Diary of a Ghost

Some strange people live in this house. I was in the downstairs. The younger boy, the one with the disheveled hair. He stayed awake for hours sitting up in bed and playing with toy soldiers by the light of the moon. Infantries charging each other over the hills of his quilt. I scrutinized this scene with fierce interest until finally he fell backwards into a stupor and kicked a dozen doughboys to the floor. I never get bored.

Upstairs Mr. and Mrs. S. were tangled in their bedsheets after a bout of lazy and inattentive intercourse. He was asleep and she was not, her eyes wide open to the dark, afraid of what the day would bring. He snored and dreamt of driving a car in the town where he grew up, except he wasn't at the wheel – he was facing backwards in the backseat and suddenly remembered he had to steer, and he tried to twist his body into place to reach the wheel and see the road, and he tried to find a way to clamber over into the front to find the pedals, and he was facing down an impossibly steep hill.

The older boy had recently fallen asleep too, after obsessing over the ticking of his clock. The more he tried to ignore it the louder it got. When he focused on it he found he could make the infernal sound disappear for a few beats but then it would just as soon expand back into his consciousness, louder still, violent ticktocks blaring at him, taunting him, as though reproaching him for some mysterious sin. It never really ended but thankfully exhaustion prevailed and he passed into a dark and fitful slumber.

I slipped into the heating pipes with a hiss and a clang.

All new! Washable toast!

Introducing... Washable toast!

Put it in the toaster and toast it till it's hot and toasty. Take it out, butter it. Spread some jam or jelly. Enjoy your wonderful washable toast all you want and then simply WASH IT! That's right, soak it in the sink, wash it like anything else. It's even dishwasher safe! Place your washable toast in the dishwasher along with all your dishes. Take it out and it's time to toast it again for hours more TOAST FUN.

Washable toast!

There was a man in the laundry room so I lifted my head as I approached, I lifted my eyes. Nothing. He kept sorting solemnly his remaining clothes into the two machines.

John is the surly, quiet doorman. He wears glasses that droop a little too far down his nose, so when you walk in or out, and say hello, and he lifts his tired, jowly head he has to lift it a bit too far so that he's seeing you through his lenses. He's hunched over but his head is tilted back and he's struggling to see you through the glasses with the light from up above glinting off them too.

"Hi John."

Silence.

"Hello. Sir," his last syllable dissolving into a whisper, then a breath. And then he puts his head back down again.

George W. Bush Is an Idiot and a Fucking Craven Little Bitch Besides

George W. Bush on "60 Minutes" looked pained, reluctant, tired, all things you might expect. But it took me a while to form any other thoughts about this dreary, obligatory bit of public relations work. The President's vague and halting manner seemed to defy close scrutiny, as though his famous aversion to introspection and his incuriosity form a sort of field around him which similarly dulls our own inquisitiveness.

But with the benefit of a night's sleep a few ideas began to coalesce.

This is a sad, stupid and bumbling man who has real difficulty – and I mean the tragic, pathos-filled difficulty of the semi-functioning adult moron – putting together a coherent sentence. And like idiotic people typically do when they are faced with challenges, Bush has – deftly, even, one might say – developed a series of strategies to deflect questions and thus to appear "normal." For example, there is the "stalling" of questions that are beyond his mental functioning to properly address. Scott Pelley asked something like, "Mr. President, many Americans feel that you're stubborn. Is this true?" Bush replied, "What, that I'm stubborn... or that many Americans think I'm stubborn?" And here Bush produced his slack, shucky grin, like, Whew! OK. I thought of something to say. Pelley repeated, with what appeared to me to be a trace of impatience, of patronization: "Americans feel that way. Is it true?" And then the denial – odd, actually, since he's always tried to play his inflexibility off as strength, as gutsy resolve. This time: "I think I'm a flexible open-minded person. I really do. I really do." A touch of petulance now. And then, "Do you think you owe the Iraqi people an apology for not doing a better job?" Bush's reply: "That we didn't do a better job or they didn't do a better job?" The maddening tactic he employs of answering questions with questions, often idiotically reversed ones, no matter how ill-conceived or inappropriate, in order to deflect attention from his inability to properly consider and respond to such questions, questions that are even the least bit penetrating, is only part of the problem. He also reflexively casts the blame on others. Like a kid at recess: I know you are but what am I? It's a craven gesture, the signature of a petty and immature soul, and he performs it at once, without hesitation.

Why would HE fucking APOLOGIZE for the IRAQIS not doing a better job, anyway, for fuck's sake? My God, if you're going to be weak, if you're going to be a coward, if you're to be a petty little BITCH and you happen to be the President of the United States can't you be the least bit clever about it?

Bush's spin doctors, aides, speechwriters and other Rasputins have jammed a gummy wad of fucking self-serving, disingenuous, sinister, hypocritical EXCUSES for the mayhem and murder in Iraq into his thick, tiny skull and he STILL can't get them right.

And that's the sad truth about Bush. He's Pandora, who opened the box. And just as the box contained that one ghostly glimmer of good to be loosed upon the world, hope, Bush himself is not all bad. He's not evil; he believes he's doing good and in fact doesn't believe he's doing great harm in the service of good. He's far more dangerous than evil people are. Saddam was evil, and our rickety constitutional democracy seems to protect us against actually electing people like that. People like that are recognized and soon enough marginalized in a free, educated society. They'll make their mark, sure, but they won't become president. And if somehow they were to they'd get run out of town sooner or later – Nixon was as close to actual evil (knowing, calculated malfeasance) as any leader we've had and we kicked him around until we didn't have him to kick around any more. Bush is worse: he's both stupid and craven. Let's face it, this emperor's naked as a jaybird. Can we say so finally? He's a low functioning adult, not borderline retarded but frankly much closer to that line than most people are willing to think. By any measure, by any observation, he's hapless, exceedingly inarticulate, lost, halting, bewildered. In addition, he is a moral coward. He's quick to blame others, to hide, to avoid being implicated and to cower from any physical or other danger even when such a risk might be warranted as a rite, or in order to protect others, or as a matter of principle. He has no desire to accept responsibility and to experience the accordant realization of his own weaknesses, shortcomings and errors. In short, to grow. In some, these shortcomings arise out of evil; in Bush they arise out of stupidity. The effect is the same, though more terminal and – because he is not entirely unsympathetic, not a Nixon – more insidious. To bring us back to the playground, he's like that really fucked up dumb kid no one felt sorry for because his reaction to being dumb was being mean. And in the meantime those who are evil, who know how to, and seek to, take advantage of this circumstance, this president's miraculously obstinate idiocy, happily further their own war mongering, war profiteering, insane pseudo-religious fantasies and all manner of other machinations whose toxicity imperils our moral environment just as greenhouse gases imperil our physical one.

Fuck Ford

Fuck Gerald Ford. I mean really. Enough already, day after day of speeches and salutes and viewings and reminiscing and of the laying in state. All anyone can seem to say is he was a nice enough guy. Maybe he was. Who gives a fuck? Who are we burying, Willy Loman? This was a kindly Midwestern good ol' guy, the epitome of a particularly bland postwar type, the decent yet uncourageous American male. Good enough to let his wife outshine him, not too good to pardon Nixon in return for the presidency. In deference to another asshole president, he was kind enough to die when the Iraq War reached a gruesome new depth: the deadliest month for civilians. And what an irony that he upstaged James Brown, something no living man could do. Could you possibly even imagine a greater distance in every measurable way between two contemporaneous U.S. citizens than there was between those two? Hail Black Caesar. As for Gerry, let's bury him, not praise him.

In Paris there was a didgeridoo player down in the metro. Was entrancing two little kids by making sounds like a bouncing ball and miming a bounce with the finger of his free hand. He wore a hipster hat. Bwaaoing, baaoingg, bwoing.

The scene made me depressed for some reason.

34th Street on New Years Eve was run through with idiots. Young boys with gelled hair and pleated pants and their miniskirted dates in high heels and tights, 2007 tiaras. Everyone seemed to be on their way in or out of a deli.

On the precipice of debt.

There was a knocked-over stack of sodden newspapers in the middle of the tarmac between rows of empty, waiting luggage trailers.

I was reading an Ian McEwan story in the New Yorker about a clumsy and anxious couple on their wedding night when a couple just like them drifted into the restaurant where I was having lunch, a corner bistrot, French in every regard. They were mute and bewildered, evidently Anglo-Saxon. They stared blankly when the patronne offered them placemats at the bar. Eventually he pulled his knit hat back on his head and they retreated out the door. It seemed to me as though they had strayed off the page and, momentarily, into reality beside me.

We took turns walking out on the balcony to have a smoke or think about jumping.

Far below there were Christmas lights in windows and on buildings and in trees. The various bridges in the distance. The Chrysler Building.

That floaty, wobbly feeling when you look down from a great height, like your fear is cruelly lifting you out of your shoes.

I knocked over an entire tray of good artisan rustic bread and some kind of big, soft cheese.

I was drinking rum and Cokes, like I was back on the beach in 1985 with Matt and Nat and Rich and John. Pouring the Coke out of the big, squishy two-liter bottle and watching the bubbles sizzle on the ice. A nostalgia drink. The effervescent essence of my adolescence.

The night ended dully with The Matrix on TV, a movie everyone likes except now some people said they didn't, actually.

It's a good concept, is what I said.

Dan had prodigious sideburns, he was a student of my dad's. He had a nice house and a wife or girlfriend or whatever who had short hair and was an actress. She showed us pictures of a play she did where she played a princess and a pauper or something. She had a picture of herself all scintillating and pretty and then one all poor and dirty in the pauper makeup. She said it took thirty seconds one to the other, you couldn't tell this was true from two pictures, but we were impressed.

Someone gave me Coca-Cola and I watched a football game on TV. It was the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The Buccaneers always lost those days.

Always.

My dad had another student, she used to be Miss Connecticut. She had a boyfriend who was a car mechanic, long shaggy hair and a mustache. They drove up our driveway. She had a baby I think, rocked it in her arms. It had a knit hat with flaps over the ears. She rocked it as her man peered under the hood of our car. Our fan belt broke I think, maybe. He showed my dad and mom something and laughed.

"Look where it landed. Look where it went."

Everyone looked and laughed.

"See? See where it went?" He laughed.

The former Miss Connecticut rocked her baby in her arms and laughed as well.

I had a dream I walked around a corner. I was a little girl. I had a dream I saw a red-painted thing. It was a plank of wood, a bench. Maybe. Peeled paint. Propped upon the dirt. A simple and poignant object.

I was in a novel written by Don Delillo.

I stood above the Pacific Ocean, like a room-size map. At my feet. Prepared to make a journey from Hawaii, south. To who knows where. Why. A long journey south across the dark blue, white-capped sea.

Since I've moved the unending stream of things I buy. Like I refuse to settle in, unconsciously. Or I'm caught for the occasion in the idiotic grip of materialistic lust. A spatula. Shades. Matching lamps on matching bedside tables. Goose-down pillows and a wall mount for the TV. I've been patiently waiting for it to all end. But there is no end.

I have a spasmodic, heaving cough I've not tended to so well. And as the ominous, pulsing waves of droning ambient music swell around me I lay me down to sleep.

As I walked along Third Street a man burst out a store door looking dazed. He held his hand up by his chest in the universal indication of something wrong breathing, something wrong heart beating. He staggered toward the wall. There was a strand of foamy spittle on his black turtleneck shirt. He was a healthy-looking black man, early 30s. He bent over to cough and heave as I walked past the door and looked inside. An aisle formed a ramp up to the door and I stared down it, saw the white floor's waxy sheen.

It appeared to be some kind of hardware store.

His name was Kris with a K, he wrote his name on the back of my Friends & Family 20% off coupon card.

Wrote it with a K.

In blue ballpoint pen in the top left corner of the letter-sized card. His phone number too.

Kris was talking about Tampa. Clearwater to be precise.

"I've heard of it."

His eyes widened. "You have?"

"I have."

Now he's tellin' me how he moved here from there, onto 9th Avenue. S'OK but he wishes there was a subway.

"Eh, someday."

"Really?"

"Well no."

On the East Side, maybe.

And about how now he sees Clearwater everywhere.

"I'll look at something and somewhere, somehow in the fine print. It says Clearwater, Florida."

I nodded and smiled and said yes, that's what –

"And across the street from me there's this bar. And two of the bartenders are from Clearwater!"

"That's very strange."

"I go out, there's a group of people. Someone's from Tampa."

"Yes – that's bizarre."

"And then there's these other people who come up and are like, did you say you're from Tampa? We're from Clearwater."

"Maybe they're all fleeing," I volunteered.

"Date of birth?"

Kris was entering my data. I was taking the two-week trial at the New York Sports Club and here he was with the plans and such. He handed me my temporary magnetized card. A suspiciously portentous temporary card. Suggestive of lifetimes of recurring fees, referrals, costly training regimens undertaken in fits and starts.

"There you go!"

"Great. Nice to meet you," I said. I extended my hand.

"Not a problem at all – you too. To you too."

"OK. When I'm ready to – "

"Come see me – "

"I will."

"Have a good swim."

"Alright, man."

"Alright."

Michael Richards is dying for our sins.

I get ideas riding in the passenger seats of cars on the highway at night, ideas for writing. Themes to trace from one memory to the next, a long-past folly, some incongruous idea. But then it evaporates on firm footing, to say nothing of the scouring light of day.

What I Remember About the '90s

Flaming plane debris bobbing in the water at night
Tonya Harding's handful of cum
And Space Station Mir

My father once returned a pillow to the department store complaining that it smelled of chicken soup.

Today I threw out some old insurance papers, 401k stuff, warranties and receipts. Shit with my name all over it. Into a bag, down the chute and onto some great pile of sweet Manhattan garbage.

We should have known when they were in our offices, to interview us or explain something or to test our mood and puzzle out our apprehensions. Every moment they were not addressing us or each other they faced their laptops to tip-tap away, God knows why. No one can conceivably have that much work to do with their digits, unless they're a novelist, video game coder or court stenographer. No one on a business trip for Christ's sake. It seemed to me a means of keeping the world at bay, of managing one's tidy corner of it safe and sound. But then when the deal went down I realized.

They're e-mailing all the time.

E-mails to and fro, to the to line and to the cc's. Thoughts? Fire away. Loop someone in why don't you. Give an action item to Bob. Take the lead. Drop the ball and circle back.

This frenzy at first glance seems to take the place of real work in a most ridiculous charade. But then maybe not. Maybe the micro-forces it exerts finally make the world go round.

I threw some things away and bought some slightly finer things to take their place. I arranged it all meticulously, and was dully pleased to see how all the empty spaces in between were even.

More or less.

And then it occurred to me, am I decorating my tomb?