Sitting in my easy chair I remembered that not an hour ago I’d had an idea for a song and now it was gone. What was it? Something to a country tune. It’s always easy to think of a country tune when you get an idea for a lyric, or to think of an idea for a lyric when you think of a country tune. I don’t know. The one follows the other eagerly, easily. Not that it has to stay that way, or should. The lyric can change. The music can change. Or both. Now I had neither. You can’t abandon something you forgot. Was it about forgetting? I wish I could forget… my name? No. It was about doing something, getting through it, something rote. But it was poignant, maybe all the more so for being mundane. Definitely started with the word I. Like so many country songs do.

I stood in line for vegetables at the corner farmer’s market. It wound and stretched around the stand, off the pavement onto the grass, over a path, almost into the woods. But six feet apart, it wasn’t that long after all. Everyone peering down over their masks at their phones. I thought about the beginning of this in March and how life was the same of course but different in weird, small ways: we favored an Italian restaurant for delivery back then but we haven’t ordered since and I can’t remember why or if there was a reason why. Our hallway was cluttered with different things. We had no cats. It’s as though years had been condensed into months. It was forever ago. You could just about trace the time in the lines of your face.

Thanks

I accidentally titled this post Thanks so there it is. Thanks and praises.

I saw a bridge in ruins in a Japanese anime and it reminded me of the rope bridge over those river falls in Jamaica. It was just scary enough to be a little rite of passage for all the tourists, at the beginning of the climb, something to make us feel brave. It was exposed on either side between the lines you held onto and the base of bundled bamboo canes a couple feet wide. It wobbled a little—just enough. Really you couldn’t fall unless you wanted to.

I was watching a classic French movie late at night, drunk, after the fireworks and after the guests had gone home, actually the fireworks were still going on and they still go on now. I’d watch a scene and descend into a psychedelic interpretation of the events—is that what really happened? Did he think she said he said she thought? I fumbled for the slender Apple TV remote and swiped back 20 seconds, whatever the device is set to do. And 20 seconds more. Turns out nothing of the sort took place.

The fireworks begin at dusk and go on late into the night, sometimes in quick bursts, sometimes every few minutes, no rhyme or reason. Of course they’re in honor of nothing this year. Each concussion is an anti-celebration, an assertion of how fucked we all are and everything is. Boom, boom, boom, boom, bang.

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.

Sara said look at the moon, see the moon? Jackie said it’s almost full. It seems like a couple days ago I was showing her the sliver of new moon out her bedroom window before she went to sleep.

I’m looking at it now, its giant aura shrouded above and below by black clouds.

I’ve always been obsessed with my computer doing things, updating itself, fixing itself, restoring something or other. I thought it was because I want things to work and then I thought maybe it’s because I want them not to work. Just so I can worry. Just so I can care. So I can wake up and see: Is it done yet? Is it fixed? But really I’d just like my computer to count from 1 to infinity. I’d check its progress now and then. Sometimes often, every ten or fifteen minutes—when I’d be working and in need of distraction. Sometimes once a day. I’d see: how far up is it now?

After the beans were already cooked I found a raw one on the counter, pristine, more beautiful than all the rest. Smooth, unblemished sea-green flesh. I threw it away.

Sideways rain gave way to hail, rattling angrily off the windows and air conditioners. They were marble-sized or less—not like the ones upstate someone had posted pictures of, which were the size of a man’s balls and dented the roofs of cars. Still I beheld them with awe. They had come from so far away to land on our planting terrace. I imagined they were fragments of meteorites, or a warning from God. Frogs and locusts next.

Then the sun shone again and I tried to remember what it felt like, two or three minutes before, to be in the storm, and I barely could, the way you sometimes remember a dream.

Someone in the park said hey look, the sun is coming out again and minutes later the wind picked up like crazy. A mylar birthday balloon blew out of the woods onto the sidewalk and hit Jackie, shit that’s not supposed to happen—balloons and plastic bags are like pigeons, they always get out of the way. By the time we got upstairs ropes of rain were pounding down and the sun shone straight through the west side of our apartment and out the east. And of course there was a rainbow. 

It took me all day to remember what I’d watched drunkenly before bed last night, a documentary about Sam Cooke. Smokey Robinson appeared to me, his fine features and processed hair, and I realized he’d been on it had to be about music, but what? R&B, Motown? Sam Cooke. 

9:23. It’s always 9:23.

At seven o’clock from our roof there was the usual commotion down below, claps and honks and sirens, but almost no one else up on top. A neighbor to the right clapped gamely but inaudibly with garden-gloved hands before lying down to fuck around with the vines curling up around his deck. New Jersey glimmered far away. What would the guys from WBGO in Newark say tomorrow morning when my clock radio goes off at 7:30? It’s going to be a hot one.

I flipped through the channels and landed on a tennis match. Was it a replay from years back? It didn’t seem to be. Anonymous players and no crowd. Not even empty stands. No stands. A plywood barrier where they would start. Mask-clad figures hovered just off court, watching vaguely, attending to some thing or other. So it was current, I thought. But then I looked again and wondered whether it was a video game. There was a vague stiffness in the movements, of the players but especially of the others, and of the leaves on the nearby trees and everything else. There was a suspicious emptiness in the grassy area adjacent to the court. No people or cars parked or infrastructure—why bother coding it? The gleam of the sun on the players’ shirts seemed too real—so unreal, really. The match proceeded a while and a more frightening thing became clear: it was real.

Everything Is a Virus

I contemplated the furniture ad banner at the top of the news site I visit again and again and again day after day. A mindless, unhuman mechanism—an algorithm—had placed it there in response to my browsing history. My behavior. My interactions.

There’s been some complaining about the glib use of “viral” in technology and marketing. How dare we? Viruses kill people. But we don’t use the term enough. It describes a kind of near-life, desirous to grow, expand, consume. It’s water running down a mountain or data surging through cables. It’s populations of people, of trees, of birds. It’s everything.

The ticket window was on the side wall of a head shop in an old Victorian in the sad little town between us and the city. My mom dropped me off there to wait in the freezing cold for spring tour tickets. Sweet coffee in a dented thermos. Camel unfiltereds snuck in my coat pocket. Just putting my hand in there would make it reek of that dark, sweet perfume, Turkish and domestic blend. But my mom didn’t know. Or she did.

The line snaked back into the dirt parking lot behind the building, filled with beaters and VW buses. It became amorphous there, people playing hacky-sack or huddled in little circles to get high. I sat on the embankment by the wall and watched. Someone blared a live tape circa 1979, “He’s Gone.”

A Deadhead invited me into his car, a beat-up old boat, to warm up and smoke a joint. He put on Neil Young, “Down by the River.” I’d never heard it before and it took a hold of my brain, that da-da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da-da on the guitar and the refrain, which I didn’t understand at first but then I understood and then misunderstood again, in circles and circles, shudder day, shutter day, shotty day, shut her day, shot her dead, shut a day, shudder day.

We looked for the prickly pear and I didn’t remember what tree I planted it by. Finally I found it, lying flat on the dirt and leaves. It was gray and withered but I stuck it back in as best I could, tamped down some dark soil around the bottom of it. Who knows.

I told Jackie and her friend to stay away, it has prickly bits that fly through the air.

“Really?” he said.

“No, not exactly. But be careful.”

Then they took off running down what they called abandoned paths.

I titled this Usual by mistake. That is to say, that’s what Apple autocorrect decided to name it. So here goes: Usual.

The world is converging on us, collapsing, like a dying star. Everything we believe and everything we desire. Even when those are in opposition. Music and video streaming. Porn. We’ve been hypertargeted to the point that soon we’ll all be demographics of one. The ads, the content presented to us now almost seems to wink: There you are. I know you. And here I am. For you. And then it’s a solipsistic dance until your synapses are exhausted and you die. E pluribus unum.

We urgently need new algorithms. Some that say: People unlike you like this. And Here’s something you won’t like. Based on nothing you’ve listened to. Nothing you’ve seen. Really: Here’s something for people who aren’t you. Or: This is not for one. It’s for everyone.

Otherwise we’re fucked.

I sat at my desk at work as the world fell deeper into dread and paranoia, wondering: Am I getting sick? How does it feel to be getting sick? A vague, watery nausea on the tongue. An aching head. Fatigue.

Of course I felt that way.

Doing dishes with the TV just cutting through from time to time, when I didn’t run the water or clank the plates and silverware. Didn’t matter what was on because I wasn’t watching but I wanted it to be something I’d watch just the same, sports news, comedy, a movie I’d seen again and again. Wouldn’t want to be exposed to bad TV, it’s like X-rays, you can only take so much. Then I move the little angel so I can water the Christmas tree, wouldn’t want the angel to get wet. Then I turn off the lights, the Christmas lights the normal lights, the TV. The TV last just in case it has one last thing to show me.

Shipbuilding

There was always this model ship on the shelf in my parents’ closet, its keel cradled in the felted holders of an elegant stand. A glorious warship but mastless, stripped of rigging or sails.

No one thinks it was there since the beginning of time but it was always there.

I asked my mom about it. I didn’t ask my dad. His side didn’t have scale replicas in the house.

“It’s your grandpa’s,” she said.

“Can I have it?” I asked, wondering why it wasn’t mine already.

“Sure.”

I took it down and put it on the bookshelf in my room. The rest of it—masts, yardarms, the boom that sticks out from the bow—was wrapped up in old newspapers and I took that too. There were no sails. Still I would restore this thing of beauty that time forgot.

I set upon the ship with plastic glue and sewing thread. I put the masts back in their holes and hung the yards where I thought they should go. It was hard to tie a good knot at the end of the smooth sticks and it was hard to get them to hang right, perpendicular. I fixed the boom to the prow with a big dab of cement. The surfaces didn’t really join, but they stuck together fine. I strung a black thread from the tip to the top of the front mast, and then another from the other mast to the middle of the stern. That’s what a ship looked like in my head. There were dozens of cannons strewn about on deck, with little pins at the bottom to stick them in place. I put one in each of the cannon ports and there were almost enough to go around.

When I was done I thought about my grandfather, dead long before my birth. He was a revered man, the beloved patriarch of a family riven by insanity, resentment and drink. It’s possible he would have loved me but he would not have been proud.