Moments ago I closed the final page of Middlesex which is another book that I will add to my short list--among High Fidelity, White Teeth, and Vernon God Little--of Good Books I Wish I Had Written.

But--and here's what I struggle with everyday with my own work--will I ever read a great book that could not be titled "How I Fell in Love Right Before That Guy I Know Died?"

Annie brought a copy of Cosmo home today from the gym. Over lunch we read about all the Sexy Sex Tips we could handle and tried to figure out who actually uses them, who follows them, who comes up with them. ("...hold you vibrator on yourself with one hand, then grab hold of his boys while you stick a finger up his...") I posited that they are created by plump cosmo staff writers, based on interviews with their closeted football announcer husbands. Annie posited that I can be a real asshole sometimes.

After half an hour of what appears to be sex tips from fifth graders writing at a fourth grade reading level--"...slowly moving him to you main moan zone...","Cosmo-tize your day!"--what is it that they have against the Queen's English?)--we went home and I realized I didn't get my copy of Esquire this month.

In the two years since I first subscribed, to the magazine with grand intellectual pretensions, I have repeatedly refused to appologize for its presence in my life. Every month when it comes in the mail I read the fiction section--which is almost always better than whatever is in real literary magazines--and dream of the day that a story of mine might entertain the men of American for the openning three paragraphs while they stain their toilets.

I got online to find out what happened to my issue and I find out that I can read it online if I'm a subscriber. And it turns out that a two-dimensional men's magazine without pictures and examples of fine fabrics is just no fun.

Life, As a VISA Check Card Commercial

There's a liquor store in my hometown where my childhood toystore and saturday morning diner once resided. The man takes my ID as he talks amicably with a friend of mine. He was my next door neighbor in the house where I was born, but he doesn't know me.

"Brendan Sullivan?" he says. "The famous Brendan Sullivan?"

"Depends on what you want that to mean?"

"The writer?"

"Oh," I say. The hardest part of leaving a small town is coming to grips with how little strangers of a certain mile-radius care about you. "Yeah. Yeah. I used to write for the Courant."

"We can't accept that." Another man, a spotty-scalped bald guy, comes out from the other register. "We can't take out-of-state ID's. We can't."

"It's okay," the neighborly man says. "I know this guys. He's the guy who...it's fine."

"Doesn't matter," he shakes the pre-cancerous blotches from his head. I wonder if cirosis can spread to the scalp. "We can't accept an out-of-state ID. It's policy."

The friendly old man rolls his eyes and starts shooting the shit with me about how I ended up with an out-of-state ID, what I'm doing, how the writing is going, while my barely-twenty-one-year old friend takes my money and buys for me.

As soon as I got home, I took up teeth-grinding. Don't know how or why, but it's really upsetting me. I, like pretty much every female who has every dranken a liquor, refuse to believe that I could even snore. If I discovered that I did such a thing, I would have a larger nose installed immediately.

And then yesterday I awoke with my teeth feeling like they were in headgear again. How can this be? I ask myself as I try and stretch out my facial muscles. What could possibly be bothering me? I don't pay rent, I don't have workmares.At my brother's house I sit there openning my mouth wider and wider, pleading for the soreness to leave my face. On the coffee table, George Clooney's well defined face looks away from the camera in a men's magazine. I wonder if George grinds his teeth and if so, does he have any advice for the novice?

Our annual Christmas eve dinner with family friends is over. The brothers leave together, my parents go to church, my brother and his wife go home. Orphaned, drunk, I fall asleep at 10:30.

At 2:30 I wake up with jaw-aches. Was I grinding? I fit my teeth together. Ow. Fuck. That hurts. Then I do the first of five stupid things I will do before going back to bed. I go back to bed, but I only go back to bed so that I can fall asleep, wake up immediately, and see if I'm grinding my teeth. My body is alot smarter than I, and doesn't fall for this. I lay awake for an hour on Christmas eve with the children of the world, hoping no one discovers me, including myself.

At 2:45 I think of all the things that make me tired: reading, drinking, warm hot baths, psychology amphitheaters. I try to address my troubles and decide that since I haven't written in the past two mornings, I must be all wound up inside and genius is finally striving to come out of my skull. Laptop in bed, I reread Chapter 25 and find that it makes me really, really happy. So happy that I can't even change it. I move on.

At 3:00 I start reading Middlesex--which is a great book, and a terrible idea if you're trying to fall asleep because every sentence makes you want to read the next one.

At 3:45 I shut my parents door and turn on the bath water. The communal bathing of college turned me off of tubs years. But I forgot that, after hours, my parents house somehow has nineteenth century plumbing. Hot water--steaming, so-hot-it's-cold water--bursts out for long enough to fill one of those tubs from Young Einstein. Maybe two gallons. Cold water fills the tub as I tell myself that--unlike social anxiety, domestic disputes, and college--drinking won't solve this problem. The last time I dried to drink myself to sleep I was successful, and also threw up in my sleep. I was too embarassed at the time to even write about it, but somewhere in a master bedroom of an expensive Deleware seaside condo, there's a bedside rough spot in the carpet where baking soda proved unsuccessful.

At 4:00 I sit in the tub, shoulders submerged, knees in the air, shivering. The water is maybe four degrees from where it could be acceptable. I turn the water off, wait ten minutes, and turn it back on. A hot blast comes over my feet. I rub my hands under it as goosebumps tell me all the places where a real man should have hair. The water turns cold and I shut it off.

I consider whether anyone in my neighborhood might have an unguarded hot tub that I could jump into and then ooze my way home.

At 4:15 I think of the cup of coffee I had after dinner. I was tired. I was on my second glass of Jim Beam Black which--just in case you're planning a surprise party for me--is my favorite when cheap Maker's and Bulleit can't be found--which--turns out--is everywhere outside of Ohio, Kentuckey, and New Hampshire--now that I think of it was a good way to end the night.

At 4:30 I sit in a tub, which--because they have modern plumbing during the daytime--is slowly emptying of the tepid water so that it doesn't flood the house. I think of anything I cane to keep my mind off the cold while I wait for the basement coils to heat up. I think of my grandfather--much hairier than myself--tell my brother and I that a good rubdown with a towel is better for you after a cold swim than a hot shower. I think of how in novels you can go around having people with grandfathers that they remember and long, boring ordeals that they go through but in short stories you just can't do that.

I think of how the time I threw up in my sleep I had stayed up watching I Dream of Jeanie until five in the morning when the sun came through the Atlantic. I remembered then that I always sleep like a fetus when I drank. I openned my Fisher Price Liquore cabinet: baby little bottles of Hennessy, Skyy Vodka, Jameson, and Bacardi. I have a shot of each--which was an important part of my bartender training--and then, just to treat myself, I add two shots of Hennessy and stumble of the stair to the empty bed where I collapse and wake up, perplexed as to how my Thai food from dinner ended up in the carpet.

At 4:45 I get out of the tub and dry off. The progressive, non-asbestos tiles installed in this house during the sixties succeed in sucking the remaining heat out of my body. Meanwhile, my inner-monologue--bored from two days of disuse--works overtime narrating the situation. I stand there, pissed-off at the pipes and their miscalculations, for fifteen minutes until I think there's enough time. Then I take a hot shower.

At 5:00 I sit in my parents' kitchen, eating left over lazagna, and drinking on Christmas morning. I think about how many people must get pleasure from making jokes about Jim Beam being their best friend. I wonder if they'd be any happier with real jokes and real friends. I think about how much I've learned in the past year--how better equipped I am to take care of myself/drink too much when necessary--and I do a few other things.

David Sedaris on love, Chicago, and matching luggage.
"...We were together for six years, and when we finally broke up I felt like a failure, a divorced person. I now had what the self-help books called relationship baggage, which I would carry around for the rest of my life. The trick was to meet someone with similar baggage, and form a matching set, but how would one go about finding such a person? Bars were out; I knew that much. I’d met my first boyfriend at a place called the Man Hole—not the sort of name that suggests fidelity. It was like meeting someone at Fisticuffs and then complaining when he turned out to be violent." From "Old Faithful" in this month's New Yorker.

Labels: Chicago

"If the Journal of the Working Boy meets with any success at the book stalls, I shall perhaps etch a likeness of our nation with my pen. Our nation demands the scrutiny of a completely disengaged observer like your Working Boy, and I already have in my files a rather formidable collection of notes and jottings that evaluate and lend a perspective to the contemporary scene." Ignatius Reily, the main character of A Confederacy of Dunces, in his journal, which he believes will someday be published.

Burning the drive in.

"They wrapped a big chain fence wraps around the evergreen walls just so that no one can see in for free. Like anyone cares. Someone smashed the gate in a long time ago. A rusted lock still hangs from the end of the wooden beam, but the rest of it’s busted off and rotting from the hinge. A big sign stands in the window where the movie ticket guy should be. IDAHO DRIVE-IN CLOSED FOR SEASON. And you gotta wonder what season that was. Weeds grow through the mailman-blue gravel. Some of them wrap all the way around the speaker stands next to where the cars go. There’s hundreds of ‘em, all in soldier rows, waiting for you. Some of them got knocked down and landed on the gravel with their old cracked wires connected to nothing but staples. We park halfway through the drive-in lot and don’t really say much to each other. Hampshire spreads out the tarp and leaves the tent in the trunk. Big sky clouds roll around us, tryna get home for the night as the sky goes orange. You just know some asshole in a pickup came here the day he got his license and just went nuts. All of the broken speaker stands are lined up. You can almost hear him driving through, yelping, tryna write his name in tire tracks and downed speakers. He prolly went after the screen too. Long shadows from a few hundred stands reach out to us as the sun heads for the next state. The clouds flower up all pink and purple and colors the screen. He gets the rice going. Before the sun disappears, I collect the broken speaker stands and pile them up in front of us. This is a camping trip and we’re going to have a goddam campfire.

I sit on the edge of the tarp and watch it burn. A little white gas helps. Hampshire wraps a sleeping bag around his neck, holding his knees to his chest, glaring at the fire. I lean fence posts on a three-foot high stack of wood and jump down on it. Mmmmmkha-ackk! It snaps in half. And I pile it on the fire. Then more stands and more stands. I pile on the busted shutters from the snack bar, the exit sign, the one with the line through the word HORNS. I pile on cracked benches. I pile on the fence that kept people in line by the bathroom, but just the parts that already broke. Their paint and their sale prices and their posted hours flare up, turn black, and disappear. The speaker wires curl up as they burn, leaving little glowing red springs in the ashes. I drag over a whole row of seats, five of ’em. But they don’t go in. We sit in the even numbers as the flames reach out like peaks. The screen glows orange again."

The List: Books I Once Owned, Once Loved is pretty much done.

These are all the books that I care to remember right now. The rest were sold to someone in Chicago, probably Oprah, and will remain as unappreciated by them as they were by me.

I can easily remember author phases: Zadie Smith, Nick Hornby, Dave Eggers, Ahrudati Roy and recall three titles or so by each of them, but it's hard to remember which books I should have read for class and didn't, or which books I finished but wasn't wowed by. Also, I could only get a few images from powells.com out of the hundred I tried for. As such, the above graphic makes my reading tastes indicate that I am almost always on spring break from Radcliffe.

Labels: Chicago

First time out of the city in what feels like months. Glad to be in New England. Forgot how much I love New Hampshire. Our own red state (sometimes). And here's why:

I buy a "grinder", kettle chips, a sobe, and a coke at the above store. And as soon as I put my the food on the counter, the clerk says: "You Jewish?"

Me, thinking for an unnecessary second, "No, not at all."

"Oh." He punches in my bag of popcorn. "Well. You look jewish." I search all around for any exposed minorae. And then I look down at what I'm wearing. Sportcoat, sweater, collared shirt, jeans. I look like someone who watches too many Woody Allen movies.

"I'm from New York, if that's what you mean."

"That must be it."

"It's nice to get out. I always forget how great New Hampshire is it's so...so..." (don't say hilarious, don't say hilarious) "beautiful."

"Yeah, it's nice to get away from the city, ain'it? I used to reposses cahhs for a living." (There are parts of New England where they only bother having an accent on the word "car." This is one of them). "And I mean I was in all the big cities. Nashua, Roxbury, Boston, Manchester. But it's just too much, sometimes. You know?"

"Oh, I know it."

How Jonathan Franzen might get me on Court TV.

After narrating the saintly portrait of myself, the violated, blameless individual who, for reasons that elllude everyone, was some how robbed of 200 books, the producer asked a few questions. "Any idea why they would do this?"

"No."

"Huh."

"I mean, maybe they thought that I didn't want them, but still. They should have called. You know?"

"Okay. Well, I'll talk to the other producers and give you a call back."

The impish voice of Jonathan Franzen creeps in my head. If you are going to write a story about a way in which you were wronged or treated unjustly, you must be willing to admit whether you are the person who can write the story. The one who can be fair to all you characters.

"When I got there, one of the subletters mentioned that she was upset that we didn't leave her a key to the front door."

"Oh?"

"And then she said that she didn't think they should have had to pay the deposit for a sublet. Also, we never finished painting the walls, and no one vaccuumed their rugs when they moved out, my clothes were in the front closet." Good television (even good bad television) is good journalism and good novel writing. It's not who or what or where, but Why that matters. Acres of classroom adages fill my skull as I launch into a defense where in I stop just short of mentioning that the trouble we caused them was not even entirely covered by selling my books and that, who knows, maybe I should be paying him for the time it took to sell them.

"Writing is the best way to spend what time is left to me -- sit at [Annie's] dining room table and try to write what is given to me to write, a comic novel, a sonnet, a Lake Wobegon story, a parody of the president, a limerick about a lady named Reba who cried out in rapture, "Ich liebe," a rhapsody to homegrown tomatoes. I've loved doing this all my life, and one should not turn away from good luck as good as that."
-Garrison Keillor, in paraphrased interview, which I found stirring.

While I have not received a single email from the man who sold my books, I did just received this about the man who sold my books:

Hello,

My name is Monique Rothman, and I am an Associate Producer at "Judge Judy."  I received your e-mail and would like to speak with you as soon as possible about your case.

You can reach me by telephone and email.

I look forward to speaking with you soon.

Thank you,

Monique Rothman

And for the record: Oprah, as of now, does not give a shit about me.

Sometimes when I'm in the middle of an hour-long commute, when I walk down long avenue blocks, when I cross over one of the nice bridges, or when I run into a hundred people going some place special, I look forward to the day when I can miss New York.

Almost everyday I write an email to the guy who sold two hundred of my books. I should write one everyday, but I don't. The guy, however, is much more vigilant than myself. While I some days I don't even write him a letter he makes sure that every single day he does not write me a letter. Not even by accident.

So every day mine get more and more desparate.

Dear Anonymous Book Guy-
I've sent you a few emails and I just want to get this taken care of now. I don't want to plague your cellphones. We're adults. We can handle this. There's a lot of confusion about what happened to my books and why. But we can only figure this out if you tell me what happened. Okay?

Please just email me back an explanation. Anything. Please. "Dear Brendan, Drew said when we got here, 'Brendan wants you to smell his books.' But it was raining really hard I we heard 'Brendan wants you to melt his books,' which also didn't make any sense. But we had just moved in and we didn't want to get off to a bad start, so later we decided that he must have said, 'Brendan wants you to spell 'Mishtuks.' And we all really wanted to be able to spell 'Mishtuks' for you. But we couldn't so that, cause we didn't have a dictionary. So then we had to sell all your books to buy one."

See? There it was all a misunderstanding and I understand everything. But right now I have no idea what happened and I just want to know.

Sincerely,

Brendan

Wallow #2

Since the year 2000, I have lived in a world where no one will care if I do not get out of bed in the morning. College, restaurants, bartending, being a reporter--all of these things did not happen in the morning, and if they did (college, being a reporter), no one really could do anything or even noticed if you didn't show up.

This means that the only reason to wake up every morning at 7:30 AM is to get writing done. Some mornings I hear a bus roll by at 5:45 and I break awake and cannot convince myself to get back to sleep. But when the writing goes poorly, I see the morning come through the shades and think, Nah, I better get a lot of sleep so I can really get going on this next section. Four hours later if I'm not in bed, I'm dicking around on the internet.

The two main characters in my project are now on page 270. They're fighting. They're sick of eachother. They've spent probably about 250 pages sitting right next to eachother, so they want some time alone while they drive to Washington. The main character, desparate to get away, sits in the back seat for eight hundred miles.

There's a really beautiful part of Lolita where the narrative breaks down. You're no longer following the story as it unfolds nor are you witnessing the travels of the two. You just know what there is a duration of time wherein the narrator is working a few things out in his head and they are moving in some direction in a car.

I'd love to read that right now. It may even help. But my copy of Lolita, as well as my narrative theory papers--which would have a better term for the breakdown--are probably not even on the shelves of the used bookstore anymore. They're probably wrapped in old Tribune pages and sitting under some hippie-collective's Christmas tree.

Last night when Annie came home we did our Ozzie and Harriet thing and talked about the eight hours since we had last seen eachother.

"It's strange. I lost my last job over a sixteen dollar mistake. I even paid for it. Last week at the gallery, someone stole a sixteen-thousand-dollar piece of artwork while I was working, and they did was give me more hours."

"I can't totally see that going on your weblog. It's there already, isn't it? I bet if I check in the morning that exact sentence will be there. Word-for-word."

"It will not."

"Whatver."