It was some time after this time, the following October, when I heard that the Berlin wall had come down. I don’t really know if the cold war was over right then, but that was the prevailing zeitgeist in the autumn of my senior year. The Soviet Union was collapsing very quickly. East and West Germany had been unified. Poland would probably be next. There would be peace, and there would be a peace dividend.
The end of the U.S.S.R. seemed somewhat less important to me because I had lost my virginity just a week before and I was largely preoccupied with replaying this event in my memory. I suppose I was trying to figure out how it happened. Who am I kidding? I was a seventeen year old American male. It was bound to happen sooner or later, and it was a pleasure to recall the event. It was exciting to know that I had beaten most of my friends in the race to get laid.
The girl with whom I lost it didn’t have pink panties, as far as I could tell. It was dark. There had been no white flash, no moment of grace or sanctification. There had only been a slight going away for a moment, and a slight returning. The girl (a curvy brunette named Jeanine who I would go steady with a year later) hadn’t even had an orgasm as far as I could tell.
And now there would be no thermonuclear flash either. There would be no atomic destruction, no need to escape and repopulate the planet. It was a new beginning, but not one that was particularly brave or hopeful. There would only be graduation, then a job (or college and a job), marriage, kids, then a slow diminishment, retirement, death. I thought about the children I would probably have someday. They would go through the same experiences I had gone through. Then I thought about their children and the children of those children. Just living their lives. Trying to get laid and dreaming of something they can’t quite define. And on into infinity, where all colors run and fade into the pure and sanctified white background of the universe.
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