When I made my visit to Chicago, one night I found myself sitting on a bench in Wicker Park wondering what I’d meant when years ago I’d subconsciously decided somewhere along the way to commit myself only to writing “important” stories, “important” poems. I was in transit to adulthood now that I was out of school, and it was becoming increasingly clear that “important” only meant “self-important.”
The problem was that, in our heads, we’re all geniuses. We are all the stars of our own lives, as David Foster Wallace had once noted; the most important person to ever exist. We’re all cologned with some slight expectation of greatness.
The problem was also that, when you listened to someone like David Foster Wallace speak, you realized that you were not a genius, and that you were doomed to a lesser level of recognition that was inevitable for writers in this culture anyway. Regardless of your talent, you’re not going to be writing the Great American novel; as you’d long suspected, there are too many Americas, and too many brilliant Americans already writing about each of them.
So I sat on my little bench in Chicago penning the obituary for my own glory. Good. Nice to get that out of the way.
Let’s talk about writing as a tool for survival.
Those of us not in grad school will likely have to adjust to the eight or more hours of day that we will spend at an entry-level job doing little tasks for nominal pay. We have to confront that, four these eight (or more) hours, our brains are sedentary. Fielding calls for customer service means few synapses need to be fired. Less connections need to be made. Your brain becomes maximally efficient at doing menial work that had required very little effort to begin with.
This is your brain on the twenty-first century.
Writing will help keep you in intellectual shape, like jogging for a few miles a week. If you maintain any standard of quality for your work, fiction should force you to maintain a sense of clarity over long distances of plot and characterization, helping to combat the ADHD tendency of your Google-adapted thought process. On the opposite side of the spectrum, poetry will encourage you to reach different parts of your brain not normally accessible and smash them together to create something unexpected.
Reading, naturally, is also encouraged, so that you encounter minds other than your customers’.
Now, what does it mean to be literary if you’re not a professional, or a career academic?
In many regards, it’s about being a repository of culture, thoughtfulness, and idiosyncrasy. Contrary to hipsterism—which is being subjected to increasingly aggressive marketing these days—it’s about being interesting not through the clothes you wear or the quality of your sarcasm but by the depth and breadth of the ideas you hold. People may think reading is dying—it is—84% of Americans want to write a book, yet only a fraction have read one this year—but YouTube notwithstanding, writing will at least be around for as long as people don’t want to embarrass themselves. Writing is the final defense against a culture of instantaneity that values sound-bites and missteps more than thoughtful presentation.
And in a society of rampant consumerism, where sadness is inefficient, and unprofitable (except to sell antidepressants) writing reminds us that it’s still okay to try and be the heroes of our own lives even when things aren’t going so hot. No matter how bad things get, your day, your life still has value; art can still at least be made, no matter how pedestrian.
When David Foster Wallace died, his friend and public radio literary critic Michael Silverblatt commented on his show that “The death of David Foster Wallace seems to speak to the difficulty of life itself; depressed or not, brilliant or not, are we living in a time that makes it hard for us to find the things that allow us to want to stay alive?”
Perhaps. Writing and art can’t heal everything. But it’s still worth trying to leave a testament to the desire we’d once had to be so much greater than ourselves.
And I think that’s something.
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Saturday, July 19, 2008
The ballad of El Burrito
In the beginning, my dad never actually intended to become a photographer. He went to UMKC in the late 60s/early 70s and got his degree in English (!) and economics before becoming a traveling salesman. He got his start when he shot a few polaroids at a wedding, more out of curiosity than anything.
When he started his business my grandfather told him that he'd never make money taking pictures; he told him that he should get a "real" job.
A couple years before that, and before his stint as a salesman, Dad'd had a "real" job in San Jose at a gas station on the outskirts of the city, near the desert. He wasn't sure what he was doing there, exactly; he'd moved to Cali with my mom to check out west coast living for a while.
On his first day of work, he asked the guy who'd been running the place for eleven years when the last time was that he'd been robbed. Guy says, we've never been robbed.
Two weeks later, at two o'clock in the morning, a shirtless man is standing over my father (facedown in the candy aisle) with a machete to the back of his neck telling him to count to twenty-five; if you get up before twenty-five, I will come right back here and kill you dead. The man ran out the door.
Dad didn't quit this "real" job, though.
His next brush with crime came a couple weeks later, in the afternoon. It's hot. Dad's mopping the aisle next to the foodstuffs when he notices a Mexican migrant worker standing nervously in front of the microwave. Dad asks if he could use any help, and the guy doesn't reply. He starts fidgeting. Dad walks over to him and looks in the microwave and realizes that the man is trying to microwave approximately forty burritos at once.
Dad laughs. "You have to do them one at a time."
The migrant worker doesn't say anything, and Dad makes hand motions. One at a time.
At this, the migrant worker immediately flings open the door of the microwave and dumps all the still-cold burritos into a plastic sack and sprints out the door without paying.
Dad runs after him.
With a baseball bat.
My father had a scholarship offer to play tailback at Brown. He was an all-state sprinter. But the little short guy with a plastic sack full of burritos actually starts getting away. There's a Buick with five passengers (three in front, two in back) out in the parking lot with the engine running and a door open, everyone from the car shouting for him to ondele.
When he realizes that he won't catch him, Dad stops, cocks his arm, and hammer-tosses the baseball bat instead.
He misses the guy-- but he hits the car. BANG. And the driver, who must have been thinking my dad had a gun, immediately panics and punches the gas-- neglecting to make sure that his buddy had actually made it inside the vehicle.
Hombre was being dragged down the street, one hand on the handle of the door, the other on the trailing bag of burritos. He wouldn't let go of either. The driver only figured out what was happening a block later, stopping long enough to get his buddy in the car.
My father watched them drive away. It was 1973. He had a "real" job. He was getting minimum wage.
Monday, July 14, 2008
A Song for You, pt. II
I have a longstanding hypothesis about relationships-- some of you may have heard this before-- that no matter how much two people like each other, there's always one person who likes the other a little bit more. It's not original thinking, nor is it probably a revelation to any of you, but the theory goes that whoever likes the other person more is inevitably the one that gets dumped.
(It's just another of my idiot-proof dating theories kind of like the one I have about knowing when people like you: when someone's into you, they don't make excuses about not being able to hang out; they find a way to make it happen. Add booze, stir, simmer, voila. Your gut is never wrong, folks. Trust it.)
(p.s., Here's another for the road: if you know they like you-- you can tell-- then they are the one that's more into you. If you find yourself asking your friends to interpret mixed signals, you are more into them. Sorry. The more you know!)
Anyway, in that line of thinking-- about who likes who more-- the people who write songs are inevitably the kind of people who always like the other person more.
Think about it. Which set of these generic lyrics I just made up right now would you think are more common?
I've been thinking about youWondering how you've beenDon't want to see you with that other manI want to see you again
Or:
That girl from the coffee shop is kinda cuteI dunno thoughI'm not sure I'm feeling itShe's been calling a lotI think I'm gonna go nail my ex
Exactly.
Of course, the most astounding thing is how cool musicians are in this country when the vast body of their work consists of the kind of clingy sentiments that drive a normal person's significant others away.
For instance, let's say you're trying to win someone over. Pragmatically speaking, what's the best way to do it-- telling them how you feel? Hell no! That's romantic suicide and you know it. Every single one of your friends will tell you to pretend like you're not interested. You have to run away a little bit, not write love songs, you dork.
Think about this: for every awesome love song you know, there is a person out there that that song was written for, and they wish their creepy guitar-player ex would just stop calling them. Bon Jovi, you're eating up all her texts.
If there's an exception to the rule, it's that rappers maybe seem like they're not all that sentimental-- they're too busy tappin' dat ass, I guess-- but I think they're actually dating geniuses. Rappers feel pain like everyone else. But what better way to drive up their stock with the ladies and get revenge on the woman who toyed with their hearts than to brag over national radio about all the hotties that are climbing all over them at the club? Brilliant.
Anyway, I guess there's something to be said for music in that it can turn the inherently uncool into Al Green's "Let's Stay Together."
Sunday, July 13, 2008
A Song for You
I haven’t written a song since my junior year of high school or so, which I guess seems odd since I'm both a musician and a writer.
I think I remember the process of what usually happened when I slapped something together: first, I would find a neat chord progression on my guitar, and then I’d make some weird, shrill singing noises with my voice for a while to find a melody. This is a hugely embarrassing yet suprisingly effective process. I had a real knack for finding catchy hooks, and I had a lot of fun doing it.
Then, I would spend about five minutes writing words. Immortal, immortal words.
Let’s check out bits of this little gem I just found nestled amongst the tabs of popular songs in the bottom of my guitar case. Witness the magic of “Spanish Senorita,” written around the time I was a freshman in high school:
Nevermind that at that point in my life I had never actually met a real, living person who spoke Spanish—I had written a fuckin’ song and I was gonna sing it. I needn’t have ever actually touched (or talked to) a woman to know real love.
There’s a recording of this song floating around somewhere on my hard drive at home, but I’m too scared to listen to it. I don’t want to remember. I don’t think I developed any kind of taste in anything until I was, oh, a sophomore in college. (C’mon, I’m from the country. It took me a long time to catch up with everybody.)
But I feel better looking at the lyrics of the Lil’ Wayne and Rihanna songs currently on top of the charts, and it makes me think maybe I missed my calling:
Powerful stuff. In light of that, I think “Spanish Senorita” has aged rather well.
The fact is that most song lyrics are woefully inartful when they’re separated from the music, at least compared to the bewildering aesthetic and cognitive shit-show that constitutes most poetry. Lyrics often convey only a simple message, and lack the general elusiveness that characterizes most literary writing.
Then, I would spend about five minutes writing words. Immortal, immortal words.
Let’s check out bits of this little gem I just found nestled amongst the tabs of popular songs in the bottom of my guitar case. Witness the magic of “Spanish Senorita,” written around the time I was a freshman in high school:
Spanish senorita… I hear you calling my name
What is it now?
Spanish senorita… What is this game?
You tempt me now.
Nevermind that at that point in my life I had never actually met a real, living person who spoke Spanish—I had written a fuckin’ song and I was gonna sing it. I needn’t have ever actually touched (or talked to) a woman to know real love.
There’s a recording of this song floating around somewhere on my hard drive at home, but I’m too scared to listen to it. I don’t want to remember. I don’t think I developed any kind of taste in anything until I was, oh, a sophomore in college. (C’mon, I’m from the country. It took me a long time to catch up with everybody.)
But I feel better looking at the lyrics of the Lil’ Wayne and Rihanna songs currently on top of the charts, and it makes me think maybe I missed my calling:
You look so dumb right now,
Standin' outside my house,
Tryin' to apologize,
You’re so ugly when you cry,
Please, just cut it out.
Powerful stuff. In light of that, I think “Spanish Senorita” has aged rather well.
Spanish senorita… I bid you farewell
You’ve broke my shell, like them.
Spanish senorita… time to mend
This is the end.
℘
The fact is that most song lyrics are woefully inartful when they’re separated from the music, at least compared to the bewildering aesthetic and cognitive shit-show that constitutes most poetry. Lyrics often convey only a simple message, and lack the general elusiveness that characterizes most literary writing.
Even opera—which seems to have some kind of irrevocable membership in the country-club pantheon of “high” art—has libretti that are dreadfully cliché at worst, and cheesily straightforward at best.
But it’s not fair to separate lyrics from music, because that’s taking away half (or most) of the message.
But it’s not fair to separate lyrics from music, because that’s taking away half (or most) of the message.
What does “Stormy Weather” mean when you take away Billie Holliday’s nuanced delivery? What is “Satisfaction” without Mick Jagger bouncing around that little guitar hook in the background (“dah, dah… dah dah dahhhh…”)? And for that matter, what’s a Wagnerian hero tenor without his 100-piece orchestra?
Taking lyrics out of context is like taking a great piece of literature and then trying to determine its quality by looking at its one-paragraph synopsis on Wikipedia. You'll just realize that most books are basically about people screwing and dying, kind of like songs are all about love/breakups, and that’s not very original, is it? But that’s life. Everyone feels pain, everyone smiles. Unoriginality at the foundation of art is inevitable because life is unoriginal at its foundation.
So when you separate story from storytelling, lyrics from song—message from delivery—you miss that crafty flight from inescapable cliché, and I think that process of evasion is actually the foundation of anything we consider “artsy.”
Taking lyrics out of context is like taking a great piece of literature and then trying to determine its quality by looking at its one-paragraph synopsis on Wikipedia. You'll just realize that most books are basically about people screwing and dying, kind of like songs are all about love/breakups, and that’s not very original, is it? But that’s life. Everyone feels pain, everyone smiles. Unoriginality at the foundation of art is inevitable because life is unoriginal at its foundation.
So when you separate story from storytelling, lyrics from song—message from delivery—you miss that crafty flight from inescapable cliché, and I think that process of evasion is actually the foundation of anything we consider “artsy.”
It would be like writing a generic speech for Barack Obama and also having it read by President Bush, circa 2007; one delivery would have been full of the transcendent rhetoric of hope, while the other would be a tired re-tread from a lame-duck politician who is six months from being a persona non grata.
The point is that content matters, but the delivery counts just as much; lyrics are just a vehicle for expression, and lyrics by themselves are like intercontinental flights that don’t have any passengers.
In conclusion: you are allowed to write crappy lyrics if you’re W.A. Mozart, Rihanna, or Barack Obama.
In conclusion: you are allowed to write crappy lyrics if you’re W.A. Mozart, Rihanna, or Barack Obama.
Saturday, May 10, 2008
The lush life
Some lives seem distinctly more literary-- textual-- than others.
Jack Keroauc was a Catholic and a sufferer and a vagabond and he took all the pent-up energy of the fifties and took it on the road only after he decided that he wanted to create a novel out of a trip. Jorge Luis Borges was handed care of the largest library in Argentina after he had gone almost totally blind and after he had written about the world over, and no one was more sensitive to the irony than he. He had books arranged on his shelves in such a way that he could find his favorites by touch.
I don't feel like I'm living a literary life-- rather, a life defined by literature-- because books rarely surprise me or take hold of me the way that I sense that they do for other writers.
The emotional fabric of my life, thus far, is actually bound to music far more than it is to any literature. Unlike with all the books I own, every album I have has a story, and all the good ones have a history. In fact, the very best ones literally make history. The Long Winters' bizarre first two albums supplied the texture to the weird malaise that was my senior year of high school. Charles Mingus' The Black Saint and The Sinner Lady carved the shape of my bittersweet summer of 2007 into an angry color of trumpets, saxes, tubas, and pianos.
I don't feel like I'm living a literary life-- rather, a life defined by literature-- because books rarely surprise me or take hold of me the way that I sense that they do for other writers.
The emotional fabric of my life, thus far, is actually bound to music far more than it is to any literature. Unlike with all the books I own, every album I have has a story, and all the good ones have a history. In fact, the very best ones literally make history. The Long Winters' bizarre first two albums supplied the texture to the weird malaise that was my senior year of high school. Charles Mingus' The Black Saint and The Sinner Lady carved the shape of my bittersweet summer of 2007 into an angry color of trumpets, saxes, tubas, and pianos.
Each of them were like a relevation, a genesis of sound that seemed to signal that something *new* was happening, sort of like those big obelisks in "2001: A Space Odyssey," as if the time in which I was listening to them was in fact unique and that this period had its own story that could now be embodied by this certain sound, the likes of which I had never before encountered. I was not living the same day over and over again; things were actually changing. Historians name epochs in history much like music gives the moments of my life their own identity. (2001 was actually the year of Pearl Jam's Ten.)
My problem-- my double vision-- lies in the fact that I lack the musical gifts to funnel my own life experience into a song the way that I can put that experience on paper. The distance between what's in my heart and what I can put on the page is closer than, say, what I can create with the strings of my guitar. Any jazz improviser knows what I'm talking about. In order to riff and create your own distinctive sound, your own bag of licks, you have to make playing the horn as natural as possible by closing the gap that exists between the sounds in your head and the sounds that come out of your bell. You literally have to become the horn. Well, writing feels most natural for me. Everything else is just foreplay.
I write, but I'm not living a literary life. I just know what a literary life sort of looks like, and I'm using a substitute. That's just how it works for me. I'm glad, though. I'm allowed to have times when all the stories simply run out, when intuition just says that nothing needs to be said. Those are the good nights when all that really needs to matter is the distinct wordlessness of the sheets of your bed and the sound of the 3A.M. rain on your windows, and the almost never-ending drone of that idiosyncratically absurd latin funk album by a bunch of white kids from Iowa that's been put on repeat, repeat.
My problem-- my double vision-- lies in the fact that I lack the musical gifts to funnel my own life experience into a song the way that I can put that experience on paper. The distance between what's in my heart and what I can put on the page is closer than, say, what I can create with the strings of my guitar. Any jazz improviser knows what I'm talking about. In order to riff and create your own distinctive sound, your own bag of licks, you have to make playing the horn as natural as possible by closing the gap that exists between the sounds in your head and the sounds that come out of your bell. You literally have to become the horn. Well, writing feels most natural for me. Everything else is just foreplay.
I write, but I'm not living a literary life. I just know what a literary life sort of looks like, and I'm using a substitute. That's just how it works for me. I'm glad, though. I'm allowed to have times when all the stories simply run out, when intuition just says that nothing needs to be said. Those are the good nights when all that really needs to matter is the distinct wordlessness of the sheets of your bed and the sound of the 3A.M. rain on your windows, and the almost never-ending drone of that idiosyncratically absurd latin funk album by a bunch of white kids from Iowa that's been put on repeat, repeat.
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Most things work out in the end
Today I took my final courses as an undergraduate and went down to the South Quad where they were serving free beer and free food to all the outgoing seniors. The turnout was good, if turnout can ever be bad for a student event offering free alcohol. The lines were long, which was all right, because it gave us all a chance to stand around and look at each other in the hope that we'd see someone we knew. I posed for photos with anybody with a familiar face.
For me-- I'm not going to graduate school-- graduating from Mizzou means that not only do I become an alumnus of the university, but I also become an alumnus of the kind life I'm used to living and an alumnus of spending time with all the people that I've come to know. No matter what happens, things are going to be different from now on.
I've heard a lot of people say that their college years were the best years of their lives, but I think the real tragedy would be to say that the best years of my life are now over. Were they great years? Yes. But the best? That's obviously yet to be seen. There's certainly no doubt that things might not get this posh again. I'm an English major, and so I read the subtext in everything; getting free beer today was sort of like a symbol for This could be the last time you have it this easy.
But I don't think any of us should be feeling sorry for themselves. After all, most of us standing on the South Quad today come from a long line of people who work for a living. Hard work keeps this country running and makes a college education possible in the first place. We certainly shouldn't worry about not figuring what we are meant to "do" with our lives when we can pick up the paper on any day of the week and find that there are no shortages of opportunities for our lives become things of real significance.
Am I scared about what happens next? No. If I'm leaving this place with nothing but an education and a handful memories, then you'd better believe I'm going into the world nothing less than well-armed. And as soon as everybody finishes this beer, it'll already be time that we were seeing to the work at hand.
For me-- I'm not going to graduate school-- graduating from Mizzou means that not only do I become an alumnus of the university, but I also become an alumnus of the kind life I'm used to living and an alumnus of spending time with all the people that I've come to know. No matter what happens, things are going to be different from now on.
I've heard a lot of people say that their college years were the best years of their lives, but I think the real tragedy would be to say that the best years of my life are now over. Were they great years? Yes. But the best? That's obviously yet to be seen. There's certainly no doubt that things might not get this posh again. I'm an English major, and so I read the subtext in everything; getting free beer today was sort of like a symbol for This could be the last time you have it this easy.
But I don't think any of us should be feeling sorry for themselves. After all, most of us standing on the South Quad today come from a long line of people who work for a living. Hard work keeps this country running and makes a college education possible in the first place. We certainly shouldn't worry about not figuring what we are meant to "do" with our lives when we can pick up the paper on any day of the week and find that there are no shortages of opportunities for our lives become things of real significance.
Am I scared about what happens next? No. If I'm leaving this place with nothing but an education and a handful memories, then you'd better believe I'm going into the world nothing less than well-armed. And as soon as everybody finishes this beer, it'll already be time that we were seeing to the work at hand.
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Signs that you might not be standing on a giant pool of lava
The next time the English Department decides that they're going to play departmental politics with the capstone thesis of one of their hardest-working seniors, they should make sure that over the last 12 months the senior hasn't been doing more to make life easier for key tenured faculty than the English Department has.
They should also make sure that the senior isn't doing something useful with their capstone project, like, say, publishing it.
They should also make sure that the senior isn't doing something useful with their capstone project, like, say, publishing it.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Signs that you might be standing on a giant pool of lava
- You haven't started on your thesis.
- You haven't started on your thesis yet.
- You haven't started on your thesis at this time.
- You have a thesis, and you don't know where it is.
- You took your thesis to the mall and you never saw it again.
- Your thesis is probably out there somewhere on EBay.
- You sort of need this thing to graduate.
- Your feet feel warm.
Monday, April 7, 2008
Hauntology
I'm in the process of finalizing my interview with Stuart Dybek for publication in the summer issue of The Missouri Review. Here's an excerpt:
Matt Pearce: What was it about being a caseworker that rubbed you the wrong way?
Stuart Dybek: I worked for two years for the Illinois Department of Public Aid. Part of my district in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood on the South Side was the DuSable Hotel, which was at one time one of the most prominent African American hotels in a very racially divided city. At least two plays that I know of are set there. But by the time I was the caseworker for “the Mighty Du,” as it was called, it was filled with junkies and prostitutes and could have passed for a ring in Dante's Inferno. My feeling about the job was hardly a matter of being "rubbed the wrong way." I was appalled by a firsthand look at—not to mention my own inadvertent participation in—institutionalized racism and a system that seemed designed to support the status quo maintaining poverty so long as it was tucked away in prisons, poor schools, slum areas and hotels like the DuSable, mental hospitals, et cetera. The job was at least an education. It all goes on, of course. The jailed population in the US should shame us. Your question about class is posed in a time when the so-called leadership of the country, especially Bush/Cheney engages in what, if there were any perspective whatsoever, could only be described as class warfare on the impoverished...
Matt Pearce: You said that you never saw your neighborhood as anything but dangerous, yet danger in your stories can sometimes be very subtle.
Stuart Dybek: I once taught a course on ghosts. One of the things that interested me when I was teaching the course on ghosts—the ghost as an image, ghost stories—is a term by the very complicated French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Derrida talks about ontology. And he’s making a pun. It sounds in French like our word “ontology,” but the way he’s spelling it is h-a-u-n-t-o-l-o-g-y, “hauntology.” What Derrida’s saying is that there are these economic forces that you don’t even know are there anymore that are shaping your life. They’re like ghosts. They haunt everything. And when I read that phrase, I was like “That’s what I’m after.” I just didn’t have the word for it. I didn’t have the diction for it. It isn’t nostalgia when I write the stories that’s the engine for me. It’s the sense of hauntology. Behind the way these people are acting in these angry, grotesque brutal kinds of modes are all these economic forces that happened in the past that they’re not even aware of anymore. One of the reasons they’re not aware of them is that they’re hidden. The second reason they’re not aware is that their educations are so shitty that they don’t have the educational equipment to know. The third reason is that there’s been a tremendous erosion of family history, because they’re immigrants... I’m glad you asked me that question, because it’s really that complex, about the difference between hauntology's ghosts—real ghosts that are dangerous—and a more bittersweet feeling like nostalgia.
Matt Pearce: What was it about being a caseworker that rubbed you the wrong way?
Stuart Dybek: I worked for two years for the Illinois Department of Public Aid. Part of my district in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood on the South Side was the DuSable Hotel, which was at one time one of the most prominent African American hotels in a very racially divided city. At least two plays that I know of are set there. But by the time I was the caseworker for “the Mighty Du,” as it was called, it was filled with junkies and prostitutes and could have passed for a ring in Dante's Inferno. My feeling about the job was hardly a matter of being "rubbed the wrong way." I was appalled by a firsthand look at—not to mention my own inadvertent participation in—institutionalized racism and a system that seemed designed to support the status quo maintaining poverty so long as it was tucked away in prisons, poor schools, slum areas and hotels like the DuSable, mental hospitals, et cetera. The job was at least an education. It all goes on, of course. The jailed population in the US should shame us. Your question about class is posed in a time when the so-called leadership of the country, especially Bush/Cheney engages in what, if there were any perspective whatsoever, could only be described as class warfare on the impoverished...
Matt Pearce: You said that you never saw your neighborhood as anything but dangerous, yet danger in your stories can sometimes be very subtle.
Stuart Dybek: I once taught a course on ghosts. One of the things that interested me when I was teaching the course on ghosts—the ghost as an image, ghost stories—is a term by the very complicated French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Derrida talks about ontology. And he’s making a pun. It sounds in French like our word “ontology,” but the way he’s spelling it is h-a-u-n-t-o-l-o-g-y, “hauntology.” What Derrida’s saying is that there are these economic forces that you don’t even know are there anymore that are shaping your life. They’re like ghosts. They haunt everything. And when I read that phrase, I was like “That’s what I’m after.” I just didn’t have the word for it. I didn’t have the diction for it. It isn’t nostalgia when I write the stories that’s the engine for me. It’s the sense of hauntology. Behind the way these people are acting in these angry, grotesque brutal kinds of modes are all these economic forces that happened in the past that they’re not even aware of anymore. One of the reasons they’re not aware of them is that they’re hidden. The second reason they’re not aware is that their educations are so shitty that they don’t have the educational equipment to know. The third reason is that there’s been a tremendous erosion of family history, because they’re immigrants... I’m glad you asked me that question, because it’s really that complex, about the difference between hauntology's ghosts—real ghosts that are dangerous—and a more bittersweet feeling like nostalgia.
Monday, March 31, 2008
The nature of memory
"Days in the past cover up little by little those that preceded them and are themselves buried beneath those that follow them. But each past day has remained deposited in us, as, in a vast library in which there are older books, a volume which, doubtless, nobody will ever ask to see."
-Marcel Proust
Being sixteen is a funny thing. That's the age when you still think epiphanies are real, the age before you've had enough of them to know better. For instance, when I was sixteen, I, Matt Pearce, attained nirvana. I was right in the middle of a shower at camp one summer when all of a sudden a overwhelming tranquility washed over me. I felt benevolent and all-knowing. I knew I would never be sad again.
(Ha.)
Years later, I'd be sitting in a creative writing class with one of my teachers talking about a story he thought was sort of trite: "You ever have one of those friends who, every four months, comes up to you and is like, 'Omigosh, I just had this amazing realization!' ...Yeah! Aren't they always wrong?" It's true. Epiphanies change nothing, usually; it's a bit like hitting jackpot in the emotional lottery and losing the winnings in six months. God knows how many endorphins you trick your brain into giving itself. I imagine that, scientifically, a brain on an epiphany looks like a brain on crack.
Well, I was on emotional crack when I was sixteen, and it all happened because of a book. I remember the couch I was on when I read it. I remember what the weather was like when I read it. (Something similar would happen three years later when I read A Hundred Years of Solitude.) I remember it was a Sunday, and I remember I'd just plowed straight through the whole book in a couple hours. It was a beat-up paperback with a blue cover and a trippy picture of a Buddha statue on the cover. After I finished it, I took a deep breath. I then went to my room, and then to my shower. I had my epiphany. I got out of shower. I dressed myself with a newfound sense of wonder for everything in the world, for every moment, for every gesture of basic living like, say, tying my shoes. I was all-embracing. I walked downstairs and outside to where a poolside barbecue was being held.
The sky was blue, and resplendent.
I stood in line to get my food. Kids my age were playing water polo in the pool. I remember the smell of the chlorine and the barbecue sauce. I remember the kid standing behind me in line had blue hair and glasses and wasn't wearing shoes. I'd seen him around before but had never talked to him.
"I just read this amazing, incredible book," I said to him.
"Oh really?" he said. He had a kind voice. "What's it called?"
"It's..." and I froze. The kids played in the water. The ribs sizzled on the grill. The clouds floated across the endless sky like galleons coasting in the trade winds of the Atlantic. The kid looked at me and I looked down at his naked, flattened toes. "I, er, can't remember what it's called," I said.
-Marcel Proust
Being sixteen is a funny thing. That's the age when you still think epiphanies are real, the age before you've had enough of them to know better. For instance, when I was sixteen, I, Matt Pearce, attained nirvana. I was right in the middle of a shower at camp one summer when all of a sudden a overwhelming tranquility washed over me. I felt benevolent and all-knowing. I knew I would never be sad again.
(Ha.)
Years later, I'd be sitting in a creative writing class with one of my teachers talking about a story he thought was sort of trite: "You ever have one of those friends who, every four months, comes up to you and is like, 'Omigosh, I just had this amazing realization!' ...Yeah! Aren't they always wrong?" It's true. Epiphanies change nothing, usually; it's a bit like hitting jackpot in the emotional lottery and losing the winnings in six months. God knows how many endorphins you trick your brain into giving itself. I imagine that, scientifically, a brain on an epiphany looks like a brain on crack.
Well, I was on emotional crack when I was sixteen, and it all happened because of a book. I remember the couch I was on when I read it. I remember what the weather was like when I read it. (Something similar would happen three years later when I read A Hundred Years of Solitude.) I remember it was a Sunday, and I remember I'd just plowed straight through the whole book in a couple hours. It was a beat-up paperback with a blue cover and a trippy picture of a Buddha statue on the cover. After I finished it, I took a deep breath. I then went to my room, and then to my shower. I had my epiphany. I got out of shower. I dressed myself with a newfound sense of wonder for everything in the world, for every moment, for every gesture of basic living like, say, tying my shoes. I was all-embracing. I walked downstairs and outside to where a poolside barbecue was being held.
The sky was blue, and resplendent.
I stood in line to get my food. Kids my age were playing water polo in the pool. I remember the smell of the chlorine and the barbecue sauce. I remember the kid standing behind me in line had blue hair and glasses and wasn't wearing shoes. I'd seen him around before but had never talked to him.
"I just read this amazing, incredible book," I said to him.
"Oh really?" he said. He had a kind voice. "What's it called?"
"It's..." and I froze. The kids played in the water. The ribs sizzled on the grill. The clouds floated across the endless sky like galleons coasting in the trade winds of the Atlantic. The kid looked at me and I looked down at his naked, flattened toes. "I, er, can't remember what it's called," I said.
Friday, March 28, 2008
Lullaby
Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, and it’s still nighttime in the early of the morning, I like to open my window and sit to watch Columbia from the quiet of my fifth-floor bedroom. From up there you can see a couple steeples lit in the near distance standing over the dark silhouettes of trees and houses and telephone poles; the foggy sky colored like a sullen orange from the reflection of the city lights; the early-risers’ cars passing up and down College Avenue, whose tires wash along the wet pavement almost like a rhythmic pounding of waves against an asphalt beach. A cool breeze inevitably creeps in, and I could sigh, because sometimes during those little becalmed moments in the middle of no-when, you just have to think of how nice it can be to listen to the twenty-first century as it goes trickling by.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
All the stuff I've ever stolen
- A bouncy-ball from the corner drugstore when I was 5
- A toy jet from a rich kid who never even know he had it
- Two dwarf-sized salt and pepper shakers
- My mother's copies of Tao of Steve and The Royal Tenenbaums
- A ceiling tile from the Hearnes Center
- Photoshop
- A Batman mask and a plastic princess tiara
- A bottle of Heidelberg mustard
- My junior high shop teacher's catchphrases
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Remember those big obelisks in "2001: A Space Odyssey"?
In relative order:
- Eric Clapton's guitar solo on the live version of "White Room" with Sheryl Crow.
- Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On."
- Weezer's Pinkerton.
- The Long Winters' The Worst You Can Do Is Harm.
- Claude Debussy's "Prelude on the afternoon of a faun."
- The Roots' "Star."
- Charles Mingus' The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady.
- Hank Williams Sr.'s Greatest Hits.
- Olivier Messiaen's Turangalila Symphony.
Monday, March 24, 2008
Footnotes to the life and times of a former... lover
1. Of course, no one thought it was very cool when you were a freshman and were dating that guy who was a senior. When you guys were both in high school.
2. Why yes, I looked it up. That’s statutory rape.
3. The same white pants you could see the electric green thong through.
4. Incidentally, my dad today remembered you and reiterated his offer from when you were in the fourth grade and he said he would buy you a new car if you married me. Yeah, he liked you a little bit.
5. That marked the third consecutive time you went for a scruffy guy who played guitar.
6. Your gaydar had always been much better than mine, after all. You saw it from a mile away. “No, no!” I said. “But…he’s…got…a…girlfriend!”
7. Do you remember Rowena, from Mr. Holland’s Opus? You guys sang the same role in our production of Crazy For You, whatever the name of that character was. You and Rowena were one and the same; there’s even that scene where Mr. Holland was watching her deliver the big aria (“Someone to Watch Over Me”) and it was very pretty and everything but then he said, Listen bitch, you’re not singing it like you mean it.
8. Well, they never gave me a romantic lead, did they?
9. You could have at least done him in a different room.
10. Yes, we both knew you were doing him right there. On the floor. Next to our beds. He was a prick before and a prick then and everyone knew that, too.
11. Your fiancé told me about the toothbrush. That’s disgusting. He also said he knew he was in love with you when he saw “those huge fuckin’ eyes staring at me.”
12. In retrospect, it was cheesy that half of our phone conversations at that point consisted of listening to each other's breathing since we couldn't really think of anything else to say but couldn't quite hang up either. I guess we really weren't too old for that kind of thing. Thank god.
13. How’s that children’s book coming?
14. The poem was called "The Bells." I had it written on a piece of notebook paper; there were scribbles and eraser smudges everywhere from trying to get the rhyme and meter right all week. I sat there in my car outside the church trying to copy it out on the card. I had the radio going. Mizzou was pounding Nebraska by a couple touchdowns at that point. A few people we both knew from high school were hanging around a van smoking weed and taking shots of tequila before going inside. It was clear I was going to be one of the best-dressed people there just because I was wearing slacks. At that point I still thought the poem was a good idea, not knowing it was already fucked, because I didn't know yet that your sprint down the rather undersized aisle would take only an Olympian three seconds (as opposed to the interminable march described in stanza 2) and, perhaps most dubiously, that you'd chosen to get married in a church that didn't have a single bell to its name.
15. "Amateur model?" you said, only sort of impressed. "She's not 'model' pretty, per se. Models are 'cute.' She's supermodel pretty, which is very different." Which was your way of saying that you didn't approve. You'd never approved.
16. Do you remember you broke up with me through a note in the third grade because I was wearing lime green snow pants? That was heartless. But since we only went out on dates in notes, I guess I already knew our relationship probably wasn’t working out for you in the long run since I'd never once actually talked to you yet.
17. I knew your husband was watching, but I didn’t care, and you didn't seem to either.
2. Why yes, I looked it up. That’s statutory rape.
3. The same white pants you could see the electric green thong through.
4. Incidentally, my dad today remembered you and reiterated his offer from when you were in the fourth grade and he said he would buy you a new car if you married me. Yeah, he liked you a little bit.
5. That marked the third consecutive time you went for a scruffy guy who played guitar.
6. Your gaydar had always been much better than mine, after all. You saw it from a mile away. “No, no!” I said. “But…he’s…got…a…girlfriend!”
7. Do you remember Rowena, from Mr. Holland’s Opus? You guys sang the same role in our production of Crazy For You, whatever the name of that character was. You and Rowena were one and the same; there’s even that scene where Mr. Holland was watching her deliver the big aria (“Someone to Watch Over Me”) and it was very pretty and everything but then he said, Listen bitch, you’re not singing it like you mean it.
8. Well, they never gave me a romantic lead, did they?
9. You could have at least done him in a different room.
10. Yes, we both knew you were doing him right there. On the floor. Next to our beds. He was a prick before and a prick then and everyone knew that, too.
11. Your fiancé told me about the toothbrush. That’s disgusting. He also said he knew he was in love with you when he saw “those huge fuckin’ eyes staring at me.”
12. In retrospect, it was cheesy that half of our phone conversations at that point consisted of listening to each other's breathing since we couldn't really think of anything else to say but couldn't quite hang up either. I guess we really weren't too old for that kind of thing. Thank god.
13. How’s that children’s book coming?
14. The poem was called "The Bells." I had it written on a piece of notebook paper; there were scribbles and eraser smudges everywhere from trying to get the rhyme and meter right all week. I sat there in my car outside the church trying to copy it out on the card. I had the radio going. Mizzou was pounding Nebraska by a couple touchdowns at that point. A few people we both knew from high school were hanging around a van smoking weed and taking shots of tequila before going inside. It was clear I was going to be one of the best-dressed people there just because I was wearing slacks. At that point I still thought the poem was a good idea, not knowing it was already fucked, because I didn't know yet that your sprint down the rather undersized aisle would take only an Olympian three seconds (as opposed to the interminable march described in stanza 2) and, perhaps most dubiously, that you'd chosen to get married in a church that didn't have a single bell to its name.
15. "Amateur model?" you said, only sort of impressed. "She's not 'model' pretty, per se. Models are 'cute.' She's supermodel pretty, which is very different." Which was your way of saying that you didn't approve. You'd never approved.
16. Do you remember you broke up with me through a note in the third grade because I was wearing lime green snow pants? That was heartless. But since we only went out on dates in notes, I guess I already knew our relationship probably wasn’t working out for you in the long run since I'd never once actually talked to you yet.
17. I knew your husband was watching, but I didn’t care, and you didn't seem to either.
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Mending broken hearts
During my freshman year of college, the second floor of Wolpers dorm had a reputation. "It bothers me," one of our RAs said, "that you're regarded as one of the worst floors that ResLife has ever seen."
It was true. Every day was an adventure. Cops would show up before 9am and be going room to room with the hall coordinator looking for power tools, because the night before someone had somehow removed a lounge door and a bulletin board. (*cough* They did it with a screwdriver. *cough*) Cops were a regular sight. We once had a large wine party on our floor-- in the halls and everything-- that would even spread downstairs to the laundry room when people kept spilling boxed Franzia on themselves and needed to wash their clothes lest the stains become permanent. Someone pissed in one of the dryers.
It seemed like a weekly ritual that someone would excuse themselves on one of the lounge couches as well. We defaced every bulletin board. We'd heard of "Quiet Hours," but we couldn't remember from where. The smokers that congregated out front once completely destroyed a metallic green bike locked to an adjacent rack, bending the wheels and the frame, and for a whole semester no one ever took it away. We threw unlocked bikes on the roof of the entrance. We duct-taped someone's door shut and did it again right after the hall coordinator tore the first attempt down.
We kept our mouths shut because material damages that showed up on the bills were just part of the entertainment costs.
One of our most dubious records was the number of ambulance visits in a single semester, and I was the thoroughbred that 2nd floor Wolpers rode to victory.
Almost everything up until that point, naturally, had been alcohol poisoning (though it's a miracle my neighbor across the hall didn't kill himself with the Drano/Extacy/coke concoctions he made regularly). Some straight-edge engineer on the upper floors would find one of our guys cruising up and down in the elevator in an alcohol coma with some delightful messages on his forehead. Slap 'em on the stretcher. They'd swear off drinking for about a week before getting back on the wagon.
Mine was legit, however, or so I thought. I had a heart condition called Wolff-Parkinson-White, which is a fairly common one as far as heart conditions go. A normal heart has an electrical pathway that goes back and forth between the atria and the ventricles, which is why heartbeats come in accented pairs. There's a little device like an organic Pacemaker in that pathway that regulates the electrical impulse and keeps your heart from beating about twice as fast as it needs to. People with WPW have an additional electrical pathway, like a service entrance, that lacks that regulating device, so every now and then, when playing, say, basketball, I'd go up for a rebound and get jostled and that electrical impulse that went down the normal pathway would suddenly get diverted down the alternate pathway, and my heart would start beating at an unregulated 200+ beats per minute. That's over three per second, and it doesn't slow down. Sometimes the episodes could last for forty minutes. Then, after spending quite a lot of time laying on the ground, feeling like I might pass out, my heart would suddenly seize up, stop for a moment, and then start beating at a mercifully regular tempo.
Most of the time, WPW isn't fatal, but sometimes it is. Needless to say, the idea of dropping dead of a heart attack at the age of nineteen kind of freaked me out, and that whole heart-stopping-for-a-second thing freaked me out too. (If you're laying down, it feels like you're falling forward.) This lead to a lot of thinking too much, too much worrying, and so the weekend before my first finals week I started feeling strange and thought I was about to bite the Big One. My heart started racing in a specific way that it had never done before, and I felt sick, and I was laying in my bunk bed in the middle of the afternoon thinking that this was it. I was having a real heart attack and was about to buy the farm.
It's a strange thing to call 911. At least it is for me. I'm too polite: I'm sitting there, thinking I'm about to die, and I'm like, "Man, what if I'm not really dying and I called 911? That would suck." I'm sitting there in my bed, in my possible last moments, and I feel self-conscious for having to punch those numbers on my cell phone. I remember being polite to the operator.
Even stranger than calling 911 is hearing the surreal sound of sirens that you know are coming for you. "No, no," you think, "let's please not draw too much attention to me, OK? Just get me to the hospital, thanks." It's embarrassing to be on a stretcher.
Well, the paramedics came and burst dramatically into the room, pulled down my jeans, hooked me up to all manner of electrodes on my chest and legs, put me on an oxygen mask, slapped me on a stretcher, and dragged me half-trousered out to the dozens of my friends waiting in the hallway with a What the fuck, Pearce? look on their faces.
"Hey guys," I said, weakly. "Record-setter!"
The cowboys in the University Hospital E.R. were practically reaching for the rib-spreader to do some exploratory surgery when my Mom showed up, took one look at me, and somehow just knew that it was only a panic attack. What a fucking disappointment.
I don't mean that literally. I mean, I'm glad that I wasn't dying, but I was royally pissed at having to feel disproportionately worried over something that was absolutely nothing. (P.S. -- what E.R. can't diagnose a panic attack? Don't go to the University hospital.)
Much later I decided to get my condition taken care of anyway just so I didn't have to think about it any more.
Getting surgery was a big decision for me, because I'd never been anesthetized before. It's just one of those philosophical things, that you're completely handing your life over to someone else, and if something goes wrong you'd never even know it-- you just don't wake up.
But heart surgery for WPW is a funny thing, because it's not really heart surgery-- at least not in classical medical definition. They actually don't go through your chest. What they do is stick a pair of tubes up your thighs at the place where they meet your pelvis, work the catheters up the veins to your heart, where they use tiny lasers to stimulate various parts of your heart to beat in order to "map" them. Then they burn tiny holes in the extra electrical pathway to stop electricity from passing through them anymore, just like you would with a circuit board. Your heart is really just a muscular circuit board anyway.
We got to the hospital in Kansas City real early, before seven in the morning, and they had me changed into a gown and got on me laid out on a stretcher pretty quickly. Before taking me to the Prep room the nurse was kind enough to ask me if I was all right before throwing a pack of plastic tubes and IV bags right onto my balls. Thanks, Nurse. Could you please throw some more things at my nads? No, I don't need anything else. Thanks. I'll see you in the OR.
On the upside, they give you a cocktail of Valium and something else, so I was riding pretty high by the time they wheeled me into the operating room. They'd stuck an empty IV in me by now, but I was still a Van Wilder in my mind, cracking jokes at all the surgeons and nurses. "Man!!" I said to them. "There are a lot of you guys!!!!" "Can we watch some football on that screen?!!!!" "This must be a pretty sweet job!!!!" Then without my noticing one of the green scrubs had plugged my IV in and I passed out immediately into a dreamless sleep.
Woozy. Big lights. Big colorful screens all around. A big theatre of screens. I can see a map of a heart on a TV. That's my heart!
I could feel my heart beating, except it wasn't beating normally. I could feel it rapidly accelerating, stopping, accelerating in a different place, at a different speed. I realized that I had woken up in the middle of my heart surgery, though I was too doped up to care. It was like waking up in the middle of a hard nap on the couch and realizing that Jerry Springer was on TV but not really acknowledging its existence. Except Jerry Springer in this case was feeling them tinkering around inside my heart. Thank god for drugs.
DOCTOR, a huge booming voice said, THE PATIENT IS AWAKE.
And then I passed out again.
They were wheeling me out of the O.R. and into an elevator when I came to again. The doctors seemed pretty fucking proud of themselves, so I guess it had gone well. My parents were there and the doctors were debriefing them.
"Why hello," the head surgeon said to me. "How are you feeling?"
"Urgh," I said.
"Yeah, he won't remember any of this," he said to my parents. "We've got him on some post-op stuff that has some amnesiac effects."
"Bah," I gurgled. "I remember everything! I'll remember this!"
And I did. Then they laughed, and I forgot everything that happened after that.
It was true. Every day was an adventure. Cops would show up before 9am and be going room to room with the hall coordinator looking for power tools, because the night before someone had somehow removed a lounge door and a bulletin board. (*cough* They did it with a screwdriver. *cough*) Cops were a regular sight. We once had a large wine party on our floor-- in the halls and everything-- that would even spread downstairs to the laundry room when people kept spilling boxed Franzia on themselves and needed to wash their clothes lest the stains become permanent. Someone pissed in one of the dryers.
It seemed like a weekly ritual that someone would excuse themselves on one of the lounge couches as well. We defaced every bulletin board. We'd heard of "Quiet Hours," but we couldn't remember from where. The smokers that congregated out front once completely destroyed a metallic green bike locked to an adjacent rack, bending the wheels and the frame, and for a whole semester no one ever took it away. We threw unlocked bikes on the roof of the entrance. We duct-taped someone's door shut and did it again right after the hall coordinator tore the first attempt down.
We kept our mouths shut because material damages that showed up on the bills were just part of the entertainment costs.
One of our most dubious records was the number of ambulance visits in a single semester, and I was the thoroughbred that 2nd floor Wolpers rode to victory.
Almost everything up until that point, naturally, had been alcohol poisoning (though it's a miracle my neighbor across the hall didn't kill himself with the Drano/Extacy/coke concoctions he made regularly). Some straight-edge engineer on the upper floors would find one of our guys cruising up and down in the elevator in an alcohol coma with some delightful messages on his forehead. Slap 'em on the stretcher. They'd swear off drinking for about a week before getting back on the wagon.
Mine was legit, however, or so I thought. I had a heart condition called Wolff-Parkinson-White, which is a fairly common one as far as heart conditions go. A normal heart has an electrical pathway that goes back and forth between the atria and the ventricles, which is why heartbeats come in accented pairs. There's a little device like an organic Pacemaker in that pathway that regulates the electrical impulse and keeps your heart from beating about twice as fast as it needs to. People with WPW have an additional electrical pathway, like a service entrance, that lacks that regulating device, so every now and then, when playing, say, basketball, I'd go up for a rebound and get jostled and that electrical impulse that went down the normal pathway would suddenly get diverted down the alternate pathway, and my heart would start beating at an unregulated 200+ beats per minute. That's over three per second, and it doesn't slow down. Sometimes the episodes could last for forty minutes. Then, after spending quite a lot of time laying on the ground, feeling like I might pass out, my heart would suddenly seize up, stop for a moment, and then start beating at a mercifully regular tempo.
Most of the time, WPW isn't fatal, but sometimes it is. Needless to say, the idea of dropping dead of a heart attack at the age of nineteen kind of freaked me out, and that whole heart-stopping-for-a-second thing freaked me out too. (If you're laying down, it feels like you're falling forward.) This lead to a lot of thinking too much, too much worrying, and so the weekend before my first finals week I started feeling strange and thought I was about to bite the Big One. My heart started racing in a specific way that it had never done before, and I felt sick, and I was laying in my bunk bed in the middle of the afternoon thinking that this was it. I was having a real heart attack and was about to buy the farm.
It's a strange thing to call 911. At least it is for me. I'm too polite: I'm sitting there, thinking I'm about to die, and I'm like, "Man, what if I'm not really dying and I called 911? That would suck." I'm sitting there in my bed, in my possible last moments, and I feel self-conscious for having to punch those numbers on my cell phone. I remember being polite to the operator.
Even stranger than calling 911 is hearing the surreal sound of sirens that you know are coming for you. "No, no," you think, "let's please not draw too much attention to me, OK? Just get me to the hospital, thanks." It's embarrassing to be on a stretcher.
Well, the paramedics came and burst dramatically into the room, pulled down my jeans, hooked me up to all manner of electrodes on my chest and legs, put me on an oxygen mask, slapped me on a stretcher, and dragged me half-trousered out to the dozens of my friends waiting in the hallway with a What the fuck, Pearce? look on their faces.
"Hey guys," I said, weakly. "Record-setter!"
℘
The cowboys in the University Hospital E.R. were practically reaching for the rib-spreader to do some exploratory surgery when my Mom showed up, took one look at me, and somehow just knew that it was only a panic attack. What a fucking disappointment.
I don't mean that literally. I mean, I'm glad that I wasn't dying, but I was royally pissed at having to feel disproportionately worried over something that was absolutely nothing. (P.S. -- what E.R. can't diagnose a panic attack? Don't go to the University hospital.)
Much later I decided to get my condition taken care of anyway just so I didn't have to think about it any more.
Getting surgery was a big decision for me, because I'd never been anesthetized before. It's just one of those philosophical things, that you're completely handing your life over to someone else, and if something goes wrong you'd never even know it-- you just don't wake up.
But heart surgery for WPW is a funny thing, because it's not really heart surgery-- at least not in classical medical definition. They actually don't go through your chest. What they do is stick a pair of tubes up your thighs at the place where they meet your pelvis, work the catheters up the veins to your heart, where they use tiny lasers to stimulate various parts of your heart to beat in order to "map" them. Then they burn tiny holes in the extra electrical pathway to stop electricity from passing through them anymore, just like you would with a circuit board. Your heart is really just a muscular circuit board anyway.
We got to the hospital in Kansas City real early, before seven in the morning, and they had me changed into a gown and got on me laid out on a stretcher pretty quickly. Before taking me to the Prep room the nurse was kind enough to ask me if I was all right before throwing a pack of plastic tubes and IV bags right onto my balls. Thanks, Nurse. Could you please throw some more things at my nads? No, I don't need anything else. Thanks. I'll see you in the OR.
On the upside, they give you a cocktail of Valium and something else, so I was riding pretty high by the time they wheeled me into the operating room. They'd stuck an empty IV in me by now, but I was still a Van Wilder in my mind, cracking jokes at all the surgeons and nurses. "Man!!" I said to them. "There are a lot of you guys!!!!" "Can we watch some football on that screen?!!!!" "This must be a pretty sweet job!!!!" Then without my noticing one of the green scrubs had plugged my IV in and I passed out immediately into a dreamless sleep.
℘
Woozy. Big lights. Big colorful screens all around. A big theatre of screens. I can see a map of a heart on a TV. That's my heart!
I could feel my heart beating, except it wasn't beating normally. I could feel it rapidly accelerating, stopping, accelerating in a different place, at a different speed. I realized that I had woken up in the middle of my heart surgery, though I was too doped up to care. It was like waking up in the middle of a hard nap on the couch and realizing that Jerry Springer was on TV but not really acknowledging its existence. Except Jerry Springer in this case was feeling them tinkering around inside my heart. Thank god for drugs.
DOCTOR, a huge booming voice said, THE PATIENT IS AWAKE.
And then I passed out again.
℘
They were wheeling me out of the O.R. and into an elevator when I came to again. The doctors seemed pretty fucking proud of themselves, so I guess it had gone well. My parents were there and the doctors were debriefing them.
"Why hello," the head surgeon said to me. "How are you feeling?"
"Urgh," I said.
"Yeah, he won't remember any of this," he said to my parents. "We've got him on some post-op stuff that has some amnesiac effects."
"Bah," I gurgled. "I remember everything! I'll remember this!"
And I did. Then they laughed, and I forgot everything that happened after that.
Friday, March 21, 2008
The History of the Letter
written 1/3/07; recovered 3/21/08.
Dear ____,
My history of the letter:
When I was young, I was assigned a pen pal that lived in Australia. She wrote me once. I never wrote back.
When I was in third grade, my third grade teacher Mr. Littleton—who was a massively overweight man, literally a “little ton”—had us write to celebrities and their fan clubs in a quest for autographs. We’d get glossy black-and-whites back from about half of them. The crown jewels of my collection, sitting on a shelf somewhere in a green binder, are a local weatherwoman; the figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi; the defensive lineman Neil Smith; and an unsigned poster from the New Orleans Hornets NBA cheerleaders. A magnetic schedule for the ‘93-’94 Miami Heat basketball season is still on the side of our fridge. I’ve never watched a complete game of the NBA in my life.
Other than those coerced correspondences, I did not write a letter again until the fall of 2001, when an eighteen-year-old Asa W. wrote me letters from basic training in Fort Benning, Georgia. You remember him: the alcoholic with split personalities. (When we were having breakfast together in St. Louis and I was telling you the story of when he went off the deep end, it gave me the shakes. I needed to get up; I would have sat and talked for much longer otherwise.)
I’m looking at his letters right now. Army Stationary with a gradation of blue around the edges, and the emblem of the eagle clutching wheat, “E Pluribus Unum.” From Many, One. The military’s psychological strategy is to eliminate individuality in basic training by breaking down the soldier. Once his confidence is shattered, they remold him into the Army’s ideal. But I digress. Asa writes in the kind of undisciplined cursive that is the calligraphic equivalent of driving drunk and swerving all over the road. His print is much worse; the letters are blocky and disproportionate with one another, like a seven-year-old’s. In this letter I’m holding Asa talks about how he was one shot away from sniper eligibility, but when the drill was over he realized he had miscounted his rounds and left one in the chamber. He writes that he is a better shot than the drill sergeants. He leaves two plastic pins in the envelope that commemorate his training achievements. At the end he signs “One tough soldier, Asa”—and underneath, in plain block letters, his moniker “DEATH."
We wrote each other until he was out of basic training.
The next sequence of letters is from one Sarah D., who I am having dinner with tonight. I used to send her small care packages every time she went away to camp, which was often, as she became increasingly involved with youth group activities as she got older. In this letter I’m looking at now, she writes an emoticon about the expression on her face when she got my letter—“☺”—and I remember it felt good to make someone smile who was so far away. She writes what she does all day at camp with the YoungLife girls. I won’t go in depth about her; that was a friendship marked by flawless chemistry, and flawed by increasingly divergent paths regarding religion. And perhaps some unfulfilled expectation, with a dash of miscommunication.
I keep these old letters in a hard-to-reach drawer in my room at home for memories; but the most prominent letter in my mind is one I never wrote, to one Hannah T., following camp in the summer of 2002. She was the sweetest girl I had ever met-- truly an astounding woman-- and I somehow already knew that I would never hear from her again. In bed one night, I composed the letter in my head that was never written when I woke in the morning. I ran into someone last year who knew her family, who said Hannah had gone vegetarian, began eating roots she had just dug out of the ground with her bare hands, had gone barefoot, stopped wearing bras, had two children by a drug dealer… it goes on. Where would my letter have ended up? It’s funny how life works sometimes.
But that is my history of the written letter, for better or worse. Not as full of good memories as I would have hoped, or even of harmless pleasantries, but that is the company you’re joining. I personally am glad you’re (hopefully) injecting a little sun into this collection of ghosts—it’s like I’m visiting a museum of extinct species writing about these—but in any case your written history can only be off to a good start, I’m sure; the moment I get your first letter you become the author known as ______, New Years' 2007. And I think that’s something worth finding in an old drawer someday.
Well, unless also you go and shoot somebody too. That would ruin everything for me.
My Best,
Matt
Dear ____,
My history of the letter:
When I was young, I was assigned a pen pal that lived in Australia. She wrote me once. I never wrote back.
When I was in third grade, my third grade teacher Mr. Littleton—who was a massively overweight man, literally a “little ton”—had us write to celebrities and their fan clubs in a quest for autographs. We’d get glossy black-and-whites back from about half of them. The crown jewels of my collection, sitting on a shelf somewhere in a green binder, are a local weatherwoman; the figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi; the defensive lineman Neil Smith; and an unsigned poster from the New Orleans Hornets NBA cheerleaders. A magnetic schedule for the ‘93-’94 Miami Heat basketball season is still on the side of our fridge. I’ve never watched a complete game of the NBA in my life.
Other than those coerced correspondences, I did not write a letter again until the fall of 2001, when an eighteen-year-old Asa W. wrote me letters from basic training in Fort Benning, Georgia. You remember him: the alcoholic with split personalities. (When we were having breakfast together in St. Louis and I was telling you the story of when he went off the deep end, it gave me the shakes. I needed to get up; I would have sat and talked for much longer otherwise.)
I’m looking at his letters right now. Army Stationary with a gradation of blue around the edges, and the emblem of the eagle clutching wheat, “E Pluribus Unum.” From Many, One. The military’s psychological strategy is to eliminate individuality in basic training by breaking down the soldier. Once his confidence is shattered, they remold him into the Army’s ideal. But I digress. Asa writes in the kind of undisciplined cursive that is the calligraphic equivalent of driving drunk and swerving all over the road. His print is much worse; the letters are blocky and disproportionate with one another, like a seven-year-old’s. In this letter I’m holding Asa talks about how he was one shot away from sniper eligibility, but when the drill was over he realized he had miscounted his rounds and left one in the chamber. He writes that he is a better shot than the drill sergeants. He leaves two plastic pins in the envelope that commemorate his training achievements. At the end he signs “One tough soldier, Asa”—and underneath, in plain block letters, his moniker “DEATH."
We wrote each other until he was out of basic training.
The next sequence of letters is from one Sarah D., who I am having dinner with tonight. I used to send her small care packages every time she went away to camp, which was often, as she became increasingly involved with youth group activities as she got older. In this letter I’m looking at now, she writes an emoticon about the expression on her face when she got my letter—“☺”—and I remember it felt good to make someone smile who was so far away. She writes what she does all day at camp with the YoungLife girls. I won’t go in depth about her; that was a friendship marked by flawless chemistry, and flawed by increasingly divergent paths regarding religion. And perhaps some unfulfilled expectation, with a dash of miscommunication.
I keep these old letters in a hard-to-reach drawer in my room at home for memories; but the most prominent letter in my mind is one I never wrote, to one Hannah T., following camp in the summer of 2002. She was the sweetest girl I had ever met-- truly an astounding woman-- and I somehow already knew that I would never hear from her again. In bed one night, I composed the letter in my head that was never written when I woke in the morning. I ran into someone last year who knew her family, who said Hannah had gone vegetarian, began eating roots she had just dug out of the ground with her bare hands, had gone barefoot, stopped wearing bras, had two children by a drug dealer… it goes on. Where would my letter have ended up? It’s funny how life works sometimes.
But that is my history of the written letter, for better or worse. Not as full of good memories as I would have hoped, or even of harmless pleasantries, but that is the company you’re joining. I personally am glad you’re (hopefully) injecting a little sun into this collection of ghosts—it’s like I’m visiting a museum of extinct species writing about these—but in any case your written history can only be off to a good start, I’m sure; the moment I get your first letter you become the author known as ______, New Years' 2007. And I think that’s something worth finding in an old drawer someday.
Well, unless also you go and shoot somebody too. That would ruin everything for me.
My Best,
Matt
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Five years ago
"I want to get a motorcycle," I said.
"Absolutely not," my mother replied.
We were in Colorado at the time, on vacation early in the summer. My family and I were sitting in a cafe restaurant in Crested Butte.
"Oh come on," my dad said to her. "We rode around on a Vespa all the time in California, way back in the day."
I had seen bikers all over the place in Colorado. They were gnarly dudes, mostly. Older. Beards, denim, tattoos. Bad-asses. At the time I was just entering a bad-ass phase in my own life, or so I'd thought; I'd got my first car, worked out with the football team at school, lost a bunch of weight and started chatting up girls. Up to this point I'd just played video games all the time. I felt powerful, and worse, I had just finished reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It was a novel on philosophy, not really on motorcycles, and I pretended to understand what it was talking about even though I'd mostly skimmed the philosophy to get to the road-trip scenes. The man was taking a seventeen-day road trip across America with his son. Holy shit.
As much as Mom loathed the idea of me riding a motorcycle, she knew her bikes. This is evidence of the motorcycle's dying primacy in American culture. Her generation had Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider. Mine got Paul Walker and Fast and the Furious. (We must prefer our soul-searching to be over in eight seconds.) Make of that difference what you will. Anyway, as soon as Mom told me no-- and after describing every kind of horrible operations that come with bike wrecks-- skin grafts, pin insertion-- she started talking Harleys, Victories, Indians, Triumphs. Choppers, roadsters. Sidecars, bitch seats. I liked the idea of having a Triumph. It sounded sexy and victorious. It was a Brit bike too, so the gear shift would be on the right handle, not the left, which seemed exotic and sophisticated. I wanted to be exotic and sophisticated, just as I saw myself as being the guy that could wear a leather jacket when I rode it to school.
"Absolutely not," my mother then reiterated. A moment later, outside, a peloton of motorcycles passed.
After we came back from our vacation, I came up to my parents' work one morning after weights with the football team. My folks ran a photography business, which meant a lot of sets, outdoor and indoor. Farmhouse, map room, library/study, industrial fan, log cabin. I was interested in the one that had the big American flag and the working '78 Harley Roadster. My dad brought out me back to the parking lot behind the studio when I got there, shushing me not to tell Mom.
There it was, in all its black and chrome glory, leaning up on its kickstand with the front wheel at an angle towards us like a bikini model contorting herself to the camera for a photo shoot. It sat aloof and alone on a row of empty parking spaces away from Mom's and Dad's cars as if the parking lot was its kingdom and the empty spots were the dais upon which it reposed. Just sitting there, the gargantuan two-wheel chassis exuded an awesome and effortless power. When we walked up to it, it thrillingly reeked of gas. Dad told me to get on, and when I straddled it, I felt the cushion of the leather seat, the grip of the rubberized handles, the radiance coming off the metal parts superheated by the hot sun. I could feel the huge weight of the bike below me.
My dad grinned evilly.
He told me how to operate it. Here's your gas tank, your speedometer. Ignition. Here's the front brake, the back brake, there's the accelerator. The clutch is on the left handlebar. The shifter is right below your foot there. Neutral is between first and second gear. Upshift, downshift. Be careful with that front brake, you don't want to throw yourself. You don't want to pop the clutch. If you have to ditch it, here's how I'd do it.
Turn it on.
rumblerumblerumbleRUMbleRUMBLErumbleRUMBLERUMBLERUMBLE--
I put it in first and tapped the gas and scooted forward and then stopped and then hit the gas, tried to remember the clutch, forgot where the brake was, mistook it for the accelerator, and promptly plowed this half a ton of steel and flesh moving at twenty-five miles per hour into the side of my mother's 1995 Buick Riviera.
I don't remember what happened in that single second when I hit my mother's car. It's a blank spot in my memory. I remember everything up to it: the car rushing towards me, the bike vibrating beneath my thighs, the oh fuck, you dumb shit feeling, but I don't remember the impact. It's gone.
I once realized that in a way I actually died when I hit my mother's car. I didn't know it then, but my life had just ended and started over. Someone else might have been killed in that situation, some other guy. Yet here I was. What if this was really paradise, the only afterlife I'd been given, and I was missing it? I was the luckiest man alive and I didn't know it.
Call it fate, call it luck-- it doesn't matter. One second later, when I came to, I was miraculously upright. The bike lay sprawled on the ground between my legs and no part of me was pinned beneath it. My arms were braced against the side of the car. I hadn't hit my head. Had I even hit anything? I was too adrenalized to feel pain. You dumb shit, I then thought, you could have killed yourself. And then: I am never riding a motorcycle again.
My dad came running up. I had just put this man's motorcycle into his wife's car. I had just taken his judgment and shamed him in the eyes of my mother. Yet with all the decency of a saint he asked me desperately if I was okay. He must really love me.
"I don't know," I said. "Am I all right?"
"Absolutely not," my mother replied.
We were in Colorado at the time, on vacation early in the summer. My family and I were sitting in a cafe restaurant in Crested Butte.
"Oh come on," my dad said to her. "We rode around on a Vespa all the time in California, way back in the day."
I had seen bikers all over the place in Colorado. They were gnarly dudes, mostly. Older. Beards, denim, tattoos. Bad-asses. At the time I was just entering a bad-ass phase in my own life, or so I'd thought; I'd got my first car, worked out with the football team at school, lost a bunch of weight and started chatting up girls. Up to this point I'd just played video games all the time. I felt powerful, and worse, I had just finished reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It was a novel on philosophy, not really on motorcycles, and I pretended to understand what it was talking about even though I'd mostly skimmed the philosophy to get to the road-trip scenes. The man was taking a seventeen-day road trip across America with his son. Holy shit.
As much as Mom loathed the idea of me riding a motorcycle, she knew her bikes. This is evidence of the motorcycle's dying primacy in American culture. Her generation had Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider. Mine got Paul Walker and Fast and the Furious. (We must prefer our soul-searching to be over in eight seconds.) Make of that difference what you will. Anyway, as soon as Mom told me no-- and after describing every kind of horrible operations that come with bike wrecks-- skin grafts, pin insertion-- she started talking Harleys, Victories, Indians, Triumphs. Choppers, roadsters. Sidecars, bitch seats. I liked the idea of having a Triumph. It sounded sexy and victorious. It was a Brit bike too, so the gear shift would be on the right handle, not the left, which seemed exotic and sophisticated. I wanted to be exotic and sophisticated, just as I saw myself as being the guy that could wear a leather jacket when I rode it to school.
"Absolutely not," my mother then reiterated. A moment later, outside, a peloton of motorcycles passed.
After we came back from our vacation, I came up to my parents' work one morning after weights with the football team. My folks ran a photography business, which meant a lot of sets, outdoor and indoor. Farmhouse, map room, library/study, industrial fan, log cabin. I was interested in the one that had the big American flag and the working '78 Harley Roadster. My dad brought out me back to the parking lot behind the studio when I got there, shushing me not to tell Mom.
There it was, in all its black and chrome glory, leaning up on its kickstand with the front wheel at an angle towards us like a bikini model contorting herself to the camera for a photo shoot. It sat aloof and alone on a row of empty parking spaces away from Mom's and Dad's cars as if the parking lot was its kingdom and the empty spots were the dais upon which it reposed. Just sitting there, the gargantuan two-wheel chassis exuded an awesome and effortless power. When we walked up to it, it thrillingly reeked of gas. Dad told me to get on, and when I straddled it, I felt the cushion of the leather seat, the grip of the rubberized handles, the radiance coming off the metal parts superheated by the hot sun. I could feel the huge weight of the bike below me.
My dad grinned evilly.
He told me how to operate it. Here's your gas tank, your speedometer. Ignition. Here's the front brake, the back brake, there's the accelerator. The clutch is on the left handlebar. The shifter is right below your foot there. Neutral is between first and second gear. Upshift, downshift. Be careful with that front brake, you don't want to throw yourself. You don't want to pop the clutch. If you have to ditch it, here's how I'd do it.
Turn it on.
rumblerumblerumbleRUMbleRUMBLErumbleRUMBLERUMBLERUMBLE--
I put it in first and tapped the gas and scooted forward and then stopped and then hit the gas, tried to remember the clutch, forgot where the brake was, mistook it for the accelerator, and promptly plowed this half a ton of steel and flesh moving at twenty-five miles per hour into the side of my mother's 1995 Buick Riviera.
I don't remember what happened in that single second when I hit my mother's car. It's a blank spot in my memory. I remember everything up to it: the car rushing towards me, the bike vibrating beneath my thighs, the oh fuck, you dumb shit feeling, but I don't remember the impact. It's gone.
I once realized that in a way I actually died when I hit my mother's car. I didn't know it then, but my life had just ended and started over. Someone else might have been killed in that situation, some other guy. Yet here I was. What if this was really paradise, the only afterlife I'd been given, and I was missing it? I was the luckiest man alive and I didn't know it.
Call it fate, call it luck-- it doesn't matter. One second later, when I came to, I was miraculously upright. The bike lay sprawled on the ground between my legs and no part of me was pinned beneath it. My arms were braced against the side of the car. I hadn't hit my head. Had I even hit anything? I was too adrenalized to feel pain. You dumb shit, I then thought, you could have killed yourself. And then: I am never riding a motorcycle again.
My dad came running up. I had just put this man's motorcycle into his wife's car. I had just taken his judgment and shamed him in the eyes of my mother. Yet with all the decency of a saint he asked me desperately if I was okay. He must really love me.
"I don't know," I said. "Am I all right?"
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Floor Paleontology
Books currently on my floor and not on my shelves:
- Nicole Krauss' The History of Love (under jacket #1)
- Stuart Dybek's I Sailed with Magellan (by my guitar case)
- Norton Anthology of Western Music (Vol. 2) (by my dresser)
- Alex Ross' The Rest is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century (beneath a pair of jeans)
- The Paris Review Interviews (vol. 1) (by my bed)
- The Paris Review Interviews (vol. 2) (under my guitar)
- Dean Bakopoulos' Please Don't Come Back From the Moon (by my guitar case)
- Essentials of World Regional Geography (under a notebook and jacket #2)
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Memories of My Melancholy Whores (by my guitar)
- Nicholas Montemarano's If The Sky Falls (by my guitar case)
- Stuart Dybek's Childhood and Other Neighborhoods (on jacket #2)
- Frank Conroy's Body and Soul (beneath a towel)
- Tin House no. 34 "The Dead of Winter" (on a pair of gym shorts)
"Bird asked what a paleontologist was and Mom said that if he took a complete, illustrated guide to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, shred it into a hundred pieces, cast them into the wind from the museum's steps, let a few weeks pass, went back and scoured Fifth Avenue and Central Park for as many surviving scraps as he could find, then tried to reconstruct the history of painting, including schools, styles, genres, and names of painters from his scraps, that would be like being a paleontologist."
-Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
-Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Avec chaleur
I live on the fifth floor of an apartment building right alongside campus. It's an ugly place; though a red-brick structure, and lined with gorgeous oaks that really come alive in the spring, the roof is placed on atop of the building a la the lid of a gift box, or maybe like a bad architectural toupee; the shingles come vertically down the side of the building about 10 feet, completely cosmetic and thus ironically hideous, because the real roof is as flat as the top of a grand piano. (Thanks, 1960s.) Not that the inside's any better. The long hallway to my room is painted hospital mauve, and you can always smell curry or something equally disgusting since this is where all the foreign exchange students live.
Last winter the heater stopped working, not that we ran it much. Most of the time in an apartment building you can get away with not using the heat because of all the rooms around you, but we're on the top corner, and whenever it slipped below about 20 degrees outside-- that was the magic number-- the temperature in our apartment would plummet. We never saw our own breath, but we knew we were almost there. We had idiotic scientific debates on whether the air coming out of the still-functioning air-conditioning unit might be warmer than the temperature outside. Joey and Jordan, my two roommates at the time, bought space heaters for themselves and promptly and repeatedly blew the fuses for our apartment whenever they tried to plug them in at the same time. A third space heater was out of the question. I was on my own.
We called the building maintenance man, Terry, who always seemed to come when it was above 20 degrees outside. Terry has a huge beer belly and calls everyone "Guy" when he sees them. I'll never forget the image of him standing in front of the vent with a thermometer and manipulating the thermostat to hot, cold, hot, cold again. "There's your problem, Guy," he said. "The dang thermostat's backwards." He took a pencil and wrote a reversing arrow on the wall paint above the thermostat. As soon as he waddled out, we put the thermostat on 50 degrees and stood in front of the vent and then put the thermostat on 90 degrees and stood in front of the vent and it became obvious that the fucking thing was going to blow 65 degrees of heat no matter what.
Night came, the temperature dropped, and the heater stopped blowing 65 degree heat. It was frigid. We left the door to the hallway open while we were awake, since at least the hall was warm. Then when I went to bed, I put on 3 layers of socks, sweaters, sweats, stocking caps, and then buried myself under a mound of blankets. I put up the hood on my sweatshirt and cinched it closed. I looked like Kenny from South Park. The only thing exposed was my nose, and when I woke up, I couldn't feel my nose. I'd then go to the bathroom and shut the door and turn the water up to a scalding temperature and instead of taking a shower just sit on the bathmats until the numbness left my extremities. Our monthly utility bills were at a gloriously fixed rate. We had Christmas lights up in our living room, and we let them run 24 hours because we swore they generated heat.
We sent in maintenance requests but we never raised hell, which we were perfectly in our rights to do. It doesn't really make any sense in hindsight, other than all three of us were much too busy with school and girls to make much of a stink, but I think it's also that we weren't really the kind of guys whose happiness necessarily depended on having only part-time warmth, or else we wouldn't have been living in a building like this in the first place.
Last winter the heater stopped working, not that we ran it much. Most of the time in an apartment building you can get away with not using the heat because of all the rooms around you, but we're on the top corner, and whenever it slipped below about 20 degrees outside-- that was the magic number-- the temperature in our apartment would plummet. We never saw our own breath, but we knew we were almost there. We had idiotic scientific debates on whether the air coming out of the still-functioning air-conditioning unit might be warmer than the temperature outside. Joey and Jordan, my two roommates at the time, bought space heaters for themselves and promptly and repeatedly blew the fuses for our apartment whenever they tried to plug them in at the same time. A third space heater was out of the question. I was on my own.
We called the building maintenance man, Terry, who always seemed to come when it was above 20 degrees outside. Terry has a huge beer belly and calls everyone "Guy" when he sees them. I'll never forget the image of him standing in front of the vent with a thermometer and manipulating the thermostat to hot, cold, hot, cold again. "There's your problem, Guy," he said. "The dang thermostat's backwards." He took a pencil and wrote a reversing arrow on the wall paint above the thermostat. As soon as he waddled out, we put the thermostat on 50 degrees and stood in front of the vent and then put the thermostat on 90 degrees and stood in front of the vent and it became obvious that the fucking thing was going to blow 65 degrees of heat no matter what.
Night came, the temperature dropped, and the heater stopped blowing 65 degree heat. It was frigid. We left the door to the hallway open while we were awake, since at least the hall was warm. Then when I went to bed, I put on 3 layers of socks, sweaters, sweats, stocking caps, and then buried myself under a mound of blankets. I put up the hood on my sweatshirt and cinched it closed. I looked like Kenny from South Park. The only thing exposed was my nose, and when I woke up, I couldn't feel my nose. I'd then go to the bathroom and shut the door and turn the water up to a scalding temperature and instead of taking a shower just sit on the bathmats until the numbness left my extremities. Our monthly utility bills were at a gloriously fixed rate. We had Christmas lights up in our living room, and we let them run 24 hours because we swore they generated heat.
We sent in maintenance requests but we never raised hell, which we were perfectly in our rights to do. It doesn't really make any sense in hindsight, other than all three of us were much too busy with school and girls to make much of a stink, but I think it's also that we weren't really the kind of guys whose happiness necessarily depended on having only part-time warmth, or else we wouldn't have been living in a building like this in the first place.
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