You wonder whether the wax figures are thinking of you. Resenting you for your mobility, your ability to dart in and out of their personal space, taking endless selfies and family portraits with them as props, objects of reverence or lust or derision. You walk away into the next room of the exhibition and they stand prone as though frozen in time. Maybe there’s something they know that you don’t know. You sense it from their sly smiles and unblinking gaze.

After the pop stars and the Royal fam you get a bit of history: in the Reign of Terror Madame Tussaud was enlisted to make death masks of aristocrats by clutching their freshly severed heads between her knees. I guess someone had to do it. Exit through Star Wars and the gift shop.

Day 4

I dove down to touch the canon and tried to appreciate something of its antiquity. It really just felt hard under a veneer of moss. Like an old stone wall in the Connecticut woods. The anchor veiled in seaweed looked like a crucifix someone had escaped and discarded. And yet the fish and the coral and everything else is alive.

On the way out some others on the boat, maybe Eastern European, Russian, asked if it was okay to smoke. Nods all around. A mother and son pulling from the same pack. He lit up right after he got out of the water, too. Cigarettes as a means to delineate events.

It had rained pretty hard in the afternoon.The flagstone terrace of Rick’s ran with rivulets of dirty water that amassed in little pools. We watched the cliff jumpers, saw the sun set through the remains of the storm. The DJ played loud, punctuating the music with birthday shout-outs. Goddamn if it isn’t always someone’s birthday. A young couple, well-dressed, sat facing each other romantically at the corner of the bar. They were daintily eating dishes of penne pasta, one marinara, one cream. She lifted her phone and gazed into it as though it were a mirror.

The Cat From Iran

When I was a kid we drove across France in the summer of 1979 in that Renault 4, the heat merciless on the rainbow-striped synthetic seats. An odor of glorious vomitude. Hollow metal poles formed the frames upon which the fabric stretched, ready to tear, ready to pop in a fender-bender, a serrated end ready to plunge into the firm neckflesh of a ten-year-old: me.

Dad had the radio on and the French people do love their news. Music, news, news, news. Weather. News. Traffic—vacation traffic. Live reports on the jam you’re in right now. Music. News, news, news, news, news. They kept talking about this cat. A cat was fleeing to France. To live out the rest of his days. This cat was on the run. From some kind of danger. Who was this cat? This cat from Iran?

As I gazed into the microwave, the bowl slowly turning, the liquid inside growing hotter—I couldn’t tell it was, but I knew—I wondered about the first microwave of all time, maybe a hundred years ago. What did they think was going to happen? That blue flames would arc across the air? That all life in the vicinity might be contaminated? How could they know? They didn’t. So they tried.

I thought about how the entire twentieth century was defined by leaps into the void. Eat this mold from an orange—see if it kills you, see if it makes you well. What would happen when an atom exploded? Would the chain reaction continue until all of creation was destroyed? How about a sonic boom? Would the airplane disintegrate, and Chuck Yeager too? What if you shined a laser into someone’s eye? What if we played all the wrong notes? Painted pictures of nothing? Made sculptures out of toilets. We suspected someone, or something, might stop us. Or punish us after the fact. But no one did.

Hindenburg

During some idle time at work I found myself browsing sites about the Hindenburg and the other zeppelins. I don’t know why. I don’t know why I started. What was it? Maybe the menus, the food. I was suddenly gripped with a desire to know what they all ate on their lazy way across the ocean, what they drank. And I wanted to know what the interior looked like. Wasn’t it small? But wasn’t it also luxurious, graceful, a triumph of sophistication, elegance, of civilization?

The Hindenburg had a beloved bartender. His job was to mix drinks and tell jokes but especially make sure no one got out of the adjacent smoking room with anything lit. One night an American socialite made everybody dance to jazz. The bar ran out of gin so she invented something wonderful and forgettable made with rum. Barkeep couldn’t make a Manhattan for shit.

You better stay in that smoking room, sir.

They feasted on roast beef, boiled trout, asparagus, potatoes. Good, homogenous, boring food from smack dab in the middle of Europe. Naturally there were fine German white wines. And French reds. What more could you want? The breakfasts were continental style. Of course.

They had an aluminum piano. For some reason it didn’t make the final trip.

They were so proud of this, the Germans. Evidence for sure of the preeminence of their people and a glimpse of what the future was to bring: hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years of glory and beauty and pleasure. Of civilization.

People spent the two or three days they had on board in a reverie, lulled by the distant hum of the engines, the sun streaming through the windows, nothing much to do. They napped in the sitting room, newspapers crumpled in their laps.

Didn’t anyone see the horror that was soon to come?

Sitting at work, I watched them take down the Stars and Bars in South Carolina today. Who were they, National Guard I guess. The fussy ritual—the elaborate rolling and folding, one soldier stepping stiffly closer to the other—was incongruous. Really, a mob shoulda just clambered up the pole and tore it down. Just the other day they shot at it, anyway. “USA, USA!” the crowd chanted, just like they did when we killed Bin Laden. One more symbol of terror vanquished.

9/14/14

When I start writing, in Google Drive, the first thing I need to know is the date. I create a doc and that infernal little window pops up—it used to be that, by default, the title would be the first who knows how many characters of the text itself; the title would be the text and the text would be the title, and you needn't lift a finger—now I have to name it something so I name it for the date, in standard all-American format, like on the spine of a cassette of a Grateful Dead concert: 2/14/68, 5/8/77, 10/10/82. So 9/14/14.

Like the date might mean something. Like what I'm writing is historic, or enmeshed in history. Like it's got anything to do with it, really.

And sometimes, by the time I've thought hard enough to remember the date, I've forgotten what I was going to write about.

What I Think About on My Way In

Here’s what I think about on the train, with Jackie, on my way in to drop her off and go to work.

I ate some chocolate last night, half a little chocolate rooster, or rabbit, or something—must have been a rabbit left over from Easter—some ridiculous shape they mold chocolate into, anyway, that makes you feel greedy and ashamed for having wedged it somehow into your jaw so you could snap it in two, little shards collapsing into its hollow core—it’s always disappointing that it’s hollow, and the disappointment deepens the shame—or falling to the kitchen floor where you’ll have to pick them up with a paper towel before they melt. It tasted good. It was milk chocolate, of course. I prefer dark chocolate. It makes you feel less silly, less of a child, with its hit of bitterness. Dark chocolate is serious. Wasn’t it as good as gold in Europe during World War II? All the books you read, the movies you see, people trade it on black markets, they bribe border officials with it, they break bars in half and share it with their lovers, they hand it to doomed urchins, their little arms straining from the windows of trains, in beautiful gestures of mercy. What did this chocolate look like? Had to be dark. Was it Swiss? Were the fucking Swiss pounding out chocolate and cuckoo clocks like they always did, oblivious to what took place around them, even as they turned away the Jews? I envision good, dark, sober chocolate, a little grainy maybe—the best cacao is hard to come by in the war—but so much better than the crusts of bread and boiled potatoes people lived on that it had to seem radiant, magical even, when you unwrapped it from its gray wax paper and beheld its smooth, ebony form. Some people in the War had all the chocolate they wanted. Imagine that. Nazis. Nazi officers could probably have chocolate all the time. And wine. Red wine, white wine. Champagne. They just marched into those wineries and chocolate factories and told those fucking peasants, you’re Nazis now. Keep making this shit. We’ll drink it. We’ll eat it. We’ll dispense a tiny fraction into the world and watch everybody else scurry around like rats to catch it. Carry on just like you did before. You’re leader is French, don’t worry. His name is Pétain. What a good, French name. Your government is safe and sound in Vichy. That’s a good, French town. You can go there to cure all that ails you. Don’t worry about a thing.

The breakdown of history into arbitrary, discrete segments called decades or centuries seems silly and misleading. The Sixties didn’t start on January 1st, 1960 and end on December 31st, 1969, after all. Everyone knows they started when Ed Sullivan introduced the Beatles on February 9th, 1964 and ended when the Hells Angels sacrificed a young, black man at the Rolling Stones’ free concert in Altamont on December 6th, 1969. Though some argue they started when Sputnik flew on October 4th, 1957 and ended when man last walked the moon on December 14th, 1972. Each of these delineations may be ridiculous. Yet we know what we’re talking about when we talk about the Sixties. Or the Eighties, or the Thirties. Each of us has a clear mental picture, informed by a lifetime of schooling and media consumption, of what each era signifies.

But maybe it’s not so arbitrary. Maybe we don’t, in hindsight, read a pattern in a few signal events that happen to have occurred in the same decade, or century, and interpret that pattern to “mean” something, and attribute that meaning to the entire period. Something else is at play. We are conscious of these periods as we live them, and to some degree we behave—think, believe, act—in accordance to what we believe to be the prevailing spirit of the time. In other words, people did things in the Sixties—drop acid, listen to rock music, protest against the war—not just because that’s where the currents of history had carried them but because they were conscious that they were living in the Sixties and that doing those things, and feeling the way they felt, is what was expected of them as “citizens” of the decade. And when it became the Seventies—on January 1st, 1970, or at least within a few weeks of then—people started to do the sorts of things we now identify with the Seventies—snort coke, listen to disco, swap spouses—because they knew it was the Seventies.

President Obama will be remembered for having dragged the United States—much of it kicking and screaming—into the 21st century.

I often think about how much there is that’s from the past. Deep in the past. Let’s say, fifty years. Sixty, seventy, eighty, more. There’s a lot: Most of the buildings on my block. The park across the way. The street itself—though I guess it’s been repaved. But someone a long time ago invented this street—thought it’d be a good idea. They made it straight—just as straight as it is today. They made it begin somewhere, end somewhere else. They connected it to other streets. They gave it a name—the name we still pronounce in 2012. That dead person—OK, a few people, a few dead people—created our reality, created what we experience as now.

We think we live in a hypermodern world, full of brand-new bells and whistles, the new ever supplanting the old. Yet we’re beholden to the past. Wasn’t it unsophisticated, relatively? Wasn’t it naive? In the past, blacks were slaves. Women couldn’t vote. But men were making blueprints for the world in which we live today.

April 23rd, 1985

The era in which we now live began on April 23rd, 1985. On that morning, word of a momentous event spread through the halls and classes of my high school like a virus: New Coke was here.

It was a Tuesday - how could it not be? And April - of course. And it had to be 1985. The day, month and year bespeak a radical mundanity. April 23rd, 1985 is a date that wanted to be forgotten even as it loomed. It's a date we all might have skipped by accident. Tuesday. Nothing day. Neither Monday nor Wednesday, neither fish nor fowl. The day of low blood sugar. A day not to be lived so much as endured. April. The month of cold, gray rain; of ambiguous, uncertain spring. The doldrums in every pupil's odyssey to recess. 1985. A year in which it might well be said that nothing whatsoever happened. April 23rd, 1985 was the sort of date that was in danger of falling off the calendar. And such dates, of course, are ideal for mass exposure and response to a seismic event, be it glorious or cataclysmic.

The news itself hung in the air like a vaporous mist - it seemed we began to talk about it before we'd even heard. "Hey, New Coke." "Did you try New Coke?" "I heard Mark had some already." "Some what, New Coke?" "New Coke." The marketing really was brilliant, if it wasn't completely disastrous. New! Coke! What melodious and sunny syllables to set upon the lips of a nation.

There was another aspect of our reaction to the event, and this is why I know it was the moment in our history that became now: we didn't really care. Even as we chirped the brand message, there was a wryness in our voices, sly smiles on our faces. For this virus had a second, unintended component: irony. Perhaps it was a product of the phrase itself: New Coke. Or perhaps it just happened to be hanging in the air that morning too, also waiting for this non-day when there'd be a break in our defenses. In any case, we now knew two things: New Coke was here, and New Coke was here. These two truths were antagonistic but not incompatible; they were the manifestation of a nascent reality. Yes, we bought it; yes, we drank it. But not the way we did before. Not automatically, but knowingly. Not with alacrity, but nonchalantly. Coca-Cola thought they were the mama bird and we would be her babies, letting her belch into our eager gullets. In the past, we'd given every indication we would play that role. But not on April 23rd, 1985.

Suicide is masturbatory, the ultimate self-indulgent act. What more can you give yourself besides an orgasm? Death. The gift that keeps on giving. That's why we're so dumbfounded with shameful, prurient awe at death from autoerotic asphyxiation. The math isn't sex plus death – a heady sum already – but sex times sex. Masturbation squared, and escalating into the stars. Do we envy them, discovered dangling and enrapt?

There is a fundamental friction between the races in the United States which doesn't seem to exist in France. The source of it is obviously slavery, the blunt fact that whites owned blacks and that the presence of blacks in the country and their citizenship and their identity will forever be colored so to speak by this fact. It tends to leave a bad taste in the mouth.