It was obvious when you observed Robnoxious with his wild eyes, rockstar hair, and verbose posturing that he’d perish one day of a heroin overdose.

He ran an arts collective out of an old fur vault in the depressed, decrepit mill town down the road from the state college with its drunk and horny boys and girls and disaffected townies with moms and dads who taught and their bitter counterparts with moms and dads who ran the garage or the cleaners or the package store. It was a fire trap, a dark and dirty hole; it was the only place in fifty miles where anything unpredictable or new was happening.

He held a photography exhibit on the theme of dog feces. I stood with Rob and the woman whose work was on display. “What I’m saying is, art is the same as the shit that comes out of a dog’s ass,” she explained. Robnoxious nodded approvingly.

My band played there a few times. Once we opened up for a herky jerky prog-rock ensemble. Or did they open up for us?

“Everybody’s gotta die,” sang the singer. “Everybody’s gotta die.”

For the longest time I thought he was saying everybody’s got a dime.

Up the road I was still taking classes in the vain hopes of a degree. Rob was in an American lit seminar with me. He was loud, argumentative, disruptive almost. Always had to disagree. We were reading Henry Miller. I remember him saying the word bourgeois with his punk American sneer: bore JWAH. No one in class liked him much, least of all the teacher. But you know? He said something. He opened up his mouth. And now he’s dead.

Day 2

In one of my last dreams of the night I had a strong feeling it was 1:07 in the afternoon and I felt the requisite guilt of oversleeping, wasting half the day. When I awoke and asked Sara the time it was seven something. I lay in bed awhile trying to remember. 

A jogger ran past on the beach, winding up and delivering in a cricket bowler’s motion every ten paces or so.

Supply chain disruptions have made odd things scarce. At the supermarket there was no beer in cans. No plain Red Stripe, only apple, melon. Someone told us we’re lucky, they couldn’t find chlorine for the pool until a couple days ago. I lie back under the sun drinking Guinness Foreign Extra, twice the usual ABV. I guess the Irish can’t handle it.

I got up out of the hammock to watch the sunset and caught the three seconds when it goes from a sliver to nothing. 

I finished my short book about the end of the world. 

They’re in India in the book I’m reading, the color and chaos. I distracted myself thinking about Indian food, a forkful of rice and curry. How many grains sit uneasily upon the tines? Eighty? A hundred? How many grains are produced for human consumption each year? No, how many have ever been produced, to date in the history of agriculture? To be devoured by rich and poor alike across the globe. It’s in the trillions, right? Hundreds of trillions? Or is that number woefully, naively low? Is it some other order of magnitude? I imagined being punished if I got the answer wrong. All mankind punished because of me.

I fell into a half-sleep while reading a paragraph in Delillo’s “The Names” and the text suddenly revealed elaborate, deeper meanings, as though the words on the page pointed to another world or dimension. I woke back up and reread. There wasn’t anything remarkable about the paragraph after all—though it was good writing, it was literature, with whatever that entails. The experience left me with the feeling that all text inherently has that power and mystery.

A bead of water trickled down Jackie’s electric toothbrush after it had been replaced on its stand, probably to gum up the electronics once it reached the charging base, causing a short circuit, starting a fire. I envisioned us naked on the street as annoyed firefighters clambered up the four flights.

No matter what technology you have, smart devices, app controls, computers in the car, nothing works like a toilet.

Jackie had a fortune cookie in her lunch. I unfurled the little wisp of paper, spotted with sauce. Ready for another fortune? it said, and I thought: good fortune. Smart. Did not expect that. Then I realized of course the fortune was on the other side:

Declare peace every day.

Lately when I read a book that’s supposed to be good, I think: this book has been read ten million times. It’s been read to death. I start to worry there’s nothing there for me. I try to reassure myself that every act of reading is unique. It must create its own universe from the reader and the text. I believe that, but still I worry. Hasn’t everything been thought already about these words? Maybe it doesn’t matter anyway. I thought this reading “The Sound and the Fury” and now I think it reading “Ragtime.” But then a word or phrase comes round to penetrate my brain. Tonight it was this: The freaks were delighted.

Imagined Conversations - 1

I was reading over someone’s shoulder on the subway. Trying to look away from time to time. At the right time, ideally. That is: whenever he grew suspicious and glanced at me. I hoped that by staring indisputably in another direction at those very moments—at the floor, at the pole, at the old lady’s knee—he’d be satisfied that I hadn’t the least bit of interest in his book. Oh no, not me. And yet I felt a few cold seconds of his reproachful glare.

“You’re reading over my shoulder,” he declared.

“What?” I stammered, trying on a perplexed expression.

“No, no, no—I saw you.”

I considered pressing the point but I could tell the jig was up. There was nowhere to hide, nothing to say. I made a shameful little shrug and grimace.

“That’s rude!” he declared righteously.

“Yeah, well—”

“You don’t do that. You don’t just look over some complete stranger’s shoulder like that. And read.”

He spat out the word “read” as though it were some terrible violation. As though I hadn’t been reading a page out of the trendy paperback he’d had on his lap but had actually peered through him, through his clothes to his nakedness, through his skin to his soul. And I wondered if maybe that wasn’t true.

“It’s my art project,” I countered bravely.

It was the only card I had to play. And it also happened to be the truth. Reading over other people’s shoulders in subway cars was my ongoing project. I documented the random fragments of text I spied in a Twitter feed.

“Your what?”

“It’s an art project. I read over lots of people’s shoulders. It’s nothing personal.”

The man stared at me like I’d just told him I fucked his mother. He’d stuck his book between his knees and now hunched over it protectively; his entire body closed. Still he kept one hand in as a bookmark. You never know when you might be free to read again.

“What the fuck are you talking about, art project?”

“I look over someone’s shoulder. I pick a part of the page at random, see what I can read real quick. Usually a sentence or less. Then I memorize it.”

A pause. Then he said, “And what do you do with it?”

“I write it down. Share it with the world on Twitter. Share it on my blog.”

He leaned back a little. I thought I might have defeated him somehow. Defeated him with reason. Or better yet non-reason.

“You share it with the world?”

“Yup.”

As we entered a station he precipitously stood. And he said something I still don’t understand. It was one of those snappy lines you’d hear in an action movie or something. Except it didn’t make sense. Or maybe it did. You tell me.

“Let me save you the trouble,” he declared, and slapped me on the side of the head with his book. He threw it at my chest in disgust, as though it were somehow to blame for its own violation. As he walked out the subway doors I read the title peering up at me from the speckled floor of the car.

“Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” by Jonathan Safran Foer.

Wish I could remember that dream last night about driving down frozen roads, down a hill, riding the brakes, thinking to myself, “You shouldn’t ride the brakes,” thinking it was someone else in my head, telling me that.

Then I was wandering through a neighborhood of well-kept houses, through the back yards. Trying to get home, I guess. Like the swimmer in Cheever’s story. Ned. I looked it up. His name is Ned.

In the dream I was with Jackie. We were both trying to get home.

After five days a teenager in a Yankees shirt was dragged out of the rubble in Nepal. Meanwhile, we slept, fucked, ate Cheerios, rode the train, worked, in no particular order, and depending on the precise timing.

George W. Bush Is Willy Loman

An article in the Washington Post about Bush's disheartened lackeys made me realize that he's a sad fucking Willy Loman figure, bewildered that he's not liked, idiotically uncomprehending of his toxic affect upon the world, an all-American tragic figure.