Tuesday, June 21, 1994

I am becoming aware of the passage of time as a terrible confluence of seconds into minutes, minutes into hours, hours into eons, until lifetimes and generations pass in what seems like instants.

It was my last day at Aetna, and Meg took the occasion of my departure to contrive a pleasant, gossipy exchange about what else, O. J. Simpson. We were discussing the length of the knife used to commit the murders and we agreed that it was indeed a very large knife – I thought of J. L. quoting the cop: "It was a substantial knife," such cop talk – and just as suddenly, as though continuing a phrase uttered about the gravity of the wounds and Nicole Simpson's nearness to decapitation, a secretary mentioned all the wonderful knives her father had given her for her new apartment: some big, some small, all very sharp, with stone sharpeners, her dad is a chef you know. And we nodded just as agreeably to the train of this conversation as to the previous one.

Monday, June 20, 1994

Everyone wants to see you naked. The reason no one really minded when the TV news broke into the big game with live footage of O. J. Simpson driving down the highway with a gun to his head isn't because he is a "beloved hero" and that we are captivated by his tragic plight, or that we are awed by the surreal or Shakespearean in current events, or even that we want to see famous people bite the dust, exactly. It is this: that we like to see people naked. We look and point, and take great pleasure in staring and sharing the pleasure of staring with others. O.J. was cruisin' in the buff, emotionally stripped and revealed as people rarely are even in the hungry voyeuristic TV eye. His nudity was made all the more flagrant by the phalanx of cop cars that followed him, "uniformed" men with guns that protected them whereas O.J.'s only served to shame him, to reveal him, to blow his dignity.

We like naked ass. We are horny for the shame of others because it reminds us of the shame we feel regarding our bodies and of our earliest and most profound erotic sensations. The lurid appeal of emotional nakedness, or more properly of emotional obscenity, is not at all different from the appeal of open cunt, or tits, or of hard cock. The tabloids and in general the media are emotional pornographers, purveyors of a more insidious obscenity that can't be regulated like the geography of the human body; it is the pornographic geography of the soul.