This has been bothering me since 1997. That was the first year where a teacher ever treated me like something less than a liability. He said he liked me writing and helped me with it after school as a way of keeping me out of English as a Second Language. I'd like to say I like learning, but just as I like having written better than writing, I just like knowing.
"You really think I'm doing good?"
"No, Mr. Sullivan. I think you're doing well." Good is an adjective. Well is an adverb He taught me all about adverbs. To never use them unless telling someone that "I am well." I liked grammar especially because my vice principal was a former gym teacher. I was convinced that I could get out of saturday school merely by noting his misplaced modifiers.
Today I was reading Artbabe in the park and fell asleep. When I woke up I saw the hundreds of people around me and I said. "Fuck that. I'm not doing well. I'm not well. I've never been well. I've been good. I mean, have I ever said 'I am fantastically?'"
Why did that take me almost ten years to figure out?
My life could really use about 50% more syncronized dancing. I mean, what if you and all of your friends had a Pee-Wee's Playhouse kind of deal where you could pick one song and everytime it played you had to get up, line up, and break into the electric slide?
At work they play the same damn music on the same shitty speakers every night and I have a deal with myself that no matter how busy I am or how many people are standing in front of me waiting for me to answer their questions, I pause and stare at them during the intro. And then: "I could feel at the time / There was no way of knowing / Fallen leaves in the night / Who can say where they´re blowing..."
One of the things I keep getting reminded of lately with the money pumping through The White Stripes, inc and Yeah Yeah Yeahs is that not so long ago rock wasn't a place to make money. Not that it's especially easier or more common now.
There's an interview with Karen O in Rollingstone this month where she mentions that when she started the band her friends all made fun of her because even three years ago starting a band was a laughable and futile excercise. Rock bands were bleach blond closet cases in matching outfits or relentless touring acts that just wouldn't die. The stale cotton-candy machine stench of the late nineties hung over music and if you absolutely had to start a band you couldn't have songs, choruses, harmonies, etc. You had to play your guitar with a shattered beer bottle and then stab Thurston Moore with it so he could death rattle into the microphone with approval.
I remember when Jack White got a Porche. It must have cost every dollar he had made then / been lease to him by Coca cola. But for a few weeks we felt like he was not a guy who would do coke commericials who got a porche. But a friend-of-a-friend who maybe took himself too seriously.
Somehow I felt like there was something not so un-manly about buying a Black & Decker steaming iron. Annie defiled our last two irons in what I'm told were two unrelated incidents involving the same polyester skirt. I ended up spending ten more dollars on the B&D brand, although I had other options which actually had the "Good Housekeeping" seal of approval.
Perhaps this was just in case I ran into my brother or the foreman from the farm I used to work in while I walked out of the downtown Brooklyn Target. "Jesus--I must be losing my mind--I meant to bring home a belt sander! And this isn't a tool bench, it is some kind of collapsible board for ironing."
But the wrinkled, white, flowered sport coat I had just bought would give me away.
At all times I am mining other peoples lives for characters, complexities. An ex girlfriend of mine later confessed how nervous it made her to lose me in a grocery store and find me talking to a complete stranger and, in her words, "stealing their souls." Tonight I was talking to two leggy women who were in search of a bar with more fun in a very unfun zip code. Girl number one had just moved to the area, temporarily. Girl number two was taking her out.
They were both the kind of women I post about occasionally with five hundred dollar purses/dye jobs. It was almost seventy degrees out today and this is the kind of day where otherwise boring women like them rediscover their own breasts, as if they were a funky necklace they hadn't worn since college. An accessory that they pull out just to make it to the weekend.*
They both worked in finance.
I asked them the question that I ask all people. What do you do all day? I stare at a computer screen, email my friends, pretend to work. Why, therefore, when you finally do get out and go to lunch or get some drinks, are all of your people still hunched over your Blackberries? Are you at all times twenty minutes away from losing your job? Basically, they said.
But what do you really do with your life? Girl number one said that the life of the office happens in the copy room where departments collide. Girl number two said, "I just look into reports, file papers, walk around in my underwear." G#2 started telling me about how when she was younger she was in fashion and how she models Calvin Klein underwear on the weekends.
"Wait. Wait. Wait," I ignored G#2 and went back to G#1. "Why are you living here temporarily?"
"Two weeks ago I broke up with my fiance," G#1 said. "We were supposed to get married next week."
"I still have her wedding shower invitations," the underwear model said, but somehow I was not interested in her story any more. It had no angles, no treachery, no forfeited deposits.**
*I have a degree in Women's Studies/A Very Serious Girlfriend and everytime I see a woman who clearly spent half an hour adhesive taping herself into her shirt I don't know what I'm supposed to do. Do I applaud her for doing something that takes such skill? Am I supposed to pretend I don't notice? If she spent half an hour etching a complicated Soduku puzzle on her neck would I ignore it, as if I have a friend who could do that with the Sunday times? Life is ridiculous, contrived, disgusting and heartless. Which is why I try and record it in the first place.
**In the end I introduced them to a friend of mine who would love nothing more than to spend his day off in a beauty salon while they glossed his future ex wife. And I walked out the door while no one was looking.
There's an apartment in my dreams that my friends move in to, re-occurringly. It's spacious, wide, with dim windows but high ceilings and a couch in the middle of the living room like some kind of TV family. And everytime a friend of mine moves in I look around and remember it from somewhere else. Some sniffing reminds me that there is a secret door in the corner behind fireplace.
When I walk through that door--it's always open--I find a lime-green, much repainted room like a Pennsylvania roadside motel. The woman inside goes "My gosh! How did you find me? Don't tell anyone I'm back here."
