1.THE PLANET TRILLAPHON AS IT STANDS IN RELATION TO THE BAD THING.

I've been on antidepressants for, what, about a year now, and I suppose I feel as if I'm pretty qualified to tell what they're like. They're fine, really, but they're fine in the same way that, say, living on another planet that was warm and comfortable and had food and fresh water would be fine: it would be fine, but it wouldn't be good old Earth, obviously. I haven't been on Earth now for almost a year, because I wasn't doing very well on Earth. I've been doing somewhat better here where I am now, on the planet Trillaphon, which I suppose is good news for everyone involved.

Antidepressants were prescribed for me by a very nice doctor named Dr. Kablumbus at a hospital to which I was sent ever so briefly following a really highly ridiculous incident involving electrical appliances in the bathtub about which I really don't wish to say a whole lot. I had to go to the hospital for physical care and treatment after this very silly incident, and then two days later I was moved to another floor of the hospital, a higher, whiter floor, where Dr. Kablumbus and his colleagues were. There was a certain amount of consideration given to the possibility of my undergoing E.C.T., which is short for "Electro Convulsive Therapy,' but E.C.T. wipes out bits of your memory sometimes - little details like your name and where you live, etc. - and it's also in other respects just a thoroughly scary thing, and we - my parents and I - decided against it. New Hampshire, which is the state where I live, has a law that says E.C.T. cannot be administered without the patient's knowledge and consent. I regard this as an extremely good law. So antidepressants were prescribed for me instead by Dr. Kablumbus, who can be said really to have had only my best interests at heart.

If someone tells about a trip he's taken, you expect at least some explanation of why he left on the trip in the first place. With this in mind perhaps I'll tell some things about why things weren't too good for me on Earth for quite a while. It was extremely weird, but, three years ago, when I was a senior in high school, I began to suffer from what I guess now was a hallucination. I thought that a huge wound, a really huge and deep wound, had opened on my face, on my cheek near my nose .. . that the skin had just split open like old fruit, that blood was seeping out, all dark and shiny, that veins and bits of yellow cheek-fat and red-gray muscle were plainly visible, even bright flashes of bone, in there. Whenever I'd look in the mirror, there it would be, that wound, and I could feel the twitch of the exposed muscle and the heat of the blood on my cheek, all the time. But when I'd say to a doctor or to Mom or to other people, "Hey, look at this open wound on my face, I'd better go to the hospital," they'd say, "Well, hey, there's no wound on your face, are your eyes OK?" And yet whenever I'd look in the mirror, there it would be, and I could always feel the heat of the blood on my cheek, and when I'd feel with my hand my fingers would sink in there really deep into what felt like hot gelatin with bones and ropes and stuff in it. And it seemed like everyone was always looking at it. They'd seem to stare at me really funny, and I'd think "Oh God, I'm really making them sick, they see it. I've got to hide, get me out of here." But they were probably only staring because I looked all scared and in pain and kept my hand to my face and was staggering like I was drunk all over the place all the time. But at the time, it seemed so real. Weird, weird, weird. Right before graduation - or maybe a month before, maybe - it got really bad, such that when I'd pull my hand away from my face I'd see blood on my fingers, and bits of tissue and stuff, and I'd be able to smell the blood too, like hot rusty metal and copper. So one night when my parents were out somewhere I took a needle and some thread and tried to sew up the wound myself. It hurt a lot to do this because I didn't have any anesthetic, of course. It was also bad because, obviously, as I know now, there was really no wound to be sewn up at all, there. Mom and Dad were less than pleased when they came home and found me all bloody for real and with a whole lot of jagged unprofessional stitches of lovely bright orange carpet-thread in my face. They were really upset. Also, I made the stitches too deep - I apparently pushed the needle incredibly deep - and some of the thread got stuck way down in there when they tried to pull the stitches out at the hospital and it got infected later and then they had to make a real wound back at the hospital to get it all out and drain it and clean it out. That was highly ironic. Also, when I was making the stitches too deep I guess I ran the needle into a few nerves in my cheek and destroyed them, so now sometimes bits of my face will get numb for no reason, and my mouth will sag on the left side a bit. I know it sags for sure and that I've got this cute scar, here, because it's not just a matter of looking in the mirror and seeing it and feeling it; other people tell me they see it too, though they do this very tactfully.

Anyway, I think that year everyone began to see that I was a troubled little soldier, including me. Everybody talked and conferred and we all decided that it would probably be in my best interests if I deferred admission to Brown University in Rhode Island, where I was supposedly all set to go, and instead did a year of "Post-Graduate" schoolwork at a very good and prestigious and expensive prep school called Phillips Exeter Academy conveniently located right there in my home town. So that's what I did. And it was, by all appearances, a pretty successful period, except it was still on Earth, and things were increasingly non-good for me on Earth during this period, although my face had healed and I had more or less stopped having the hallucination about the gory wound, except for really short flashes when I saw mirrors out of the corners of my eyes and stuff.

But, yes, all in all things were going increasingly badly for me at that time, even though I was doing quite well in school in my little "PostGrad" program and people were saying, "Holy cow, you're really a very good student, you should just go on to college right now, why don't you?" It was just pretty clear to me that I shouldn't go right on to college then, but I couldn't say that to the people at Exeter, because my reasons for saying I shouldn't had nothing to do with balancing equations in Chemistry or interpreting Keats poems in English. They had to do with the fact that I was a troubled little soldier. I'm not at this point really dying to give a long gory account of all the cute neuroses that more or less around that time began to pop up all over the inside of my brain, sort of like wrinkly gray boils, but I'll tell a few things. For one thing, I was throwing up a lot, feeling really nauseated all the time, especially when I'd wake up in the morning. But it could switch on anytime, the second I began to think about it: If I felt OK, all of a sudden I'd think, "Hey, I don't feel nauseated at all, here." And it would just switch on, like I had a big white plastic switch somewhere along the tube from my brain to my hot and weak stomach and intestines, and I would just throw up all over my plate at dinner or my desk at school or the seat of the car, or my bed, or wherever. It was really highly grotesque for everyone else, and intensely unpleasant for me, as anyone who has ever felt really sick to his stomach can appreciate. This went on for quite a while, and I lost a lot of weight, which was bad because I was quite thin and non-strong to begin with. Also, I had to have a lot of medical tests on my stomach, involving delicious barium drinks and being hung upside down for X-rays, and so on, and once I even had to have a spinal tap, which hurt more than anything has ever hurt me in my life, I am never ever going to have another spinal tap.

Also, there was this business of crying for no reason, which wasn't painful but was very embarrassing and also quite scary because I couldn't control it. What would happen is that I'd cry for no reason, and then I'd get sort of scared that I'd cry or that once I started to cry I wouldn't be able to stop, and this state of being scared would very kindly activate this other white switch on the tube between my brain with its boils and my hot eyes, and off I'd go even worse, like a skateboard that you keep pushing along. It was very embarrassing at school, and incredibly embarrassing with my family, because they would think it was their fault, that they had done something bad. It would have been incredibly embarrassing with my friends, too, but by that time I really didn't have very many friends. So that was kind of an advantage, almost. But there was still everyone else. I had little tricks I employed with regard to the "crying problem." When I was around other people and my eyes got all hot and full of burning saltwater I would pretend to sneeze, or even more often to yawn, because both these things can explain someone's having tears in his eyes. People at school must have thought I was just about the sleepiest person in the world. But, really, yawning doesn't exactly explain the fact that tears are just running down your cheeks and raining down on your lap or your desk or making little wet star puckers on your exam papers and stuff, and not too many people get super red eyes just from yawning. So the tricks probably weren't too effective. It's weird but even now, here on the planet Trillaphon, when I think about it at all, I can hear the snap of the switch and my eyes more or less start to fill up, and my throat aches. That is bad. There was also the fact that back then I got so I couldn't stand silence, really couldn't stand it at all. This was because when there was no noise from outside the little hairs on my eardrums or wherever would manufacture a noise all by themselves, to keep in practice or something. This noise was sort of a high, glittery, metallic, spangly hum that really for some reason scared the living daylights out of me and just about drove me crazy when I heard it, the way a mosquito in your ear in bed at night in summer will just about drive you crazy when you hear it. I began to look for noise sort of the way a moth looks for light. I'd sleep with the radio on in my room, watch an incredible amount of loud television, keep my trusty Sony Walkman on at all times at school and walking around and on my bike (that Sony Walkman was far and away the best Christmas present I have ever received). I would even maybe sometimes talk to myself when I had just no other recourse to noise, which must have seemed very crazy to people who heard me, and I suppose was very crazy, but not in the way they supposed. It wasn't as if I thought I was two people who could have a dialogue, or as if I heard voices from Venus or anything. I knew I was just one person, but this one person, here, was a troubled little soldier who could withstand neither the substance nor the implications of the noise produced by the inside of his own head.

Anyway, all this extremely delightful stuff was going on while I was doing well and making my otherwise quite wor· ried and less than pleased patents happy school-wise during the year, and then while I was working for Exeter Building and Grounds Department during the following summer, pruning bushes and crying and throwing up discreetly into them, and while I was packing and having billions of dollars of clothes and electrical appliances bought for me by my grandparents, gelling all ready to go to Brown University in Rhode Island in September. Mr. Film, who was more or less my boss at "B and G," had a riddle that he thought was unbelievably funny and he told it to me a lot. He'd say, "What's the color of a bowel movement?" And when I didn't say anything he'd say. "Brown! har har har!" He'd laugh and I'd smile, even after about the four-trillionth time, because Mr. Film was on the whole a fairly nice man, and he didn't even get mad when I threw up in his truck once. I told him my scar was from getting cut up with a knife in high school, which was essentially the truth.

So I went off to Brown University in the fall, and it turned out to be very much like "P .G." at Exeter: it was supposed to be all hard but it really wasn't, so I had plenty of time to do well in classes and have people say "Outstanding" and still be neurotic and weird as hell, so that my roommate, who was a very nice, squeakingly healthy guy from Illinois, understandably asked for a single instead and moved out in a few weeks and left me with a very big single all my very own. So it was just little old me and about nine billion dollars worth of electronic noise-making equipment, there in my room, after that. It was quite soon after my roommate moved out that the Bad Thing started. The Bad Thing is more or less the reason why I'm not on Earth anymore. Dr. Kablumbus told me after I told him as best I could about the Bad Thing that the Bad Thing was "severe clinical depression." I am sure that a doctor at Brown would have told me pretty much the same thing, but I didn't ever go to see anyone at Brown, mainly because I was afraid that if I ever opened my mouth in that context stuff would come out that would ensure that I'd be put in a place like the place I was put after the hilariously stupid business in the bathroom.

I really don't know if the Bad Thing is really depression. I had previously sort of always thought that depression was just sort of really intense sadness, like what you feel when your very good dog dies, or when Bambi's mother gets killed in Bambi. I thought that it was that you frowned or maybe even cried a little bit if you were a girl and said "Holy cow,l'm really depressed, here," and then your friends if you have any come and cheer you up or take you out and get you ploughed and in the morning it's like a faded color and in a couple days it's gone altogether. The Bad Thing - which I guess is what is really depression - is very different, and indescribably worse. I guess I should say rather sort of indescribably, because I've heard different people try to describe "real" depression over the last couple years. A very glib guy on the television said some people liken it to being underwater, under a body of water that has no surface, at least for you, so that no matter what direction you go, there will only be more water, no fresh air and freedom of movement, just restriction and suffocation, and no light. (I don't know how apt it is to say it's like being underwater, but maybe imagine the moment in which you realize, at which it hits you that there is no surface for you, that you're just going to drown in there no matter which way you swim; imagine how you'd feel at that exact moment, like Descartes at the start of his second thing, then imagine that feeling in all its really delightful choking intensity spread out over hours, days, months ... that would maybe be more apt.) A really lovely poet named Sylvia Plath, who unfortunately isn't living anymore, said that it's like having a jar covering you and having all the air pumped out of the jar, so you can't breathe any good air (and imagine the moment when your movement is invisibly stopped by the glass and you realize you're underglass ...). Some people say it's like having always before you and under you a huge black hole without a bottom, a black, black hole, maybe with vague teeth in it, and then your being part of the hole, so that you fall even when you stay where you are (. . . maybe when you realize you're the hole, nothing else .. .)

I'm not incredibly glib, but I'll tell what I think the Bad Thing is like. To me it's like being completely, totally, utterly sick. I will try to explain what I mean. Imagine feeling really sick to your stomach. Almost everyone has felt really sick to his or her stomach, so everyone knows what it's like: it's less than fun. OK. OK. But that feeling is localized: it's more or less just your stomach. Imagine your whole body being sick like that: your feet, the big muscles in your legs, your collarbone, your head, your hair, everything, all just as sick as a fluey stomach. Then, if you can imagine that, please imagine it even more spread out and total. Imagine that every cell in your body, every single cell in your body is as sick as that nauseated stomach. Not just your own cells, even, but the e-coli and lactobacilli in you, too, the mitochondria, basal bodies, all sick and boiling and hot like maggots in your neck, your brain, all over, everywhere, in everything. All just sick as hell. Now imagine that every single atom in every single cell in your body is sick like that, sick, intolerably sick. And every proton and neutron in every atom. . . swollen and throbbing, off-color, sick, with just no chance of throwing up to relieve the feeling. Every electron is sick, here, twirling off balance and all erratic in these funhouse orbitals that are just thick and swirling with mottled yellow and purple poison gases, everything off balance and woozy, Quarks and neu- trinos out of their minds and bouncing sick all over the place, bouncing like crazy. Just imagine that, a sickness spread utterly through every bit of you, even the bits of the bits. So that your very . . . very essence is characterized by nothing other than the feature of sickness; you and the sickness are, as they say, "one." That's kind of what the Bad Thing is like at its roots. Everything in you is sick and grotesque. And since your only acquaintance with the whole world is through parts of you - like your sense-organs and your mind, etc. - and since these parts are sick as hell, the whole world as you perceive it and know it and are in it comes at you through this filter of bad sickness and becomes bad. As everything becomes bad in you, all the good goes out of the world like air out of a big broken balloon. There's nothing in this world you know but horrible rotten smells, sad and grotesque and lurid pastel sights, raucous or deadly sad sounds. Intolerable open-ended situations lined on a continuum with just no end at all. .. Incredibly stupid, hopeless ideas. And just the way when you're sick to your stomach you're kind of scared way down deep that it might maybe never go away, the Bad Thing scares you the same way, only worse, because the fear is itself filtered through the bad disease and becomes bigger and worse and hungrier than it started out. It tears you open and gcts in there and squirms around. Because the Bad Thing not only attacks you and makes you feel bad and puts you out of commission, it especially attacks and makes you feel bad and puts out of commission precisely those things that are necessary in order for you to fight the Bad Thing, to maybe get better, to stay alive. This is hard to understand, but it's really true. Imagine a really painful disease that, say, attacked your legs and your throat and resulted in a really bad pain and paralysis and all around agony in these areas. The disease would be bad enough, obviously, but the disease would also be open-ended; you wouldn't be able to do anything about it. Your legs would be all paralyzed and would hurt like hell ... but you wouldn't be able to run for help for those poor legs, just exactly because your legs would be too sick for you to run anywhere at all. Your throat would burn like crazy and you'd think it was just going to explode ... but you wouldn't be able to call out to any doctors or anyone for help, precisely because your throat would be too sick for you to do so. This is the way the Bad Thing works: it's especially good at attacking your defense mechanisms. The way to fight against or get away from the Bad Thing is clearly just to think differently, to reason and argue with yourself, just to change the way you're perceiving and sensing and processing stuff. But you need your mind to do this, your brain cells with their atoms and your mental powers and all that, your self, and that's exactly what the Bad Thing has made too sick to work right. That's exactly what it has made sick. It's made you sick in just such a way that you can't get better. And you start thinking about this pretty vicious situation, and you say to yourself, "Boy oh boy, how the heck is the Bad Thing able to do this? You think about it - really hard, since it's in your best interests to do so - and then all of a sudden it sort of dawns on you ... that the Bad Thing is able to do this to you because you're the Bad Thing yourself! The Bad Thing is you. Nothing else: no bacteriological infection or having gotten conked on the head with a board or a mallet when you were a little kid, or any other excuse; you are the sickness yourself. It is what "defines" you, especially after a little while has gone by. You realize all this, here. And that, I guess, is when if you're all glib you realize that there is no surface to the water, or when you bonk your nose on the jar's glass and realize you're trapped, or when you look at the black hole and it's wearing your face. That's when the Bad Thing just absolutely eats you up, or rather when you just eat yourself up. When you kill yourself. All this business about people committing suicide when they're "severely depressed;" we say, "Holy cow, we must do something to stop them from killing themselves!" That's wrong. Because all these people have, you see, by this time already killed themselves, where it really counts. By the time these people swallow entire medicine cabinets or take naps in the garage or whatever, they've already been killing themselves for ever so long. When they "commit suicide," they're just being orderly. They're just giving external form to an event the substance of which already exists and has existed in them over time. Once you realize what's going on, the event of self-destruction for all practical purposes exists. There's not much a person is apt to do in this situation, except "formalize" it, or, if you don't quite want to do that, maybe "E.C.T." or a trip away from the Earth to some other planet, or something.

Anyway, this is more than I intended to say about the Bad Thing. Even now, thinking about it a little bit and being introspective and all that, I can feel it reaching out for me, trying to mess with my electrons. But I'm not on Earth anymore.

I made it through my first little semester at Brown University and even got a prize for being a very good introductory Economics student, two hundred dollars, which I promptly spent on marijuana, because smoking marijuana keeps you from getting sick to your stomach and throwing up. It really does: they give it to people undergoing chemotherapy for cancer, sometimes. I had smoked a lot of marijuana ever since my year of "P.G." schoolwork to keep from throwing up, and it worked a lot of the time. It just bounced right off the sickness in my atoms, though. The Bad Thing just laughed at it. I was a very troubled little soldier by the end of the semester. I longed for the golden good old days when my face just bled.

In December the Bad Thing and I boarded a bus to go from Rhode Island to New Hampshire for the holiday season. Everything was extremely jolly. Except just coming out of Providence, Rhode Island, the bus driver didn't look carefully enough before he tried to make a left turn and a pickup truck hit our bus from the left side and smunched the left front part of the bus and knocked the driver out of his seat and down into the well where the stairs onto and off of the bus are, where he broke his arm and I think his leg and cut his head fairly badly. So we had to stop and wait for an ambulance for the driver and a new bus for us. The driver was incredibly upset. He was sure he was going to lose his job, because he'd messed up the left turn and had had an accident, and also because he hadn't been wearing his seat belt - clear evidence of which was the fact that he had been knocked way out of his seat into the stairwell, which everybody saw and would say they saw - which is against the law if you're a bus driver in just about any state of the Union. He was almost crying, and me too, because he said he had about seventy kids and he really needed that job, and now he would be fired. A couple of passengers tried to soothe him and calm him down, but understandably no one came near me. Just me and the Bad Thing, there. Finally the bus driver just kind of passed out from his broken bones and that cut, and an ambulance came and they put him under a rust-colored blanket. A new bus came out of the sunset and a bus executive or something came too, and he was really mad when some of the incredibly helpful passengers told him what had happened. I knew that the bus driver was probably going to lose his job, just as he had feared would happen. I felt unbelievably sorry for him, and of course the Bad Thing very kindly filtered this sadness for me and made it a lot worse. It was weird and irrational but all of a sudden I felt really strongly as though the bus driver were really me. I really felt that way. So I felt just like he must have felt, and it was awful. I wasn't just sorry for him, I was sorry as him, or something like that. All courtesy of the Bad Thing. Suddenly I had to go somewhere, really fast, so I went to where the driver's stretcher was in the open ambulance and went in to look at him, there. He had a bus company ID badge with his picture, but I couldn't really see anything because it was covered by a streak of blood from his head. I took my roughly a hundred dollars and a bag of "sinsemilla" marijuana and slipped it under his rusty blanket to help him feed all his kids and not get sick and throw up, then I left really fast again and got my stuff and got on the new bus. It wasn't until, what, about thirty minutes later on the nighttime highway that I realized that when they found that marijuana with the driver they'd think it was maybe his all along and he really would get fired, or maybe even sent to jail. It was kind of like I'd framed him, killed him, except he was also me, I thought, so it was really confusing. It was like I'd symbolically killed myself or something, because I felt he was me in some deep sense. I think at that moment I felt worse than I'd ever felt before, except for that spinal tap, and that was totally different. Dr. Kablumbus says that's when the Bad Thing really got me by the balls. Those were really his words. I'm really sorry for what I did and what the Bad Thing did to the bus driver. I really sincerely only meant to help him, as if he were me. But I sort of killed him, instead.

I got home and my parents said "Hey, hello, we love you, congratulations:' and I said "Hello, hello, thank you, thank you,"I didn't exactly have the "holiday spirit," I must confess, because of the Bad Thing, and because of the bus driver, and because of the fact that we were all three of us the same thing in the respects that mattered at all.

The highly ridiculous thing happened on Christmas Eve. It was very stupid, but I guess almost sort of inevitable given what had gone on up to then. You could just say that I'd already more or less killed myself internally during the fall semester, and symbolically with respect to that bus driver, and now like a tidy little soldier I had to "formalize" the whole thing, make it neat and right-angled and external; I had to fold down the corners and make hospital corners. While Mom and Dad and my sisters and Nanny and Pop-Pop and Uncle Michael and Aunt Sally were downstairs drinking cocktails and listening to a beautiful and deadly-sad record about a crippled boy and the three kings on Christmas night, I got undressed and got into a tub full of warm water and pulled about three thousand electrical appliances into that tub after me. However, the consummate silliness of the whole incident was made complete by the fact that most of the appliances were cleverly left unplugged by me in my irrational state. Only a couple were actually "live," but they were enough to blowout the power In the house and make a big noise and give me a nice little shock indeed, so that I had to be taken to the hospital for physical care. I don't know if I should say this, but what got shocked really the worst were my reproductive organs. I guess they were sort of out of the water part-way and formed a sort of bridge for the electricity between the water and my body and the air. Anyway, their getting shocked hurt a lot and also I am told had consequences that will become more significant if I ever want to have a family or anything. I am not overly concerned about this. My family was concerned about the whole incident, though; they were less than pleased. to say the least. I had sort of half passed out or gone to sleep, but I remember hearing the water sort of fizzing, and their coming in and saying "Oh my God, hey!" I remember they had a hard time because it was just pitch-black in that bathroom, and they more or less only had me to see by. They had to be extremely careful getting me out of the tub, because they didn't want to get shocked themselves. I find this perfectly understandable.

Once a couple days went by in the hospital and it became clear that boy and reproductive organs were pretty much going to survive, I made my little vertical move up to the White Floor. About the White Floor - the Troubled Little Soldier Floor - I really don't wish to go into a gigantic amount of detail. But I will tell some things. The White Floor was white, obviously, but it wasn't a bright, hurty white, like the burn ward. It was more of a soft, almost grayish white, very bland and soothing. Now that I come to think back on it, just about everything about the White Floor was soft and unimposing and ... demure, as if they tried really hard there not to make any big or strong impressions on any of their guests - sense-wise or mind-wise - because they knew that just about any real impression on the people who needed to go to the White Floor was probably going to be a bad impression. after being filtered through the Bad Thing.

The White Floor had soft white walls and soft light-brown carpeting, and the windows were sort of frosty and very thick. All the sharp corners on things like dressers and bedside tables and doors had been beveled-off and sanded round and smooth, so it all looked a little strange. I have never heard of anyone trying to kill himself on the sharp corner of a door, but I suppose it is wise to be prepared for all possibilities. With this in mind, I'm sure, they made certain that everything they gave you to eat was something you could eat without a knife or a fork. Pudding was a very big item on the White Floor. I had to wear a bit of a thing while I was a guest there, but I certainly wasn't strapped down in my bed, which some of my colleagues were. The thing I had to wear wasn't a straitjacket or anything, but it was certainly tighter than your average bathrobe, and I got the feeling they could make it even tighter if they felt it was in my best interests to do so. When someone wanted to smoke a tobacco cigarette, a psychiatric nurse had to light it, because no guest on the White Floor was allowed to have matches. I also remember that the White Floor smelled a lot nicer than the rest of the hospital, all feminine and kind of dreamy, like ether.

Dr. Kablumbus wanted to know what was up, and I more or less told him in about six minutes. I was a little too tired and torn up for the Bad Thing to be super bad right then, but I was pretty glib. I rather liked Dr. Kablumbus, although he sucked on very nasty-smelling candies all the time - to help him stop smoking, apparently - and he was a bit irritating in that he tried to talk like a kid - using a lot of curse words, etc. - when it was just quite dear that he wasn't a kid. He was very understanding, though, and it was awfully nice to see a doctor who didn't want to do stun to my reproductive organs all the time. After he knew the general scoop, Dr. Kablumbus laid out the options to me, and then to my parents and me. After we all decided not to therapeutically convulse me with electricity, Dr. Kablumbus got ready to let me leave the Earth via antidepressants.

Before I say anything else about Dr. Kablumbus or my little trip, I want to tell very briefly about my meeting a colleague of mine on the White Floor who is unfortunately not living anymore, but not through any fault of her own whatsoever, rather through the fault of her boyfriend. who killed her in a car crash by driving drunk. My meeting and making the acquaintance of this girl, whose name is May, even now stands out in my memory as more or less the last good thing that happened to me on Earth. I happened to meet May one day in the TV room because of the fact that her turtleneck shirt was on inside out. I remember The Uttle Rascals was on and I saw the back of a blond head belonging to who knows what sex, there, because the hair was really short and ragged, And below that head there was the size and fabric-composition tag and the white stitching that indicates the fact that one's turtleneck shirt is on inside out. So I said, "Excuse me, did you know your shirt was on inside out?" And the person, who was May, turned around and said, "Yes I know that:" When she turned I could not help noticing that she was unfortunately very pretty, I hadn't seen that this was a pretty girl, here, or else I almost certainly wouldn't have said anything whatsoever. I have always tried to avoid talking to pretty girls, because pretty girls have a vicious effect on me in which every part of my brain is shut down except for the part that says unbelievably stupid things and the part that is aware that I am saying unbelievably stupid things. But at this point I was still too tired and torn up to care much, and I was just getting ready to leave Earth, so I just said what I thought, even though May was disturbingly pretty. I said, "Why do you have it on inside out?" referring to the shirl. And May said, "Because the tag scratches my neck and I don't like that." Understandably, I said, "Well, hey, why don't you just cut the tag out?" To which I remember May replied, "Because then I couldn't tell the front of the shirt:" "What?"I said, wittily. May said, "It doesn't have any pockets or writing on it or anything. The front is just exactly like the back. Except the back has the tag on it. So I wouldn't be able to tel1." So I said, "Well, hey, if the front's just like the back, what difference does it make which way you wear it?" At which point May looked at me all seriously, for about eleven years, and then said. "It makes a difference to me." Then she broke into a big deadly, pretty smile and asked me tactfully where I got my scar. I told her I had had this annoying tag sticking out of my cheek ...

So, just more or less by accident, May and I became friends, and we talked some. She wanted to write made-up stories for a living. I said I didn't know that could be done. She was killed by her boyfriend in his drunken car only ten days ago. I tried to call May's parents just to say that I was incredibly sorry yesterday, but their answering service informed me that Mr. and Mrs. Aculpa had gone out of town for an indefinite period. I can sympathize, because I am "out of town," too.

Dr. Kablumbus knew a lot about psychopharmaceuticals. He told my parents and me that there were two general kinds of antidepressants: tricyclic5 and M.A.O. inhibitors (I can't remember what "M.A.O." stands for exactly, but I have my own thoughts with respect to the matter). Apparently both kinds worked well, but Mr. Kablumbus said that there were certain things you couldn't eat and drink with M.A.O. inhibitors, like beer, and certain kinds of sausage. My Mom was afraid I would forget and maybe eat and drink some of these things, so we all conferred and decided to go with a tricyclic. Dr. Kablumbus thought this was a very good choice.

Just as with a long trip you don't reach your destination right away, 50 with antidepressants you have to "go up" on them: i.e,. you start with a very tiny little dose and work your way up to a full-size dose in order to get your blood level accustomed and all that. So, in one way, my trip to the planet Trillaphon took over a week. But in another way, it was like being off Earth and on the planet Trillaphon right from the very first morning after I started. The big difference between the Earth and the planet Trillaphon, of course, is distance: the planet Trillaphon is very very far away. But there are other differences that are sort of more immediate and intrinsic. I think the air on the planet Trillaphon must not be as rich in oxygen or nutrition or something because you get a lot tireder a lot faster there. Just shoveling snow off a sidewalk or running to catch a bus or shooting a couple baskets or walking up a hill to sled down gets you very, very tired. Another annoying thing is that the planet Trillaphon is tilted ever so slightly on its axis or something, so that the ground when you look at it isn't quite level; it lists a little to starboard. You get used to this fairly quickly, though, like getting your "sea legs" when you're on a ship.

Another thing is that the planet Trillaphon is a very sleepy planet. You have to take your antidepressants at night, and you better make sure there is a bed nearby, because it will be bedtime incredibly soon after you take them. Even during the day, the resident of the planet Trillaphon is a sleepy little soldier. Sleepy and tired, but too far away to be super-troubled.

This has nothing to do with the very ridiculous incident in the bathtub on Christmas Eve, but there is something electrical about the planet Trillaphon. On Trillaphon for me there isn't the old problem of my head making silence into a spangly glitter, because my tricyclic antidepressant - "Tofranil" - makes a sort of electrical noise of its own that drowns the spangle out completely. The new noise isn't incredibly pleasant, but it's better than the old noises, which I really couldn't stand at all. The new noise on my planet is kind of a high-tension electric trill. That's why for almost a year now I've somehow always gotten the name of my antidepressant wrong when I'm not looking right at the bottle: I've called it 'Trillaphon" instead of "Tofranil," because "Trillaphon" is more trilly and electrical, and it just sounds more like what it's like to be there. But the electricalness of the planet Trillaphon is not just a noise. I guess if I were all glib like May is I'd say that "the planet Trlllaphon is simply characterized by a more electrical way of life:" It is, sort of. Sometimes on the planet Trillaphon the hairs on your arms will stand up and a chill will go through the big muscles in your legs and your teeth will vibrate when you close your mouth, as if you're under a high-tension line, or by a transformer. Sometimes you'll crackle for no reason and see blue things. And even the sound of your brain-voice when you think thoughts to yourself on the planet Trillaphon is different than it was on Earth; now it sounds like it's coming from a sort of speaker connected to you only by miles and miles and miles of wire, like you're back listening to the "Golden Days of Radio.'

It is very hard to read on the planet Trillaphon, but that is not too inconvenient, because I hardly ever read anymore, except for "Newsweek" magazine, a subscription which I got for my birthday, I am twenty-one years old.

May was seventeen years old. Now sometimes I'll sort of joke with myself and say that I need to switch to an M.A.O. inhibitor. May's initials are M.A., and when I think about her now I get so sad I go "0." In a way, I would understandably like to inhibit the "M.A.O." I'm sure Dr. Kablumbus would agree that it is in my own best interests to do so. If the bus driver I more or less killed had the initials M.A., that would be incredibly ironic.

Communications between Earth and the planet Trillaphon are hard, but they are very inexpensive, so I am definitely probably going to call the Aculpas to say just how sorry I am about their daughter, and maybe even that I more or less loved her.

The big question is whether the Bad Thing is on the planet Trillaphon. I don't know if it is or not. Maybe it has a harder time in a thinner and less nutritious atmosphere. I certainly do, in some respects. Sometimes, when I don't think about it, I think I have just totally escaped the Bad Thing, and that I am going to be able to lead a Normal and Productive Life as a lawyer or something here on the planet Trillaphon, once I get so I can read again.

Being far away sort of helps with respect to the Bad Thing.

Except that is just highly silly when you think about what I said before concerning the fact that the Bad Thing is really me.






2.THE DEPRESSED PERSON

The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror. Despairing, then, of describing the emotional pain or expressing its utterness to those around her, the depressed person instead described circumstances, both past and ongoing, which were somehow related to the pain, to its etiology and cause, hoping at least to be able to express to others something of the pain’s context, its—as it were—shape and texture. The depressed person’s parents, for example, who had divorced when she was a child, had used her as a pawn in the sick games they played. The depressed person had, as a child, required orthodonture, and each parent had claimed—not without some cause, given the Medicean legal ambiguities of the divorce settlement, the depressed person always inserted when she described the painful struggle between her parents over the expense of her orthodonture—that the other should be required to pay for it. And the venomous rage of each parent over the other’s petty, selfish refusal to pay was vented on their daughter, who had to hear over and over again from each parent how the other was unloving and selfish. Both parents were well off, and each had privately expressed to the depressed person that s/he was, of course, if push came to shove, willing to pay for all the orthodonture the depressed person needed and then some, that it was, at its heart, a matter not of money or dentition but of “principle.” And the depressed person always took care, when as an adult she attempted to describe to a trusted friend the circumstances of the struggle over the cost of her orthodonture and that struggle’s legacy of emotional pain for her, to concede that it may very well truly have appeared to each parent to have been, in fact, just that (i.e., a matter of “principle”), though unfortunately not a “principle” that took into account their daughter’s needs or her feelings at receiving the emotional message that scoring petty points off each other was more important to her parents than her own maxillofacial health and thus constituted, if considered from a certain perspective, a form of parental neglect or abandonment or even outright abuse, an abuse clearly connected—here the depressed person nearly always inserted that her therapist concurred with this assessment—to the bottomless, chronic adult despair she suffered every day and felt hopelessly trapped in. This was just one example. The depressed person averaged four interpolated apologies each time she recounted for supportive friends this type of painful and damaging past circumstance on the telephone, as well as a sort of preamble in which she attempted to describe how painful and frightening it was not to feel able to articulate the chronic depression’s excruciating pain itself but to have to resort to recounting examples that probably sounded, she always took care to acknowledge, dreary or self-pitying or like one of those people who are narcissistically obsessed with their “painful childhoods” and “painful lives” and wallow in their burdens and insist on recounting them at tiresome length to friends who are trying to be supportive and nurturing, and bore them and repel them. The friends whom the depressed person reached out to for support and tried to open up to and share at least the contextual shape of her unceasing psychic agony and feelings of isolation with numbered around half a dozen and underwent a certain amount of rotation. The depressed person’s therapist—who had earned both a terminal graduate degree and a medical degree, and who was the self-professed exponent of a school of therapy which stressed the cultivation and regular use of a supportive peer-community in any endogenously depressed adult’s journey toward healing—referred to these female friends as the depressed person’s Support System. The approximately half-dozen rotating members of this Support System tended to be either former acquaintances from the depressed person’s childhood or else girls she had roomed with at various stages of her school career, nurturing and comparatively undamaged women who now lived in all manner of different cities and whom the depressed person often had not seen in person for years and years, and whom she often called late in the evening, long-distance, for sharing and support and just a few well-chosen words to help her get some realistic perspective on the day’s despair and get centered and gather together the strength to fight through the emotional agony of the next day, and to whom, when she telephoned, the depressed person always began by saying that she apologized if she was dragging them down or coming off as boring or self-pitying or repellent or taking them away from their active, vibrant, largely pain-free long-distance lives. The depressed person also made it a point, when reaching out to members of her Support System, never to cite circumstances like her parents’ endless battle over her orthodonture as the cause of her unceasing adult depression. The “Blame Game” was too easy, she said; it was pathetic and contemptible; and besides, she’d had quite enough of the “Blame Game” just listening to her fucking parents all those years, the endless blame and recrimination the two had exchanged over her, through her, using the depressed person’s (i.e., the depressed person as a child’s) own feelings and needs as ammunition, as if her valid feelings and needs were nothing more than a battlefield or theater of conflict, weapons which the parents felt they could deploy against each other. They had displayed far more interest and passion and emotional availability in their hatred of each other than either had shown toward the depressed person herself, as a child, the depressed person confessed to feeling, sometimes, still. The depressed person’s therapist, whose school of therapy rejected the transference relation as a therapeutic resource and thus deliberately eschewed confrontation and “should”-statements and all normative, judging, “authority”-based theory in favor of a more value-neutral bioexperiential model and the creative use of analogy and narrative (including, but not necessarily mandating, the use of hand puppets, polystyrene props and toys, role-playing, human sculpture, mirroring, drama therapy, and, in appropriate cases, whole meticulously scripted and storyboarded Childhood Reconstructions), had deployed the following medications in an attempt to help the depressed person find some relief from her acute affective discomfort and progress in her (i.e., the depressed person’s) journey toward enjoying some semblance of a normal adult life: Paxil, Zoloft, Prozac, Tofranil, Welbutrin, Elavil, Metrazol in combination with unilateral ECT (during a two-week voluntary in-patient course of treatment at a regional Mood Disorders clinic), Parnate both with and without lithium salts, Nardil both with and without Xanax. None had delivered any significant relief from the pain and feelings of emotional isolation that rendered the depressed person’s every waking hour an indescribable hell on earth, and many of the medications themselves had had side effects which the depressed person had found intolerable. The depressed person was currently taking only very tiny daily doses of Prozac, for her A.D.D. symptoms, and of Ativan, a mild nonaddictive tranquilizer, for the panic attacks which made the hours at her toxically dysfunctional and unsupportive workplace such a living hell. Her therapist gently but repeatedly shared with the depressed person her (i.e., the therapist’s) belief that the very best medicine for her (i.e., the depressed person’s) endogenous depression was the cultivation and regular use of a Support System the depressed person felt she could reach out to share with and lean on for unconditional caring and support. The exact composition of this Support System and its one or two most special, most trusted “core” members underwent a certain amount of change and rotation as time passed, which the therapist had encouraged the depressed person to see as perfectly normal and OK, since it was only by taking the risks and exposing the vulnerabilities required to deepen supportive relationships that an individual could discover which friendships could meet her needs and to what degree. The depressed person felt that she trusted the therapist and made a concerted effort to be as completely open and honest with her as she possibly could. She admitted to the therapist that she was always extremely careful to share with whomever she called long-distance at night her (i.e., the depressed person’s) belief that it would be whiny and pathetic to blame her constant, indescribable adult pain on her parents’ traumatic divorce or their cynical use of her while they hypocritically pretended that each cared for her more than the other did. Her parents had, after all—as her therapist had helped the depressed person to see—done the very best they could with the emotional resources they’d had at the time. And she had, after all, the depressed person always inserted, laughing weakly, eventually gotten the orthodonture she’d needed. The former acquaintances and roommates who composed her Support System often told the depressed person that they wished she could be a little less hard on herself, to which the depressed person often responded by bursting involuntarily into tears and telling them that she knew all too well that she was one of those dreaded types of people of everyone’s grim acquaintance who call at inconvenient times and just go on and on about themselves and whom it often takes several increasingly awkward attempts to get off the telephone with. The depressed person said that she was all too horribly aware of what a joyless burden she was to her friends, and during the long-distance calls she always made it a point to express the enormous gratitude she felt at having a friend she could call and share with and get nurturing and support from, however briefly, before the demands of that friend’s full, joyful, active life took understandable precedence and required her (i.e., the friend) to get off the telephone. The excruciating feelings of shame and inadequacy which the depressed person experienced about calling supportive members of her Support System long-distance late at night and burdening them with her clumsy attempts to articulate at least the overall context of her emotional agony were an issue on which the depressed person and her therapist were currently doing a great deal of work in their time together. The depressed person confessed that when whatever empathetic friend she was sharing with finally confessed that she (i.e., the friend) was dreadfully sorry but there was no helping it she absolutely had to get off the telephone, and had finally detached the depressed person’s needy fingers from her pantcuff and gotten off the telephone and back to her full, vibrant long-distance life, the depressed person almost always sat there listening to the empty apian drone of the dial tone and feeling even more isolated and inadequate and contemptible than she had before she’d called. These feelings of toxic shame at reaching out to others for community and support were issues which the therapist encouraged the depressed person to try to get in touch with and explore so that they could be processed in detail. The depressed person admitted to the therapist that whenever she (i.e., the depressed person) reached out long-distance to a member of her Support System she almost always visualized the friend’s face, on the telephone, assuming a combined expression of boredom and pity and repulsion and abstract guilt, and almost always imagined she (i.e., the depressed person) could detect, in the friend’s increasingly long silences and/or tedious repetitions of encouraging clichés, the boredom and frustration people always feel when someone is clinging to them and being a burden. She confessed that she could all too well imagine each friend now wincing when the telephone rang late at night, or during the conversation looking impatiently at the clock or directing silent gestures and facial expressions of helpless entrapment to all the other people in the room with her (i.e., the other people in the room with the “friend”), these inaudible gestures and expressions becoming more and more extreme and desperate as the depressed person just went on and on and on. The depressed person’s therapist’s most noticeable unconscious personal habit or tic consisted of placing the tips of all her fingers together in her lap as she listened attentively to the depressed person and manipulating the fingers idly so that her mated hands formed various enclosing shapes—e.g., cube, sphere, pyramid, right cylinder—and then appearing to study or contemplate them. The depressed person disliked this habit, though she would be the first to admit that this was chiefly because it drew her attention to the therapist’s fingers and fingernails and caused her to compare them with her own. The depressed person had shared with both the therapist and her Support System that she could recall, all too clearly, at her third boarding school, once watching her roommate talk to some unknown boy on their room’s telephone as she (i.e., the roommate) made faces and gestures of repulsion and boredom with the call, this self-assured, popular and attractive roommate finally directing at the depressed person an exaggerated pantomime of someone knocking on a door, continuing the pantomime with a desperate expression until the depressed person understood that she was to open the room’s door and step outside and knock loudly on the open door so as to give the roommate an excuse to get off the telephone. As a schoolgirl, the depressed person had never spoken of the incident of the boy’s telephone call and the mendacious pantomime with that particular roommate—a roommate with whom the depressed person hadn’t clicked or connected at all, and whom she had resented in a bitter, cringing way that had made the depressed person despise herself, and had not made any attempt to stay in touch with after that endless sophomore second semester was finished—but she (i.e., the depressed person) had shared her agonizing memory of the incident with many of the friends in her Support System, and had also shared how bottomlessly horrible and pathetic she had felt it would have been to have been that nameless, unknown boy at the other end of that telephone, a boy trying in good faith to take an emotional risk and to reach out and try to connect with the confident roommate, unaware that he was an unwelcome burden, pathetically unaware of the silent pantomimed boredom and contempt at the telephone’s other end, and how the depressed person dreaded more than almost anything ever being in the position of being someone you had to appeal silently to someone else in the room to help you contrive an excuse to get off the telephone with. The depressed person would therefore always implore any friend she was on the telephone with to tell her the very second she (i.e., the friend) was getting bored or frustrated or repelled or felt she had other more urgent or interesting things to do, to please for God’s sake be utterly up-front and frank and not spend one second longer on the phone with the depressed person than she (i.e., the friend) was absolutely glad to spend. The depressed person knew perfectly well, of course, she assured the therapist, how pathetic such a need for reassurance might come off to someone, how it could all too possibly be heard not as an open invitation to get off the telephone but actually as a needy, self-pitying, contemptibly manipulative plea for the friend not to get off the telephone, never to get off the telephone. The therapist was diligent, whenever the depressed person shared her concern about how some statement or action might “seem” or “appear,” in supporting the depressed person in exploring how these beliefs about how she “seemed” or “came off” to others made her feel. It felt demeaning; the depressed person felt demeaned. She said it felt demeaning to call childhood friends long-distance late at night when they clearly had other things to do and lives to lead and vibrant, healthy, nurturing, intimate, caring partner-relationships to be in; it felt demeaning and pathetic to constantly apologize for boring someone or to feel that you had to thank them effusively just for being your friend. The depressed person’s parents had eventually split the cost of her orthodonture; a professional arbitrator had finally been hired by their lawyers to structure the compromise. Arbitration had also been required to negotiate shared payment schedules for the depressed person’s boarding schools and Healthy Eating Lifestyles summer camps and oboe lessons and car and collision insurance, as well as for the cosmetic surgery needed to correct a malformation of the anterior spine and alar cartilage of the depressed person’s nose which had given her what felt like an excruciatingly pronounced and snoutish pug nose and had, coupled with the external orthodontic retainer she had to wear twenty-two hours a day, made looking at herself in the mirrors of her rooms at her boarding schools feel like more than any person could possibly stand. And yet also, in the year that the depressed person’s father had remarried, he—in either a gesture of rare uncompromised caring or a coup de grâce which the depressed person’s mother had said was designed to make her own feelings of humiliation and superfluousness complete—had paid in toto for the riding lessons, jodhpurs, and outrageously expensive boots the depressed person had needed in order to gain admission to her second-to-last boarding school’s Riding Club, a few of whose members were the only girls at this particular boarding school whom the depressed person felt, she had confessed to her father on the telephone in tears late one truly horrible night, even remotely accepted her and had even minimal empathy or compassion in them at all and around whom the depressed person hadn’t felt so totally snout-nosed and brace-faced and inadequate and rejected that it had felt like a daily act of enormous personal courage even to leave her room to go eat dinner in the dining hall. The professional arbitrator her parents’ lawyers had finally agreed on for help in structuring compromises on the costs of meeting the depressed person’s childhood needs had been a highly respected Conflict-Resolution Specialist named Walter D. (“Walt”) DeLasandro Jr. As a child, the depressed person had never met or even laid eyes on Walter D. (“Walt”) DeLasandro Jr., though she had been shown his business card—complete with its parenthesized invitation to informality—and his name had been invoked in her hearing on countless childhood occasions, along with the fact that he billed for his services at a staggering $130 an hour plus expenses. Despite overwhelming feelings of reluctance on the part of the depressed person—who knew very well how much like the “Blame Game” it might sound—her therapist had strongly supported her in taking the risk of sharing with members of her Support System an important emotional breakthrough she (i.e., the depressed person) had achieved during an Inner-Child-Focused Experiential Therapy Retreat Weekend which the therapist had supported her in taking the risk of enrolling in and giving herself open-mindedly over to the experience of. In the I.-C.-F.E.T. Retreat Weekend’s Small-Group Drama-Therapy Room, other members of her Small Group had role-played the depressed person’s parents and the parents’ significant others and attorneys and myriad other emotionally toxic figures from the depressed person’s childhood and, at the crucial phase of the drama-therapy exercise, had slowly encircled the depressed person, moving in and pressing steadily in together on her so that she could not escape or avoid or minimize, and had (i.e., the small group had) dramatically recited specially pre-scripted lines designed to evoke and awaken blocked trauma, which had almost immediately provoked the depressed person into a surge of agonizing emotional memories and long-buried trauma and had resulted in the emergence of the depressed person’s Inner Child and a cathartic tantrum in which the depressed person had struck repeatedly at a stack of velour cushions with a bat made of polystyrene foam and had shrieked obscenities and had reexperienced long-pent-up and festering emotional wounds, one of which being a deep vestigial rage over the fact that Walter D. (“Walt”) DeLasandro Jr. had been able to bill her parents $130 an hour plus expenses for being put in the middle and playing the role of mediator and absorber of shit from both sides while she (i.e., the depressed person, as a child) had had to perform essentially the same coprophagous services on a more or less daily basis for free, for nothing, services which were not only grossly unfair and inappropriate for an emotionally sensitive child to be made to feel required to perform but about which her parents had then turned around and tried to make her, the depressed person herself, as a child, feel guilty about the staggering cost of Walter D. DeLasandro Jr. the Conflict-Resolution Specialist’s services, as if the repeated hassle and expense of Walter D. DeLasandro Jr. were her fault and only undertaken on her spoiled little snout-nosed snaggletoothed behalf instead of simply because of her fucking parents’ utterly fucking sick inability to communicate and share honestly and work through their own sick, dysfunctional issues with each other. This exercise and cathartic rage had enabled the depressed person to get in touch with some really core resentment-issues, the Small-Group Facilitator at the Inner-Child-Focused Experiential Therapy Retreat Weekend had said, and could have represented a real turning point in the depressed person’s journey toward healing, had the rage and velour-cushion-pummeling not left the depressed person so emotionally shattered and drained and traumatized and embarrassed that she had felt she had no choice but to fly back home that night and miss the rest of the I.-C.-F.E.T.R. Weekend and the Small-Group Processing of all the exhumed feelings and issues. The eventual compromise which the depressed person and her therapist worked out together as they processed the unburied resentments and the consequent guilt and shame at what could all too easily appear to be just more of the self-pitying “Blame Game” that attended the depressed person’s experience at the Retreat Weekend was that the depressed person would take the emotional risk of reaching out and sharing the experience’s feelings and realizations with her Support System, but only with the two or three elite, “core” members whom the depressed person currently felt were there for her in the very most empathetic and unjudgingly supportive way. The most important provision of the compromise was that the depressed person would be permitted to reveal to them her reluctance about sharing these resentments and realizations and to inform them that she was aware of how pathetic and blaming they (i.e., the resentments and realizations) might sound, and to reveal that she was sharing this potentially pathetic “breakthrough” with them only at her therapist’s firm and explicit suggestion. In validating this provision, the therapist had objected only to the depressed person’s proposed use of the word “pathetic” in her sharing with the Support System. The therapist said that she felt she could support the depressed person’s use of the word “vulnerable” far more wholeheartedly than she could support the use of “pathetic,” since her gut (i.e., the therapist’s gut) was telling her that the depressed person’s proposed use of “pathetic” felt not only self-hating but also needy and even somewhat manipulative. The word “pathetic,” the therapist candidly shared, often felt to her like a defense-mechanism the depressed person used to protect herself against a listener’s possible negative judgments by making it clear that the depressed person was already judging herself far more severely than any listener could possibly have the heart to. The therapist was careful to point out that she was not judging or critiquing or rejecting the depressed person’s use of “pathetic” but was merely trying to openly and honestly share the feelings which its use brought up for her in the context of their relationship. The therapist, who by this time had less than a year to live, took a brief time-out at this point to share once again with the depressed person her (i.e., the therapist’s) conviction that self-hatred, toxic guilt, narcissism, self-pity, neediness, manipulation, and many of the other shame-based behaviors with which endogenously depressed adults typically presented were best understood as psychological defenses erected by a vestigial wounded Inner Child against the possibility of trauma and abandonment. The behaviors, in other words, were primitive emotional prophylaxes whose real function was to preclude intimacy; they were psychic armor designed to keep others at a distance so that they (i.e., others) could not get emotionally close enough to the depressed person to inflict any wounds that might echo and mirror the deep vestigial wounds of the depressed person’s childhood, wounds which the depressed person was unconsciously determined to keep repressed at all costs. The therapist—who during the year’s cold months, when the abundant fenestration of her home office kept the room chilly, wore a pelisse of hand-tanned Native American buckskin that formed a somewhat ghastlily moist-looking flesh-colored background for the enclosing shapes her joined hands formed in her lap as she spoke—assured the depressed person that she was not trying to lecture her or impose on her (i.e., on the depressed person) the therapist’s own particular model of depressive etiology. Rather, it simply felt appropriate on an intuitive “gut” level at this particular point in time for the therapist to share some of her own feelings. Indeed, as the therapist said that she felt comfortable about positing at this point in the therapeutic relationship between them, the depressed person’s acute chronic mood disorder could actually itself be seen as constituting an emotional defense-mechanism: i.e., as long as the depressed person had the depression’s acute affective discomfort to preoccupy her and take up her emotional attention, she could avoid feeling or getting in touch with the deep vestigial childhood wounds which she (i.e., the depressed person) was apparently still determined to keep repressed. Several months later, when the depressed person’s therapist suddenly and unexpectedly died—as the result of what was determined by authorities to be an “accidentally” toxic combination of caffeine and homeopathic appetite suppressant but which, given the therapist’s extensive medical background and knowledge of chemical interactions, only a person in very deep denial indeed could fail to see must have been, on some level, intentional—without leaving any sort of note or cassette or encouraging final words for any of the persons and/or clients in her life who had, despite all their debilitating fear and isolation and defense-mechanisms and vestigial wounds from past traumas, come to connect intimately with her and let her in emotionally even though it meant making themselves vulnerable to the possibility of loss- and abandonment-traumas, the depressed person found the trauma of this fresh loss and abandonment so shattering, its resultant agony and despair and hopelessness so unbearable, that she was, ironically, now forced to reach frantically and repeatedly out on a nightly basis to her Support System, sometimes calling three or even four long-distance friends in an evening, sometimes calling the same friends twice in one night, sometimes at a very late hour, sometimes even—the depressed person felt sickeningly sure—waking them up or interrupting them in the midst of healthy, joyful sexual intimacy with their partner. In other words, sheer survival, in the turbulent wake of her feelings of shock and grief and loss and abandonment and bitter betrayal following the therapist’s sudden death, now compelled the depressed person to put aside her innate feelings of shame and inadequacy and embarrassment at being a pathetic burden and to lean with all her might on the empathy and emotional nurture of her Support System, despite the fact that this, ironically, had been one of the two areas in which the depressed person had most vigorously resisted the therapist’s counsel. Even on top of the shattering abandonment-issues it brought up, the therapist’s unexpected death also could not have occurred at a worse time from the perspective of the depressed person’s journey toward inner healing, coming as it (i.e., the suspicious death) did just as the depressed person was beginning to work through and process some of her core shame- and resentment-issues concerning the therapeutic process itself and the intimate therapist-patient relationship’s impact on her (i.e., on the depressed person’s) unbearable isolation and pain. As part of her grieving process, the depressed person shared with supportive members of her Support System the fact that she felt she had, she had realized, experienced significant trauma and anguish and isolation-feelings even in the therapeutic relationship itself, a realization which she said she and the therapist had been working intensively together to explore and process. For just one example, the depressed person shared long-distance, she had discovered and struggled in therapy to work through her feeling that it was ironic and demeaning, given her parents’ dysfunctional preoccupation with money and all that that preoccupation had cost her as a child, that she was now, as an adult, in the position of having to pay a therapist $90 an hour to listen patiently to her and respond honestly and empathetically; i.e., it felt demeaning and pathetic to feel forced to buy patience and empathy, the depressed person had confessed to her therapist, and was an agonizing echo of the exact same childhood pain which she (i.e., the depressed person) was so very anxious to put behind her. The therapist—after attending closely and unjudgingly to what the depressed person later admitted to her Support System could all too easily have been interpreted as mere niggardly whining about the expense of therapy, and after a long and considered pause during which both the therapist and the depressed person had gazed at the ovoid cage which the therapist’s mated hands in her lap at that moment composed —had responded that, while on a purely intellectual or “head” level she might respectfully disagree with the substance or “propositional content” of what the depressed person was saying, she (i.e., the therapist) nevertheless wholeheartedly supported the depressed person in sharing whatever feelings the therapeutic relationship itself brought up in her (i.e., in the depressed person ) so that they could work together on processing them and exploring safe and appropriate environments and contexts for their expression. The depressed person’s recollections of the therapist’s patient, attentive, and unjudging responses to even her (i.e., the depressed person’s) most spiteful and childishly arrested complaints felt as if they brought on further, even more unbearable feelings of loss and abandonment, as well as fresh waves of resentment and self-pity which the depressed person knew all too well were repellent in the extreme, she assured the friends who composed her Support System, trusted friends whom the depressed person was by this time calling almost constantly, sometimes now even during the day, from her workplace, dialing her closest friends’ long-distance work numbers and asking them to take time away from their own challenging, stimulating careers to listen supportively and share and dialogue and help the depressed person find some way to process this grief and loss and find some way to survive. Her apologies for burdening these friends during daylight hours at their workplaces were elaborate, involved, vociferous, baroque, mercilessly self-critical, and very nearly constant, as were her expressions of gratitude to the Support System just for Being There for her, just for allowing her to begin again to be able to trust and take the risk of reaching out, even just a little, because the depressed person shared that she felt as if she had been discovering all over again, and with a shattering new clarity now in the wake of the therapist’s abrupt and wordless abandonment, she shared over her workstation’s headset telephone, just how agonizingly few and far between were the people whom she could ever hope to really communicate and share with and forge healthy, open, trusting, mutually nurturing relationships to lean on. For example, her work environment—as the depressed person readily acknowledged she’d whined about at tiresome length many times before—was totally dysfunctional and toxic, and the totally unsupportive emotional atmosphere there made the idea of trying to bond in any mutually nurturing way with coworkers a grotesque joke. And the depressed person’s attempts to reach out in her emotional isolation and try to cultivate and develop caring friends and relationships in the community through church groups or nutrition and holistic stretching classes or community woodwind ensembles and the like had proved so excruciating, she shared, that she had all but begged the therapist to withdraw her gentle suggestion that the depressed person try her best to do so. And then as for the idea of girding herself once again and venturing out there into the emotionally Hobbesian meat market of the “dating scene” and trying once again to find and establish any healthy, caring, functional connections with men, whether in a physically intimate partner-relationship or even just as close and supportive friends—at this juncture in her sharing the depressed person laughed hollowly into the headset telephone she wore at the terminal inside her cubicle at her work-place and asked whether it was really even necessary, with a friend who knew her as well as whatever member of her Support System she was presently sharing with did, to go into why the depressed person’s intractable depression and highly charged self-esteem and trust-issues rendered that idea a pie-in-the-sky flight of Icarusian fancy and denial. To take just one example, the depressed person shared from her workstation, in the second semester of her junior year at college there had been a traumatic incident in which the depressed person had been sitting alone on the grass near a group of popular, self-assured male students at an inter-collegiate lacrosse game and had distinctly overheard one of the men laughingly say, of a female student the depressed person knew slightly, that the only substantive difference between this woman and a restroom toilet was that the toilet did not keep pathetically following you around after you’d used it. Sharing with supportive friends, the depressed person was now suddenly and unexpectedly flooded with emotional memories of the early session during which she had first told the therapist of this incident: they had been doing basic feelings-work together during this awkward opening stage of the therapeutic process, and the therapist had challenged the depressed person to identify whether the overheard slur had made her (i.e., the depressed person) feel primarily more angry, lonely, frightened, or sad. ,6(a) By this stage in the grieving process following the therapist’s possible death by her own (i.e., by the therapist’s own) hand, the depressed person’s feelings of loss and abandonment had become so intense and overwhelming and had so completely overridden her vestigial defense-mechanisms that, for example, when whatever long-distance friend the depressed person had reached out to finally confessed that she (i.e., the “friend”) was dreadfully sorry but there was no helping it she absolutely had to get off the telephone and back to the demands of her own full, vibrant, undepressed life, a primal instinct for what felt like nothing more than basic emotional survival now drove the depressed person to swallow every last pulverized remnant of pride and to beg shamelessly for two or even just one more minute of the friend’s time and attention; and, if the “empathetic friend,” after expressing her hope that the depressed person would find a way to be more gentle and compassionate with herself, held firm and gracefully terminated the conversation, the depressed person now spent hardly any time at all listening dully to the dial tone or gnawing the cuticle of her index finger or grinding the heel of her hand savagely into her forehead or feeling anything much at all beyond sheer primal desperation as she hurriedly dialed the next ten-digit number on her Support System Telephone List, a list which by this point in the grieving process had been photocopied several times and placed in the depressed person’s address book, workstation terminal’s PHONE.VIP file, billfold, zippered interior security compartment of her purse, mini-locker at the Holistic Stretching and Nutrition Center, and in a special homemade pocket inside the back cover of the leatherbound Feelings Journal which the depressed person—at her late therapist’s suggestion—carried with her at all times. The depressed person shared, with each available member of her Support System in turn, some portion of the flood of emotionally sensuous memories of the session during which she had first opened up and told the late therapist of the incident in which the laughing men had compared the female college student to a toilet, and shared that she had never been able to forget the incident, and that, even though she had not had much of a personal relationship or connection to the female student whom the men had compared to a toilet or even known her very well at all, the depressed person had, at the intercollegiate lacrosse game, been filled with horror and empathic despair at the pathos of the idea of that female student being the object of such derision and laughing intergender contempt without her (i.e., the female student, to whom the depressed person again admitted she had had very little connection) ever even knowing it. It seemed to the depressed person very likely that her (i.e., the depressed person’s) whole later emotional development and ability to trust and reach out and connect had been deeply scarred by this incident; she chose to make herself open and vulnerable by sharing—albeit only with the one single most trusted and elite and special “core” member of her current Support System—that she had admitted to the therapist that she was, even today, as a putative adult, often preoccupied with the idea that laughing groups of people were often derisive and demeaning of her (i.e., of the depressed person) without her knowledge. The late therapist, the depressed person shared with her very closest long-distance confidante, had pointed to the memory of the traumatic incident in college and the depressed person’s reactive presumption of derision and ridicule as a classic example of the way an adult’s arrested vestigial emotional defense-mechanisms could become toxic and dysfunctional and could keep the adult emotionally isolated and deprived of community and nurturing, even from herself, and could (i.e., the toxic vestigial defenses could) deny the depressed adult access to her own precious inner resources and tools for both reaching out for support and for being gentle and compassionate and affirming with herself, and that thus, paradoxically, arrested defense-mechanisms helped contribute to the very pain and sadness they had originally been erected to forestall. It was while sharing this candid, vulnerable four-year-old reminiscence with the one particular “core” Support System–member whom the grieving depressed person felt she now most deeply trusted and leaned on and could really communicate over the headset telephone with that she (i.e., the depressed person) suddenly experienced what she would later describe as an emotional realization nearly as traumatic and valuable as the realization she had experienced nine months prior at the Inner-Child-Focused Experiential Therapy Retreat Weekend before she had felt simply too cathartically drained and enervated to be able to continue and had had to fly home. I.e., the depressed person told her very most trusted and supportive long-distance friend that, paradoxically, she (i.e., the depressed person) appeared to have somehow found, in the extremity of her feelings of loss and abandonment in the wake of the therapist’s overdose of natural stimulants, the resources and inner respect for her own emotional survival required for her finally to feel able to risk trying to follow the second of the late therapist’s two most challenging and difficult suggestions and to begin openly asking certain demonstrably honest and supportive others to tell her straight out whether they ever secretly felt contempt, derision, judgment, or repulsion for her. And the depressed person shared that she now, finally, after four years of whiny and truculent resistance, proposed at last really to begin actually asking trusted others this seminally honest and possibly shattering question, and that because she was all too aware of her own essential weakness and defensive capacities for denial and avoidance, she (i.e., the depressed person) was choosing to commence this unprecedentedly vulnerable interrogative process now, i.e., with the elite, incomparably honest and compassionate “core” Support System–member with whom she was sharing via her workstation’s headset right this moment. The depressed person here paused momentarily to insert the additional fact that she had firmly resolved to herself to ask this potentially deeply traumatizing question without the usual pathetic and irritating defense-mechanisms of preamble or apology or interpolated self-criticism. She wished to hear, with no holds barred, the depressed person averred, the one very most valuable and intimate friend in her current Support System’s brutally honest opinion of her as a person, the potentially negative and judging and hurtful parts as well as the positive and affirming and supportive and nurturing parts. The depressed person stressed that she was serious about this: whether it sounded melodramatic or not, the brutally honest assessment of her by an objective but deeply caring other felt to her, at this point in time, like an almost literal matter of life and death. For she was frightened, the depressed person confessed to the trusted and convalescing friend, profoundly, unprecedentedly frightened by what she was beginning to feel she was seeing and learning and getting in touch with about herself in the grieving process following the sudden death of a therapist who for nearly four years had been the depressed person’s closest and most trusted confidante and source of support and affirmation and—with no offense in any way intended to any members of her Support System—her very best friend in the world. Because what she had discovered, the depressed person confided long-distance, when she took her important daily Quiet Time now, during the grieving process, and got quiet and centered and looked deep within, was that she could neither feel nor identify any real feelings within herself for the therapist, i.e. for the therapist as a person, a person who had died, a person who only somebody in truly stupefying denial could fail to see had probably taken her own life, and thus a person who, the depressed person posited, had possibly herself suffered levels of emotional agony and isolation and despair which were comparable to or perhaps—though it was only on a “head” or purely abstract intellectual level that she seemed to be able even to entertain this possibility, the depressed person confessed over the headset telephone—even exceeded the depressed person’s own. The depressed person shared that the most frightening implication of this (i.e., of the fact that, even when she centered and looked deep within herself, she felt she could locate no real feelings for the therapist as an autonomously valid human being) appeared to be that all her agonized pain and despair since the therapist’s suicide had in fact been all and only for herself, i.e. for her loss, her abandonment, her grief, her trauma and pain and primal affective survival. And, the depressed person shared that she was taking the additional risk of revealing, even more frightening, that this shatteringly terrifying set of realizations, instead now of awakening in her any feelings of compassion, empathy, and other-directed grief for the therapist as a person, had—and here the depressed person waited patiently for an episode of retching in the especially available trusted friend to pass so that she could take the risk of sharing this with her—that these shatteringly frightening realizations had seemed, terrifyingly, merely to have brought up and created still more and further feelings in the depressed person about herself. At this point in the sharing, the depressed person took a time-out to solemnly swear to her long-distance, gravely ill, frequently retching but still caring and intimate friend that there was no toxic or pathetically manipulative self-excoriation here in what she (i.e., the depressed person) was reaching out and opening up and confessing, only profound and unprecedented fear: the depressed person was frightened for herself, for as it were “[her]self ”—i.e. for her own so-called “character” or “spirit” or as it were “soul” i.e. for her own capacity for basic human empathy and compassion and caring—she told the supportive friend with the neuroblastoma. She was asking sincerely, the depressed person said, honestly, desperately: what kind of person could seem to feel nothing—“nothing,” she emphasized—for anyone but herself? Maybe not ever? The depressed person wept into the headset telephone and said that right here and now she was shamelessly begging her currently very best friend and confidante in the world to share her (i.e., the friend with the virulent malignancy in her adrenal medulla’s) brutally candid assessment, to pull no punches, to say nothing reassuring or exculpatory or supportive which she did not honestly believe to be true. She trusted her, she assured her. For she had decided, she said, that her very life itself, however fraught with agony and despair and indescribable loneliness, depended, at this point in her journey toward true healing, on inviting—even if necessary laying aside all possible pride and defense and begging for, she interpolated—the judgment of certain trusted and very carefully selected members of her supportive community. So, the depressed person said, her voice breaking, she was begging her now single most trusted friend to share her very most private judgment of the depressed person’s “character”’s or “spirit”’s capacity for human caring. She needed her feedback, the depressed person wept, even if that feedback was partly negative or hurtful or traumatic or had the potential to push her right over the emotional edge once and for all—even, she pleaded, if that feedback lay on nothing more than the coldly intellectual or “head” level of objective verbal description; she would settle even for that, she promised, hunched and trembling in a near-fetal position atop her workstation cubicle’s ergonomic chair—and therefore now urged her terminally ill friend to go on, to not hold back, to let her have it: what words and terms might be applied to describe and assess such a solipsistic, self-consumed, endless emotional vacuum and sponge as she now appeared to herself to be? How was she to decide and describe—even to herself, looking inward and facing herself—what all she’d so painfully learned said about her?

_______

1. The multiform shapes the therapist’s mated fingers assumed nearly always resembled, for the depressed person, various forms of geometrically diverse cages, an association which the depressed person had not shared with the therapist because its symbolic significance seemed too overt and simple-minded to waste their time together on. The therapist’s fingernails were long and shapely and well maintained, whereas the depressed person’s fingernails were compulsively bitten so short and ragged that the quick sometimes protruded and began spontaneously to bleed.

2. (i.e., one of which purulent wounds)

3. The depressed person’s therapist was always extremely careful to avoid appearing to judge or blame the depressed person for clinging to her defenses, or to suggest that the depressed person had in any way consciously chosen or chosen to cling to a chronic depression whose agony made her (i.e., the depressed person’s) every waking hour feel like more than any person could possibly endure. This renunciation of judgment or imposed value was held by the therapeutic school in which the therapist’s philosophy of healing had evolved over almost fifteen years of clinical experience to be integral to the combination of unconditional support and complete honesty about feelings which composed the nurturing professionalism required for a productive therapeutic journey toward authenticity and intrapersonal wholeness. Defenses against intimacy, the depressed person’s therapist’s experiential theory held, were nearly always arrested or vestigial survival-mechanisms; i.e., they had, at one time, been environmentally appropriate and necessary and had very probably served to shield a defenseless childhood psyche against potentially unbearable trauma, but in nearly all cases they (i.e., the defense-mechanisms) had become inappropriately imprinted and arrested and were now, in adulthood, no longer environmentally appropriate and in fact now, paradoxically, actually caused a great deal more trauma and pain than they prevented. Nevertheless, the therapist had made it clear from the outset that she was in no way going to pressure, hector, cajole, argue, persuade, flummox, trick, harangue, shame, or manipulate the depressed person into letting go of her arrested or vestigial defenses before she (i.e., the depressed person) felt ready and able to risk taking the leap of faith in her own internal resources and self-esteem and personal growth and healing to do so (i.e., to leave the nest of her defenses and freely and joyfully fly).

4. The therapist—who was substantially older than the depressed person but still younger than the depressed person’s mother, and who, other than in the condition of her fingernails, resembled that mother in almost no physical or stylistic respects—sometimes annoyed the depressed person with her habit of making a digiform cage in her lap and changing the shapes of the cage and gazing down at the geometrically diverse cages during their work together. Over time, however, as the therapeutic relationship deepened in terms of intimacy and sharing and trust, the sight of the digiform cages irked the depressed person less and less, eventually becoming little more than a distraction. Far more problematic in terms of the depressed person’s trust and self-esteem-issues was the therapist’s habit of from time to time glancing up very quickly at the large sunburst-design clock on the wall behind the suede easy chair in which the depressed person customarily sat during their time together, glancing (i.e., the therapist glancing) very quickly and almost furtively at the clock, such that what came to bother the depressed person more and more over time was not that the therapist was looking at the clock but that the therapist was apparently trying to hide or disguise the fact that she was looking at the clock. The depressed person—who was agonizingly sensitive, she admitted, to the possibility that anyone she was trying to reach out and share with was secretly bored or repelled or desperate to get away from her as quickly as possible, and was commensurately hypervigilant about any slight movements or gestures which might imply that a listener was conscious of the time or eager for time to pass, and never once failed to notice when the therapist glanced ever so quickly either up at the clock or down at the slender, elegant wristwatch whose timepiece rested hidden from the depressed person’s view against the underside of the therapist’s slim wrist—had finally, late in the first year of the therapeutic relationship, broken into sobs and shared that it made her feel totally demeaned and invalidated whenever the therapist appeared to try to hide the fact that she wished to know the exact time. Much of the depressed person’s work with the therapist in the first year of her (i.e., the depressed person’s) journey toward healing and intrapersonal wholeness had concerned her feelings of being uniquely and repulsively boring or convoluted or pathetically self-involved, and of not being able to trust that there was genuine interest and compassion and caring on the part of a person to whom she was reaching out for support; and in fact the therapeutic relationship’s first significant breakthrough, the depressed person told members of her Support System in the agonizing period following the therapist’s death, had come when the depressed person, late in the therapeutic relationship’s second year, had gotten sufficiently in touch with her own inner worth and resources to be able to share assertively with the therapist that she (i.e., the respectful but assertive depressed person) would prefer it if the therapist would simply look openly up at the helioform clock or openly turn her wrist over to look at the underside’s wristwatch instead of apparently believing—or at least engaging in behavior which made it appear, from the depressed person’s admittedly hypersensitive perspective, as if the therapist believed—that the depressed person could be fooled by her dishonestly sneaking an observation of the time into some gesture that tried to look like a meaningless glance at the wall or an absent manipulation of the cagelike digiform shape in her lap. Another important piece of therapeutic work the depressed person and her therapist had accomplished together—a piece of work which the therapist had said she personally felt constituted a seminal leap of growth and deepening of the trust and level of honest sharing between them—occurred in the therapeutic relationship’s third year, when the depressed person had finally confessed that she also felt it was demeaning to be spoken to as the therapist sometimes spoke to her, i.e., that the depressed person felt patronized, condescended to, and/or treated like a child at those times during their work together when the therapist would start tiresomely lallating over and over and over again what her therapeutic philosophies and goals and wishes for the depressed person were; plus not to mention, while they were on the whole subject, that she (i.e., the depressed person) also sometimes felt demeaned and resentful whenever the therapist would look up from her lap’s hands’ cage at the depressed person and her (i.e., the therapist’s) face would once again assume its customary expression of calm and boundless patience, an expression which the depressed person admitted she knew (i.e., the depressed person knew) was intended to communicate unjudging attention and interest and support but which nevertheless sometimes from the depressed person’s perspective looked to her more like emotional detachment, like clinical distance, like mere professional interest the depressed person was purchasing instead of the intensely personal interest and empathy and compassion she often felt she had spent her whole life starved for. It made her angry, the depressed person confessed; she often felt angry and resentful at being nothing but the object of the therapist’s professional compassion or of the putative “friends” in her pathetic “Support System”’s charity and abstract guilt.
Though the depressed person had, she later acknowledged to her Support System, been anxiously watching the therapist’s face for evidence of a negative reaction as she (i.e., the depressed person) opened up and vomited out all these potentially repulsive feelings about the therapeutic relationship, she nevertheless was by this point in the session benefiting enough from a kind of momentum of emotional honesty to be able to open up even further and tearfully share with the therapist that it also felt demeaning and even somehow abusive to know that, for example, today (i.e., the day of the depressed person and her therapist’s seminally honest and important piece of relationship-work together), at the moment the depressed person’s time with the therapist was up and they had risen from their respective recliners and hugged stiffly goodbye until their next appointment together, that at that very moment all of the therapist’s seemingly intensely personally focused attention and support and interest in the depressed person would be withdrawn and then effortlessly transferred onto the next pathetic contemptible whiny self-involved snaggletoothed pig-nosed fat-thighed shiteater who was waiting out there right outside reading a used magazine and waiting to lurch in and cling pathetically to the hem of the therapist’s pelisse for an hour, so desperate for a personally interested friend that they would pay almost as much per month for the pathetic temporary illusion of a friend as they paid in fucking rent. The depressed person knew all too perfectly well, she conceded—holding up a pica-gnawed hand to prevent the therapist from interrupting—that the therapist’s professional detachment was in fact not at all incompatible with true caring, and that the therapist’s careful maintenance of a professional, rather than a personal, level of caring and support and commitment meant that this support and caring could be counted on to always Be There for the depressed person and not fall prey to the normal vicissitudes of less professional and more personal interpersonal relationships’ inevitable conflicts and misunderstandings or natural fluctuations in the therapist’s own personal mood and emotional availability and capacity for empathy on any particular day; not to mention that her (i.e., the therapist’s) professional detachment meant that at least within the confines of the therapist’s chilly but attractive home office and of their appointed three hours together each week the depressed person could be totally honest and open about her own feelings without ever having to be afraid that the therapist would take those feelings personally and become angry or cold or judgmental or derisive or rejecting or would ever shame or deride or abandon the depressed person; in fact that, ironically, in many ways, as the depressed person said she was all too aware, the therapist was actually the depressed person’s—or at any rate the isolated, agonized, needy, pathetic, selfish, spoiled, wounded-Inner-Child part of the depressed person’s—absolutely ideal personal friend: i.e. here, after all, was a person (viz., the therapist) who would always Be There to listen and really care and empathize and be emotionally available and giving and to nurture and support the depressed person and yet would demand absolutely nothing back from the depressed person in terms of empathy or emotional support or in terms of the depressed person ever really caring about or even considering the therapist’s own valid feelings and needs as a human being. The depressed person also knew perfectly well, she had acknowledged, that it was in fact the $90 an hour which made the therapeutic relationship’s simulacrum of friendship so ideally one-sided: i.e. the only expectation or demand the therapist placed on the depressed person was for the contracted hourly $90; after that one demand was satisfied, everything in the relationship got to be for and about the depressed person. On a rational, intellectual, “head” level, the depressed person was completely aware of all these realities and compensations, she told the therapist, and so of course felt that she (i.e., the depressed person) had no rational reason or excuse for feeling the vain, needy, childish feelings she had just taken the unprecedented emotional risk of sharing that she felt; and yet the depressed person confessed to the therapist that she nevertheless still felt, on a more basic, emotionally intuitive or “gut” level, that it truly was demeaning and insulting and pathetic that her chronic emotional pain and isolation and inability to reach out forced her to spend $1,080 a month to purchase what was in many respects a kind of fantasy-friend who could fulfill her childishly narcissistic fantasies of getting her own emotional needs met by another without having to reciprocally meet or empathize with or even consider the other’s own emotional needs, an other-directed empathy and consideration which the depressed person tearfully confessed she sometimes despaired of ever having it in her to give. The depressed person here inserted that she often worried, despite the numerous traumas she had suffered at the hands of attempted relationships with men, that it was in fact her own inability to get outside her own toxic neediness and to Be There for another and truly emotionally give which had made those attempts at intimate, mutually nurturing partner-relationships with men such an agonizingly demeaning across-the-board failure. The depressed person had further inserted in her seminal sharing with the therapist, she later told the select elite “core” members of her Support System after the therapist’s death, that her (i.e., the depressed person’s) resentments about the $1,080/month cost of the therapeutic relationship were in truth less about the actual expense—which she freely admitted she could afford—than about the demeaning idea of paying for artificially one-sided friendship and narcissistic-fantasy-fulfillment, then had laughed hollowly (i.e., the depressed person had laughed hollowly during the original insertion in her sharing with the therapist) to indicate that she heard and acknowledged the unwitting echo of her cold, niggardly, emotionally unavailable parents in the stipulation that what was objectionable was not the actual expense but the idea or “principle” of the expense. What it really felt like, the depressed person later admitted to supportive friends that she had confessed to the compassionate therapist, was as if the $90 hourly therapeutic fee were almost a kind of ransom or “protection money,” purchasing the depressed person an exemption from the scalding internal shame and mortification of telephoning distant former friends she hadn’t even laid fucking eyes on in years and had no legitimate claim on the friendship of anymore and telephoning them uninvited at night and intruding on their functional and blissfully ignorantly joyful if perhaps somewhat shallow lives and leaning shamelessly on them and constantly reaching out and trying to articulate the essence of the depression’s terrible and unceasing pain even when it was this very pain and despair and loneliness that rendered her, she knew, far too emotionally starved and needy and self-involved to be able ever to truly Be There in return for her long-distance friends to reach out to and share with and lean on in return, i.e. that hers (i.e., the depressed person’s) was a contemptibly greedy and narcissistic omnineediness that only a complete idiot would not fully expect the members of her so-called “Support System” to detect all too easily in her, and to be totally repelled by, and to stay on the telephone with only out of the barest and most abstract human charity, all the while rolling their eyes and making faces and looking at the clock and wishing that the telephone call were over or that she (i.e., the pathetically needy depressed person on the phone) would call anyone else but her (i.e., the bored, repelled, eye-rolling putative “friend”) or that she’d never historically been assigned to room with the depressed person or had never even gone to that particular boarding school or even that the depressed person had never been born and didn’t even exist, such that the whole thing felt totally, unendurably pathetic and demeaning “if the truth be told,” if the therapist really wanted the “totally honest and uncensored sharing” she always kept “alleging [she] want[ed],” the depressed person later confessed to her Support System she had hissed derisively at the therapist, her face (i.e., the depressed person’s face during the seminal but increasingly ugly and humiliating third-year therapy session) working in what she imagined must have been a grotesque admixture of rage and self-pity and complete humiliation. It had been the imaginative visualization of what her own enraged face must have looked like which had caused the depressed person to begin at this late juncture in the session to weep, pule, snuffle, and sob in real earnest, she shared later with trusted friends. For no, if the therapist really wanted the truth, the actual “gut”-level truth underneath all her childishly defensive anger and shame, the depressed person had shared from a hunched and near-fetal position beneath the sunburst clock, sobbing but making a conscious choice not to bother wiping her eyes or even her nose, the depressed person really felt that what was really unfair was that she felt able—even here in therapy with the trusted and compassionate therapist—that she felt able to share only painful circumstances and historical insights about her depression and its etiology and texture and numerous symptoms instead of feeling truly able to communicate and articulate and express the depression’s terrible unceasing agony itself, an agony that was the overriding and unendurable reality of her every black minute on earth—i.e., not being able to share the way it truly felt, what the depression made her feel like inside on a daily basis, she had wailed hysterically, striking repeatedly at her recliner’s suede armrests—or to reach out and communicate and express it to someone who could not only listen and understand and care but could or would actually feel it with her (i.e., feel what the depressed person felt). The depressed person confessed to the therapist that what she felt truly starved for and really truly fantasized about was having the ability to somehow really truly literally “share” it (i.e., the chronic depression’s ceaseless torment). She said that the depression felt as if it was so central and inescapable to her identity and who she was as a person that not being able to share the depression’s inner feeling or even really describe what it felt like felt to her for example like feeling a desperate, life-or-death need to describe the sun in the sky and yet being able or permitted only to point to shadows on the ground. She was so very tired of pointing at shadows, she had sobbed. She (i.e., the depressed person) had then immediately broken off and laughed hollowly at herself and apologized to the therapist for employing such a floridly melodramatic and self-pitying analogy. The depressed person shared all this later with her Support System, in great detail and sometimes more than once a night, as part of her grieving process following the therapist’s death from homeopathic caffeinism, including her (i.e., the depressed person’s) reminiscence that the therapist’s display of compassionate and unjudging attention to everything the depressed person had finally opened up and vented and hissed and spewed and whined and puled about during the traumatically seminal breakthrough session had been so formidable and uncompromising that she (i.e., the therapist) had blinked far less often than any nonprofessional listener the depressed person had ever shared with face-to-face had ever blinked. The two currently most trusted and supportive “core” members of the depressed person’s Support System had responded, almost verbatim, that it sounded as though the depressed person’s therapist had been very special, and that the depressed person clearly missed her very much; and the one particularly valuable and empathetic and elite, physically ill “core” friend whom the depressed person leaned on more heavily than on any other support during the grieving process suggested that the single most loving and appropriate way to honor both the therapist’s memory and the depressed person’s own grief over her loss might be for the depressed person to try to become as special and caring and unflaggingly nurturing a friend to herself as the late therapist had been.

6. The depressed person, trying desperately to open up and allow her Support System to help her honor and process her feelings about the therapist’s death, took the risk of sharing her realization that she herself had rarely if ever used the word “sad” in the therapeutic process’s dialogues. She had usually used the words “despair” and “agony,” and the therapist had, for the most part, acquiesced to this admittedly melodramatic choice of words, though the depressed person had long suspected that the therapist probably felt that her (i.e., the depressed person’s) choice of “agony,” “despair,” “torment,” and the like was at once melodramatic—hence needy and manipulative—on the one hand, and minimizing—hence shame-based and toxic—on the other. The depressed person also shared with long-distance friends during the shattering grieving process the painful realization that she had never once actually come right out and asked the therapist what she (i.e., the therapist) was thinking or feeling at any given moment during their time together, nor had asked, even once, what she (i.e., the therapist) actually thought of her (i.e., of the depressed person) as a human being, i.e. whether the therapist personally liked her, didn’t like her, thought she was a basically decent v. repellent person, etc. These were merely two examples.

6(a) As a natural part of the grieving process, sensuous details and emotional memories flooded the depressed person’s agonized psyche at random moments and in ways impossible to predict, pressing in on her and clamoring for expression and processing. The therapist’s buckskin pelisse, for example, though the therapist had seemed almost fetishistically attached to the Native American garment and had worn it, seemingly, on a near-daily basis, was always immaculately clean and always presented an immaculately raw and moist-looking flesh-tone backdrop to the varioform cagelike shapes the therapist’s unconscious hands composed—and the depressed person shared with members of her Support System, after the therapist’s death, that it had never been clear to her how or by what process the pelisse’s buckskin was able to stay so clean. The depressed person confessed to sometimes imagining narcissistically that the therapist wore the immaculate flesh-colored garment only for their particular appointments together. The therapist’s chilly home office also contained, on the wall opposite the bronze clock and behind the therapist’s recliner, a stunning molybdenum desk-and-personal-computer-hutch ensemble, one shelf of which was lined, on either side of the deluxe Braun coffeemaker, with small framed photographs of the late therapist’s husband and sisters and son; and the depressed person often broke into fresh sobs of loss and despair and self-excoriation on her cubicle’s headset telephone as she confessed to her Support System that she had never once even asked the therapist’s loved ones’ names.

7. The singularly valuable and supportive long-distance friend to whom the depressed person had decided she was least mortified about posing a question this fraught with openness and vulnerability and emotional risk was an alumna of one of the depressed person’s very first childhood boarding schools, a surpassingly generous and nurturing divorced mother of two in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, who had recently undergone her second course of chemotherapy for a virulent neuroblastoma which had greatly reduced the number of responsibilities and activities in her full, functional, vibrantly other-directed adult life, and who thus was now not only almost always at home but also enjoyed nearly unlimited conflict-free availability and time to share on the telephone, for which the depressed person was always careful to enter a daily prayer of gratitude in her Feelings Journal.

8. (i.e., carefully arranging her morning schedule to permit the twenty minutes the therapist had long suggested for quiet centering and getting in touch with feelings and owning them and journaling about them, looking inside herself with a compassionate, unjudging, almost clinical detachment)






3.GOOD OLD NEON

My whole life I’ve been a fraud. I’m not exaggerating. Pretty much all I’ve ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other people. Mostly to be liked or admired. It’s a little more complicated than that, maybe. But when you come right down to it it’s to be liked, loved. Admired, approved of, applauded, whatever. You get the idea. I did well in school, but deep down the whole thing’s motive wasn’t to learn or improve myself but just to do well, to get good grades and make sports teams and perform well. To have a good transcript or varsity letters to show people. I didn’t enjoy it much because I was al- ways scared I wouldn’t do well enough. The fear made me work really hard, so I’d always do well and end up getting what I wanted. But then, once I got the best grade or made All City or got Angela Mead to let me put my hand on her breast, I wouldn’t feel much of anything except maybe fear that I wouldn’t be able to get it again. The next time or next thing I wanted. I remember being down in the rec room in Angela Mead’s basement on the couch and having her let me get my hand up under her blouse and not even really feeling the soft aliveness or whatever of her breast because all I was doing was thinking, ‘Now I’m the guy that Mead let get to second with her.’ Later that seemed so sad. This was in middle school. She was a very big-hearted, quiet, self-contained, thoughtful girl — she’s a veterinarian now, with her own practice -- and I never even really saw her, I couldn’t see anything except who I might be in her eyes, this cheerleader and probably number two or three among the most desirable girls in middle school that year. She was much more than that, she was beyond all that adolescent ranking and popularity crap, but I never really let her be or saw her as more, although I put up a very good front as somebody who could have deep conversations and really wanted to know and understand who she was inside.

Later I was in analysis, I tried analysis like almost everybody else then in their late twenties who’d made some money or had a family or whatever they thought they wanted and still didn’t feel that they were happy. A lot of people I knew tried it. It didn’t really work, although it did make everyone sound more aware of their own problems and added some useful vocabulary and concepts to the way we all had to talk to each other to fit in and sound a certain way. You know what I mean. I was in regional advertising at the time in Chicago, having made the jump from media buyer for a large consulting firm, and at only twenty-nine I’d made creative associate, and verily as they say I was a fair-haired boy and on the fast track but wasn’t happy at all, whatever happy means, but of course I didn’t say this to anybody because it was such a cliché — ‘Tears of a Clown,’ ‘Richard Cory,’ etc. — and the circle of people who seemed important to me seemed much more dry, oblique and contemptuous of clichés than that, and so of course I spent all my time trying to get them to think I was dry and jaded as well, doing things like yawning and looking at my nails and saying things like, ‘Am I happy? is one of those questions that, if it has got to be asked, more or less dictates its own answer,’ etc. Putting in all this time and energy to create a certain impression and get approval or acceptance that then I felt nothing about because it didn’t have anything to do with who I really was inside, and I was disgusted with myself for always being such a fraud, but I couldn’t seem to help it. Here are some of the various things I tried: EST, riding a ten-speed to Nova Scotia and back, hypnosis, cocaine, sacro-cervical chiropractic, joining a charismatic church, jogging, pro bono work for the Ad Council, meditation classes, the Masons, analysis, the Landmark Forum, the Course in Miracles, a right-brain drawing workshop, celibacy, collecting and restoring vintage Corvettes, and trying to sleep with a different girl every night for two straight months (I racked up a total of thirty-six for sixty-one and also got chlamydia, which I told friends about, acting like I was embarrassed but secretly expecting most of them to be impressed — which, under the cover of making a lot of jokes at my expense, I think they were — but for the most part the two months just made me feel shallow and predatory, plus I missed a great deal of sleep and was a wreck at work — that was also the period I tried cocaine). I know this part is boring and probably boring you, by the way, but it gets a lot more interesting when I get to the part where I kill myself and discover what happens immediately after a person dies. In terms of the list, psychoanalysis was pretty much the last thing I tried.

The analyst I saw was OK, a big soft older guy with a big ginger mustache and a pleasant, sort of informal manner. I’m not sure I remember him alive too well. He was a fairly good listener, and seemed interested and sympathetic in a slightly distant way. At first I suspected he didn’t like me or was uneasy around me. I don’t think he was used to patients who were already aware of what their real problem was. He was also a bit of a pill-pusher. I balked at trying antidepressants, I just couldn’t see myself taking pills to try to be less of a fraud. I said that even if they worked, how would I know if it was me or the pills? By that time I already knew I was a fraud. I knew what my problem was. I just couldn’t seem to stop. I remember I spent maybe the first twenty times or so in analysis acting all open and candid but in reality sort of fencing with him or leading him around by the nose, basically showing him that I wasn’t just another one of those patients who stumbled in with no clue what their real problem was or who were totally out of touch with the truth about themselves. When you come right down to it, I was trying to show him that I was at least as smart as he was and that there wasn’t much of anything he was going to see about me that I hadn’t already seen and figured out. And yet I wanted help and really was there to try to get help. I didn’t even tell him how unhappy I was until five or six months into the analysis, mostly because I didn’t want to seem like just another whining, self-absorbed yuppie, even though I think even then I was on some level conscious that that’s all I really was, deep down.

Right from the start, what I liked best about the analyst was that his office was a mess. There were books and papers everyplace, and usually he had to clear things off the chair so I could sit down. There was no couch, I sat in an easy chair and he sat facing me in his beat-up old desk chair whose back part had one of those big rectangles or capes of back-massage beads attached to it the same way cabbies often put them on their seat in the cab. This was another thing I liked, the desk chair and the fact that it was a little too small for him (he was not a small guy) so that he had to sit sort of almost hunched with his feet flat on the floor, or else sometimes he’d put his hands behind his head and lean way back in the chair in a way that made the back portion squeak terribly when it leaned back. There always seems to be something patronizing or a little condescending about somebody crossing their legs when they talk to you, and the desk chair didn’t allow him to do this — if he ever crossed his legs his knee would have been up around his chin. And yet he had apparently never gone out and gotten himself a bigger or nicer desk chair, or even bothered to oil the medial joint’s springs to keep the back from squeaking, a noise that I know would have driven me up the wall if it had been my chair and I had to spend all day in it. I noticed all this almost right away. The little office also reeked of pipe tobacco, which is a pleasant smell, plus Dr. Gustafson never took notes or answered everything with a question or any of the cliché analyst things that would have made the whole thing too horrible to keep going back whether it even helped or not. The whole effect was of a sort of likable, disorganized, laid-back guy, and things in there actually did get better after I realized that he probably wasn’t going to do anything to make me quit fencing with him and trying to anticipate all his questions so I could show that I already knew the answer — he was going to get his $65 either way — and finally came out and told him about being a fraud and feeling alienated (I had to use the uptown word of course, but it was still the truth) and starting to see myself ending up living this way for the rest of my life and being completely unhappy. I told him I wasn’t blaming anybody for my being a fraud. I had been adopted, but it was as a baby, and the stepparents who adopted me were better and nicer than most of the biological parents I knew anything about, and I was never yelled at or abused or pressured to hit .400 in Legion ball or anything, and they took out a second mortgage to send me to an elite college when I could have gone scholarship to U.W.–Eau Claire, etc. Nobody’d ever done anything bad to me, every problem I ever had I’d been the cause of. I was a fraud, and the fact that I was lonely was my own fault (of course his ears pricked up at fault, which is a loaded term) because I seemed to be so totally self-centered and fraudulent that I experienced everything in terms of how it affected people’s view of me and what I needed to do to create the impression of me I wanted them to have. I said I knew what my problem was, what I couldn’t do was stop it. I also admitted to Dr. Gustafson some of the ways I’d been jerking him around early on and trying to make sure he saw me as smart and self-aware, and said I’d known early on that playing around and showing off in analysis were a waste of time and money but that I couldn’t seem to help myself, it just happened automatically. He smiled at all this, which was the first time I remember seeing him smile. I don’t mean he was sour or humorless, he had a big red friendly face and a pleasant enough manner, but this was the first time he’d smiled like a human being having an actual conversation. And yet at the same time I already saw what I’d left myself open for — and sure enough he says it. ‘If I under- stand you right,’ he says, ‘you’re saying that you’re basically a calculating, manipulative person who always says what you think will get somebody to approve of you or form some impression of you you think you want.’ I told him that was maybe a little simplistic but basically accurate, and he said further that as he understood it I was saying that I felt as if I was trapped in this false way of being and unable ever to be totally open and tell the truth irregardless of whether it’d make me look good in others’ eyes or not. And I somewhat resignedly said yes, and that I seemed always to have had this fraudulent, calculating part of my brain firing away all the time, as if I were constantly playing chess with everybody and figuring out that if I wanted them to move a certain way I had to move in such a way as to induce them to move that way. He asked if I ever played chess, and I told him I used to in middle school but quit because I couldn’t be as good as I eventually wanted to be, how frustrating it was to get just good enough to know what getting really good at it would be like but not being able to get that good, etc. I was laying it on sort of thick in hopes of distracting him from the big insight and question I realized I’d set myself up for. But it didn’t work. He leaned back in his loud chair and paused as if he were thinking hard, for effect — he was thinking that he was going to get to feel like he’d really earned his $65 today. Part of the pause always involved stroking his mustache in an unconscious way. I was reasonably sure that he was going to say something like, ‘So then how were you able to do what you just did a moment ago?,’ in other words meaning how was I able to be honest about the fraudulence if I was really a fraud, meaning he thought he’d caught me in some kind of logical contradiction or paradox. And I went ahead and played a little dumb, probably, to get him to go ahead and say it, partly because I still held out some hope that what he’d say might be more discerning or incisive than I had predicted. But it was also partly because I liked him, and liked the way he seemed genuinely pleased and excited at the idea of being helpful but was trying to exercise professional control over his facial expression in order to make the excitement look more like simple pleasantness and clinical interest in my case or whatever. He was hard not to like, he had what is known as an engaging manner. By way of decor, the office wall behind his chair had two framed prints, one being that Wyeth one of the little girl in the wheat field crawling up- hill toward the farmhouse, the other a still life of two apples in a bowl on a table by Cézanne. (To be honest, I only knew it was Cézanne because it was an Art Institute poster and had a banner with info on a Cézanne show underneath the painting, which was a still life, and which was weirdly discomfiting because there was something slightly off about the perspective or style that made the table look crooked and the apples look almost square.) The prints were obviously there to give the analyst’s patients something to look at, since many people like to look around or look at things on the wall while they talk. I didn’t have any trouble looking right at him most of the time I was in there, though. He did have a talent for putting you at ease, there was no question about it. But I had no illusions that this was the same as having enough insight or firepower to find some way to really help me, though.

There was a basic logical paradox that I called the ‘fraudulence paradox’ that I had discovered more or less on my own while taking a mathematical logic course in school. I remember this as being a huge undergrad lecture course that met twice a week in an auditorium with the professor up on stage and on Fridays in smaller discussion sections led by a graduate assistant whose whole life seemed to be mathemati- cal logic. (Plus all you had to do to ace the class was sit down with the assigned textbook that the prof was the editor of and memorize the different modes of argument and normal forms and axioms of first- order quantification, meaning the course was as clean and mechanical as logic itself in that if you put in the time and effort, out popped the good grade at the other end. We only got to paradoxes like the Berry and Russell Paradoxes and the incompleteness theorem at the very end of the term, they weren’t on the final.) The fraudulence paradox was that the more time and effort you put into trying to appear impressive or attractive to other people, the less impressive or attractive you felt inside — you were a fraud. And the more of a fraud you felt like, the harder you tried to convey an impressive or likable image of yourself so that other people wouldn’t find out what a hollow, fraudulent person you really were. Logically, you would think that the moment a sup- posedly intelligent nineteen-year-old became aware of this paradox, he’d stop being a fraud and just settle for being himself (whatever that was) because he’d figured out that being a fraud was a vicious infinite regress that ultimately resulted in being frightened, lonely, alienated, etc. But here was the other, higher-order paradox, which didn’t even have a form or name — I didn’t, I couldn’t. Discovering the first paradox at age nineteen just brought home to me in spades what an empty, fraudulent person I’d basically been ever since at least the time I was four and lied to my stepdad because I’d realized somehow right in the middle of his asking me if I’d broken the bowl that if I said I did it but ‘confessed’ it in a sort of clumsy, implausible way, then he wouldn’t believe me and would instead believe that my sister Fern, who’s my step-parents’ biological daughter, was the one who’d actually broken the antique Moser glass bowl that my stepmom had inherited from her biological grandmother and totally loved, plus it would lead or induce him to see me as a kind, good stepbrother who was so anxious to keep Fern (whom I really did like) from getting in trouble that I’d be willing to lie and take the punishment for it for her. I’m not explaining this very well. I was only four, for one thing, and the realization didn’t hit me in words the way I just now put it, but rather more in terms of feelings and associations and certain mental flashes of my stepparents’ faces with various expressions on them. But it happened that fast, at only four, that I figured out how to create a certain impression by knowing what effect I’d produce in my stepdad by implausibly ‘confessing’ that I’d punched Fern in the arm and stolen her Hula Hoop and had run all the way downstairs with it and started Hula-Hooping in the dining room right by the sideboard with all my stepmom’s antique glassware and figurines on it, while Fern, forgetting all about her arm and hoop because of her concern over the bowl and other glassware, came running downstairs shouting after me, reminding me about how important the rule was that we weren’t supposed to play in the dining room. . . . Meaning that by lying in such a deliberately unconvincing way I could actually get everything that a direct lie would supposedly get me, plus look noble and self-sacrificing, plus also make my stepparents feel good because they always tended to feel good when one of their kids did something that showed character, because it’s the sort of thing they couldn’t really help but see as reflecting favorably on them as shapers of their kids’ character. I’m putting all this in such a long, rushing, clumsy way to try to convey the way I remember it suddenly hit me, looking up at my stepfather’s big kindly face as he held two of the larger pieces of the Moser bowl and tried to look angrier than he really felt. (He had always thought the more expensive pieces ought to be kept secure in storage somewhere, whereas my step-mom’s view was more like what was the point of having nice things if you didn’t have them out where people could enjoy them.) How to appear a certain way and get him to think a certain thing hit me just that fast. Keep in mind I was only around four. And I can’t pretend it felt bad, realizing it — the truth is it felt great. I felt powerful, smart. It felt a little like looking at part of a puzzle you’re doing and you’ve got a piece in your hand and you can’t see where in the larger puzzle it’s sup- posed to go or how to make it fit, looking at all the holes, and then all of a sudden in a flash you see, for no reason right then you could point to or explain to anyone, that if you turn the piece this one certain way it will fit, and it does, and maybe the best way to put it is that in that one tiny instant you feel suddenly connected to something larger and much more of the complete picture the same way the piece is. The only part I’d neglected to anticipate was Fern’s reaction to getting blamed for the bowl, and punished, and then punished even worse when she continued to deny that she’d been the one playing around in the dining room, and my stepparents’ position was that they were even more upset and disappointed about her lying than they were about the bowl, which they said was just a material object and not ultimately im- portant in the larger scheme of things. (My stepparents spoke this way, they were people of high ideals and values, humanists. Their big ideal was total honesty in all the family’s relationships, and lying was the worst, most disappointing infraction you could commit, in their view as parents. They tended to discipline Fern a little more firmly than they did me, by the way, but this too was an extension of their values. They were concerned about being fair and having me be able to feel that I was just as much their real child as Fern was, so that I’d feel maximally secure and loved, and sometimes this concern with fairness caused them to bend a little too far over backward when it came to discipline.) So that Fern, then, got regarded as being a liar when she was not, and that must have hurt her way more than the actual punishment did. She was only five at the time. It’s horrible to be regarded as a fraud or to believe that people think you’re a fraud or liar. It’s possibly one of the worst feelings in the world. And even though I haven’t really had any direct experience with it, I’m sure it must be doubly horrible when you were actually telling the truth and they didn’t believe you. I don’t think Fern ever quite got over that episode, although the two of us never talked about it afterward except for one sort of cryptic remark she made over her shoulder once when we were both in high school and having an argument about something and Fern was storming out of the house. She was sort of a classically troubled adolescent — smoking, makeup, mediocre grades, dating older guys, etc. — whereas I was the family’s fair-haired boy and had a killer G.P.A. and played varsity ball, etc. One way to put it is that I looked and acted much better on the surface then than Fern did, although she eventually settled down and ended up going on to college and is now doing OK. She’s also one of the funniest people on earth, with a very dry, subtle sense of humor — I like her a lot. The point being that that was the start of my being a fraud, although it’s not as if the broken-bowl episode was somehow the origin or cause of my fraudulence or some kind of child- hood trauma that I’d never gotten over and had to go into analysis to work out. The fraud part of me was always there, just as the puzzle piece, objectively speaking, is a true piece of the puzzle even before you see how it fits. For a while I thought that possibly one or the other of my biological parents had been frauds or had carried some type of fraud gene or something and that I had inherited it, but that was a dead end, there was no way to know. And even if I did, what difference would it make? I was still a fraud, it was still my own unhappiness that I had to deal with.

Once again, I’m aware that it’s clumsy to put it all this way, but the point is that all of this and more was flashing through my head just in the interval of the small, dramatic pause Dr. Gustafson allowed himself before delivering his big reductio ad absurdum argument that I couldn’t be a total fraud if I had just come out and admitted my fraudulence to him just now. I know that you know as well as I do how fast thoughts and associations can fly through your head. You can be in the middle of a creative meeting at your job or something, and enough material can rush through your head just in the little silences when people are looking over their notes and waiting for the next presentation that it would take exponentially longer than the whole meeting just to try to put a few seconds’ silence’s flood of thoughts into words. This is another paradox, that many of the most important impressions and thoughts in a person’s life are ones that flash through your head so fast that fast isn’t even the right word, they seem totally different from or outside of the regular sequential clock time we all live by, and they have so little relation to the sort of linear, one-word-after-another- word English we all communicate with each other with that it could easily take a whole lifetime just to spell out the contents of one split-second’s flash of thoughts and connections, etc. — and yet we all seem to go around trying to use English (or whatever language our native country happens to use, it goes without saying) to try to convey to other people what we’re thinking and to find out what they’re thinking, when in fact deep down everybody knows it’s a charade and they’re just going through the motions. What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant. The internal head-speed or whatever of these ideas, memories, realizations, emotions and so on is even faster, by the way — exponentially faster, unimaginably faster — when you’re dying, meaning during that vanishingly tiny nanosecond between when you technically die and when the next thing happens, so that in reality the cliché about people’s whole life flashing before their eyes as they’re dying isn’t all that far off — although the whole life here isn’t really a sequential thing where first you’re born and then you’re in the crib and then you’re up at the plate in Legion ball, etc., which it turns out that that’s what people usually mean when they say ‘my whole life,’ meaning a discrete, chronological series of moments that they add up and call their lifetime. It’s not really like that. The best way I can think of to try to say it is that it all happens at once, but that at once doesn’t really mean a finite moment of sequential time the way we think of time while we’re alive, plus that what turns out to be the meaning of the term my life isn’t even close to what we think we’re talking about when we say ‘my life.’ Words and chronological time create all these total misunderstandings of what’s really going on at the most basic level. And yet at the same time English is all we have to try to understand it and try to form anything larger or more meaningful and true with anybody else, which is yet another paradox. Dr. Gustafson — whom I would meet again later and find out that he had almost nothing to do with the big doughy repressed guy sitting back against his chair’s beads in his River Forest office with colon cancer in him already at that time and him knowing nothing yet except that he didn’t feel quite right down there in the bathroom lately and if it kept on he’d make an appointment to go in and ask his internist about it — Dr. G. would later say that the whole my whole life flashed before me phenomenon at the end is more like being a whitecap on the surface of the ocean, meaning that it’s only at the moment you subside and start sliding back in that you’re really even aware there’s an ocean at all. When you’re up and out there as a whitecap you might talk and act as if you know you’re just a white-cap on the ocean, but deep down you don’t think there’s really an ocean at all. It’s almost impossible to. Or like a leaf that doesn’t believe in the tree it’s part of, etc. There are all sorts of ways to try to express it.

And of course all this time you’ve probably been noticing what seems like the really central, overarching paradox, which is that this whole thing where I’m saying words can’t really do it and time doesn’t really go in a straight line is something that you’re hearing as words that you have to start listening to the first word and then each successive word after that in chronological time to understand, so if I’m saying that words and sequential time have nothing to do with it you’re wondering why we’re sitting here in this car using words and taking up your increasingly precious time, meaning aren’t I sort of logically contradicting myself right at the start. Not to mention am I maybe full of B.S. about knowing what happens — if I really did kill myself, how can you even be hearing this? Meaning am I a fraud. That’s OK, it doesn’t really matter what you think. I mean it probably matters to you, or you think it does — that isn’t what I meant by doesn’t matter. What I mean is that it doesn’t really matter what you think about me, because despite appearances this isn’t even really about me. All I’m trying to do is sketch out one little part of what it was like before I died and why I at least thought I did it, so that you’ll have at least some idea of why what happened afterward happened and why it had the impact it did on who this is really about. Meaning it’s like an abstract or sort of intro, meant to be very brief and sketchy . . . and yet of course look how much time and English it’s seeming to take even to say it. It’s interesting if you really think about it, how clumsy and laborious it seems to be to convey even the smallest thing. How much time would you even say has passed, so far?

One reason why Dr. Gustafson would have made a terrible poker player or fraud is that whenever he thought it was a big moment in the analysis he would always make a production of leaning back in his desk chair, which made that loud sound as the back tilted back and his feet went back on their heels so the soles showed, although he was good at making the position look comfortable and very familiar to his body, like it felt good doing that when he had to think. The whole thing was both slightly overdramatic and yet still likable for some rea- son. Fern, by the way, has reddish hair and slightly asymmetrical green eyes — the kind of green people buy tinted contact lenses to get — and is attractive in a sort of witchy way. I think she’s attractive, anyway. She’s grown up to be a very poised, witty, self-sufficient person, with maybe just the slightest whiff of the perfume of loneliness that hangs around unmarried women around age thirty. The fact is that we’re all lonely, of course. Everyone knows this, it’s almost a cliché. So yet another layer of my essential fraudulence is that I pretended to myself that my loneliness was special, that it was uniquely my fault because I was somehow especially fraudulent and hollow. It’s not special at all, we’ve all got it. In spades. Dead or not, Dr. Gustafson knew more about all this than I, so that he spoke with what came off as genuine authority and pleasure when he said (maybe a little superciliously, given how obvious it was), ‘But if you’re constitutionally false and manipulative and unable to be honest about who you really are, Neal’ (Neal being my given name, it was on my birth certificate when I got adopted), ‘how is it that you were able to drop the sparring and manipulation and be honest with me a moment ago’ (for that’s all it had been, in spite of all the English that’s been expended on just my head’s partial contents in the tiny interval between then and now) ‘about who you really are?’ So it turned out I’d been right in predicting what his big logical insight was going to be. And although I played along with him for a while so as not to prick his bubble, inside I felt pretty bleak indeed, because now I knew that he was going to be just as pliable and credulous as everyone else, he didn’t appear to have anything close to the firepower I’d need to give me any hope of getting helped out of the trap of fraudulence and unhappiness I’d constructed for myself. Because the real truth was that my confession of being a fraud and of having wasted time sparring with him over the previous weeks in order to manipulate him into seeing me as exceptional and insightful had itself been kind of manipulative. It was pretty clear that Dr. Gustafson, in order to survive in private practice, could not be totally stupid or obtuse about people, so it seemed reasonable to assume that he’d noticed the massive amount of fencing and general showing off I’d been doing during the first weeks of the analysis, and thus had come to some conclusions about my apparently desperate need to make a certain kind of impression on him, and though it wasn’t totally certain it was thus at least a decent possibility that he’d sized me up as a basically empty, insecure person whose whole life involved trying to impress people and manipulate their view of me in order to compen- sate for the inner emptiness. It’s not as if this is an incredibly rare or obscure type of personality, after all. So the fact that I had chosen to be supposedly ‘honest’ and to diagnose myself aloud was in fact just one more move in my campaign to make sure Dr. Gustafson understood that as a patient I was uniquely acute and self-aware, and that there was very little chance he was going to see or diagnose anything about me that I wasn’t already aware of and able to turn to my own tactical advantage in terms of creating whatever image or impression of myself I wanted him to see at that moment. His big supposed insight, then — which had as its ostensible, first-order point that my fraudulence could not possibly be as thoroughgoing and hopeless as I claimed it was, since my ability to be honest with him about it logically contradicted my claim of being incapable of honesty — actually had as its larger, unspoken point the claim that he could discern things about my basic character that I myself could not see or interpret correctly, and thus that he could help me out of the trap by pointing out inconsistencies in my view of myself as totally fraudulent. The fact that this insight that he appeared so coyly pleased and excited about was not only obvious and superficial but also wrong — this was depressing, much the way discovering that somebody is easy to manipulate is always a little depressing. A corollary to the fraudulence paradox is that you simultaneously want to fool everyone you meet and yet also somehow always hope that you’ll come across someone who is your match or equal and can’t be fooled. But this was sort of the last straw, I mentioned I’d tried a whole number of different things that hadn’t worked already. So depressing is a gross understatement, actually. Plus of course the obvious fact that I was paying this guy for help in getting out of the trap and he’d now showed that he didn’t have the mental firepower to do it. So I was now thinking about the prospect of spending time and money driving in to River Forest twice a week just to yank the analyst around in ways he couldn’t see so that he’d think that I was actually less fraudulent than I thought I was and that analysis with him was gradually helping me see this. Meaning that he’d probably be getting more out of it than I would, for me it would just be fraudulence as usual.

However tedious and sketchy all this is, you’re at least getting an idea, I think, of what it was like inside my head. If nothing else, you’re seeing how exhausting and solipsistic it is to be like this. And I had been this way my whole life, at least from age four onward, as far as I could recall. Of course, it’s also a really stupid and egotistical way to be, of course you can see that. This is why the ultimate and most deeply unspoken point of the analyst’s insight — namely, that who and what I believed I was was not what I really was at all — which I thought was false, was in fact true, although not for the reasons that Dr. Gustafson, who was leaning back in his chair and smoothing his big mustache with his thumb and forefinger while I played dumb and let him feel like he was explaining to me a contradiction I couldn’t understand without his help, believed.

One of my other ways of playing dumb for the next several sessions after that was to protest his upbeat diagnosis (irrelevantly, since by this time I’d pretty much given up on Dr. Gustafson and was starting to think of various ways to kill myself without causing pain or making a mess that would disgust whoever found me) by means of listing the various ways I’d been fraudulent even in my pursuit of ways to achieve genuine and uncalculating integrity. I’ll spare giving you the whole list again. I basically went all the way back to childhood (which analysts always like you to do) and laid it on. Partly I was curious to see how much he’d put up with. For example, I told him about going from genuinely loving ball, loving the smell of the grass and distant sprinklers, or the feel of pounding my fist into the glove over and over and yelling ‘Hey, batterbatter,’ and the big low red tumid sun at the game’s start versus the arc lights coming on with a clank in the glowing twilight of the late innings, and of the steam and clean burned smell of ironing my Legion uniform, or the feel of sliding and watching all the dust it raised settle around me, or all the parents in shorts and rubber flip-flops setting up lawn chairs with Styrofoam coolers, little kids hooking their fingers around the backstop fence or running off after fouls. The smell of the ump’s aftershave and sweat, the little whisk-broom he’d bend down and tidy the plate with. Mostly the feel of stepping up to the plate knowing anything was possible, a feeling like a sun flaring somewhere high up in my chest. And about how by only maybe fourteen all that had disappeared and turned into worrying about averages and if I could make All City again, or being so worried I’d screw up that I didn’t even like ironing the uniform anymore before games because it gave me too much time to think, standing there so nerved up about doing well that night that I couldn’t even notice the little chuckling sighs the iron made anymore or the singular smell of the steam when I hit the little button for steam. How I’d basically ruined all the best parts of everything like that. How sometimes it felt like I was actually asleep and none of this was even real and someday out of nowhere I was maybe going to suddenly wake up in midstride. That was part of the idea behind things like joining the charismatic church up in Naperville, to try to wake up spiritually instead of living in this fog of fraudulence. ‘The truth shall set you free’ — the Bible. This was what Beverly-Elizabeth Slane liked to call my holy roller phase. And the charismatic church really did seem to help a lot of the parishioners and congregants I met. They were humble and devoted and charitable, and gave tirelessly without thought of personal reward in active service to the church and in donating resources and time to the church’s cam-
paign to build a new altar with an enormous cross of thick glass whose crossbeam was lit up and filled with aerated water and was to have various kinds of beautiful fish swimming in it. (Fish being a prominent Christ-symbol for charismatics. In fact, most of us who were the most devoted and active in the church had bumper stickers on our cars with no words or anything except a plain line drawing of the outline of a fish — this lack of ostentation impressed me as classy and genuine.) But with the real truth here being how quickly I went from being someone who was there because he wanted to wake up and stop being a fraud to being somebody who was so anxious to impress the congre- gation with how devoted and active I was that I volunteered to help take the collection, and never missed one study group the whole time, and was on two different committees for coordinating fund-raising for the new aquarial altar and deciding exactly what kind of equipment and fish would be used for the crossbeam. Plus often being the one in the front row whose voice in the responses was loudest and who waved both hands in the air the most enthusiastically to show that the Spirit had entered me, and speaking in tongues — mostly consisting of d ’s and g’s — except not really, of course, because in fact I was really just pretending to speak in tongues because all the parishioners around me were speaking in tongues and had the Spirit, and so in a kind of fever of excitement I was able to hoodwink even myself into thinking that I really had the Spirit moving through me and was speaking in tongues when in reality I was just shouting ‘Dugga muggle ergle dergle’ over and over. (In other words, so anxious to see myself as truly born-again that I actually convinced myself that the tongues’ babble was real language and somehow less false than plain English at expressing the feeling of the Holy Spirit rolling like a juggernaut right through me.) This went on for about four months. Not to mention falling over backward whenever Pastor Steve came down the row popping people and popped me in the forehead with the heel of his hand, but falling over backward on purpose, not genuinely being struck down by the Spirit like the other people on either side of me (one of whom actually fainted and had to be brought around with salts). It was only when I was walking out to the parking lot one night after Wednesday Night Praise that I suddenly experienced a flash of self-awareness or clarity or whatever in which I suddenly stopped conning myself and realized that I’d been a fraud all these months in the church, too, and was really only saying and doing these things because all the real parishioners were doing them and I wanted everyone to think I was sincere. It just about knocked me over, that was how vividly I saw how I’d deceived myself. The revealed truth was that I was an even bigger fraud in church about being a newly reborn authentic person than I’d been before Deacon and Mrs. Halberstadt first rang my doorbell out of nowhere as part of their missionary service and talked me into giving it a shot. Because at least before the church thing I wasn’t conning myself — I’d known that I was a fraud since at least age nineteen, but at least I’d been able to admit and face the fraudulence directly instead of B.S.ing myself that I was something I wasn’t.

All this was presented in the context of a very long pseudo-argument about fraudulence with Dr. Gustafson that would take way too much time to relate to you in detail, so I’m just telling you about some of the more garish examples. With Dr. G. it was more in the form of a prolonged, multi-session back-and-forth on whether or not I was a total fraud, during which I got more and more disgusted with myself for even playing along. By this point in the analysis I’d pretty much decided he was an idiot, or at least very limited in his insights into what was really going on with people. (There was also the blatant issue of the mustache and of him always playing with it.) Essentially he saw what he wanted to see, which was just the sort of person I could practically eat for lunch in terms of creating whatever ideas or impressions of me I wanted. For instance, I told him about the period of trying jogging, during which I seemed never to fail to have to increase my pace and pump my arms more vigorously whenever someone drove by or looked up from his yard, so that I ended up with bone spurs and eventually had to quit altogether. Or spending at least two or three sessions recounting the example of the introductory meditation class at the Downers Grove Community Center that Melissa Betts of Settleman, Dorn got me to take, at which through sheer force of will I’d always force myself to remain totally still with my legs crossed and back perfectly straight long after the other students had all given up and fallen back on their mats shuddering and holding their heads. Right from the first class meeting, even though the small, brown instructor had told us to shoot for only ten minutes of stillness at the outset because most Westerners’ minds could not maintain more than a few minutes of stillness and mindful concentration without feeling so restless and ill at ease that they couldn’t stand it, I always remained absolutely still and focused on breathing my prana with the lower diaphragm longer than any of them, sometimes for up to thirty minutes, even though my knees and lower back were on fire and I had what felt like swarms of insects crawling all over my arms and shooting out of the top of my head — and Master Gurpreet, although he kept his facial expression inscrutable, gave me a deep and seemingly respectful bow and said that I sat almost like a living statue of mindful repose, and that he was impressed. The problem was that we were also all supposed to continue practicing our meditation on our own at home between classes, and when I tried to do it alone I couldn’t seem to sit still and follow my breath for more than even a few minutes before I felt like crawling out of my skin and had to stop. I could only sit and appear quiet and mindful and withstand the unbelievably restless and horrible feelings when all of us were doing it together in the class — meaning only when there were other people to make an impression on. And even in class, the truth was that I was often concentrating not so much on following my prana as on keeping totally still and in the correct posture and hav- ing a deeply peaceful and meditative expression on my face in case anyone was cheating and had their eyes open and was looking around, plus also to ensure that Master Gurpreet would continue to see me as exceptional and keep addressing me by what became sort of his class nickname for me, which was ‘the statue.’

Finally, in the final few class meetings, when Master Gurpreet told us to sit still and focused for only as long as we comfortably could and then waited almost an hour before finally hitting his small bell with the little silver thing to signal the period of meditation’s end, only I and an extremely thin, pale girl who had her own meditation bench that she brought to class with her were able to sit still and focused for the whole hour, although at several different points I’d get so cramped and restless, with what felt like bright blue fire going up my spine and shooting invisibly out of the top of my head as blobs of color exploded over and over again behind my eyelids, that I thought I was going to jump up screaming and take a header right out the window. And at the end of the course, when there was also an opportunity to sign up for the next session, which was called Deepening the Practice, Master Gurpreet presented several of us with different honorary certificates, and mine had my name and the date and was inscribed in black callig- raphy, champion meditator, most impressive western student, the statue. It was only after I fell asleep that night (I’d finally sort of compromised and told myself I was practicing the meditative discipline at home at night by lying down and focusing on following my breathing very closely as I fell asleep, and it did turn out to be a phenomenal sleep aid) that while I was asleep I had the dream about the statue in the commons and realized that Master Gurpreet had actually in all likelihood seen right through me the whole time, and that the certificate was in reality a subtle rebuke or joke at my expense. Meaning he was letting me know that he knew I was a fraud and not even coming close to actually quieting my mind’s ceaseless conniving about how to impress people in order to achieve mindfulness and honor my true inner self. (Of course, what he seemed not to have divined was that in reality I actually seemed to have no true inner self, and that the more I tried to be genuine the more empty and fraudulent I ended up feeling inside, which I told nobody about until my stab at analysis with Dr. Gustafson.) In the dream, I was in the town commons in Aurora, over near the Pershing tank memorial by the clock tower, and what I’m doing in the dream is sculpting an enormous marble or granite statue of myself, using a huge iron chisel and a hammer the size of those ones they give you to try to hit the bell at the top of the big thermometer-like thing at carnivals, and when the statue’s finally done I put it up on a big bandstand or platform and spend all my time polishing it and keeping birds from sitting on it or doing their business on it, and cleaning up litter and keeping the grass neat all around the bandstand. And in the dream my whole life flashes by like that, the sun and moon go back and forth across the sky like windshield wipers over and over, and I never seem to sleep or eat or take a shower (the dream takes place in dream time as opposed to waking, chronological time), meaning I’m condemned to a whole life of being nothing but a sort of custodian to the statue. I’m not saying it was subtle or hard to figure out. Everybody from Fern, Master Gurpreet, the anorexic girl with her own bench, and Ginger Manley, to people from the firm and some of the media reps we bought time from (I was still a media buyer at this time) all walk by, some several times — at one point Melissa Betts and her new fiancé even spread out a blanket and have a sort of little picnic in the shade of the statue — but none of them ever look over or say anything. It’s obviously another dream about fraudulence, like the dream where I’m supposedly a big pop star on-stage but all I really do is lip-synch to one of my stepparents’ old Mamas and Papas records that’s on a record player just off-stage, and somebody whose face I can’t ever look over long enough to make out keeps putting his hand in the area of the record as if he’s going to make it skip or scratch, and the whole dream makes my skin crawl. These dreams were obvious, they were warnings from my subconscious that I was hollow and a fraud and it was only a matter of time before the whole charade fell apart. Another of my stepmother’s treasured antiques was a silver pocket-watch of her maternal grandfather’s with the Latin respice finem inscribed on the inside of the case. It wasn’t until after she passed away and my stepfather said she’d wanted me to have it that I bothered to look up the term, after which I’d gotten the same sort of crawly feeling as with Master Gurpreet’s certificate. Much of the nightmarish quality of the dream about the statue was due to the way the sun raced back and forth across the sky and the speed with which my whole life blew by like that, in the commons. It was obviously also my subconscious enlightening me as to the meditation instructor’s having seen through me the whole time, after which I was too embarrassed even to go try to get a refund for the Deepening the Practice class, which there was now no way I felt like I could show up for, even though at the same time I also still had fantasies about Master Gurpreet becoming my mentor or guru and using all kinds of inscrutable Eastern techniques to show me the way to meditate myself into having a true self . . .

. . . Etc., etc. I’ll spare you any more examples, for instance I’ll spare you the literally countless examples of my fraudulence with girls — with the ladies as they say — in just about every dating relationship I ever had, or the almost unbelievable amount of fraudulence and calculation involved in my career — not just in terms of manipulating the consumer and manipulating the client into trusting that your agency’s ideas are the best way to manipulate the consumer, but in the inter-office politics of the agency itself, like for example in sizing up what sorts of things your superiors want to believe (including the belief that they’re smarter than you and that that’s why they’re your superior) and then giving them what they want but doing it just subtly enough that they never get a chance to view you as a sycophant or yes-man (which they want to believe they do not really want) but instead see you as a tough-minded independent thinker who from time to time bows to the weight of their superior intelligence and creative firepower, etc. The whole agency was one big ballet of fraudulence and of manipulating people’s images of your ability to manipulate images, a virtual hall of mirrors. And I was good at it, remember, I thrived there.

It was the sheer amount of time Dr. Gustafson spent touching and smoothing his mustache that indicated he wasn’t aware of doing it and in fact was subconsciously reassuring himself that it was still there. Which is not an especially subtle habit, in terms of insecurity, since af- ter all facial hair is known as a secondary sex characteristic, meaning what he was really doing was subconsciously reassuring himself that something else was still there, if you know what I mean. This was some of why it was no real surprise when it turned out that the overall direction he wanted the analysis to proceed in involved issues of masculinity and how I understood my masculinity (my ‘manhood’ in other words). This also helped explain everything from the lost-female- crawling and two-testicle-shaped-objects-that-looked-deformed prints on the wall to the little African or Indian drum things and little figurines with (sometimes) exaggerated sex characteristics on the shelf over his desk, plus the pipe, the unnecessary size of his wedding band, even the somewhat overdone little-boy clutter of the office itself. It was pretty clear that there were some major sexual insecurities and maybe even homosexual-type ambiguities that Dr. Gustafson was subconsciously trying to hide from himself and reassure himself about, and one obvious way he did this was to sort of project his insecurities onto his patients and get them to believe that America’s culture had a uniquely brutal and alienating way of brainwashing its males from an early age into all kinds of damaging beliefs and superstitions about what being a so-called ‘real man’ was, such as competitiveness instead of concert, winning at all costs, dominating others through intelligence or will, being strong, not showing your true emotions, depending on others seeing you as a real man in order to reassure yourself of your manhood, seeing your own value solely in terms of accomplishments, being obsessed with your career or income, feeling as if you were constantly being judged or on display, etc. This was later in the analysis, after the seemingly endless period where after every example of fraudulence I gave him he’d make a show of congratulating me on being able to reveal what I felt were shameful fraudulent examples, and said that this was proof that I had much more of an ability to be genuine than I (apparently because of my insecurities or male fears) seemed able to give myself credit for. Plus it didn’t exactly seem like a coincidence that the cancer he was even then harboring was in his colon — that shameful, dirty, secret place right near the rectum — with the idea being that using your rectum or colon to secretly harbor an alien growth was a blatant symbol both of homosexuality and of the repressive belief that its open acknowledgment would equal disease and death. Dr. Gustafson and I both had a good laugh over this one after we’d both died and were outside linear time and in the process of dramatic change, you can bet on that. (Outside time is not just an ex- pression or manner of speaking, by the way.) By this time in the analysis I was playing with him the way a cat does with a hurt bird. If I’d had an ounce of real self-respect I would have stopped and gone back to the Downers Grove Community Center and thrown myself on Master Gurpreet’s mercy, since except for maybe one or two girls I’d dated he was the only one who’d appeared to see all the way through to the core of my fraudulence, plus his oblique, very dry way of indicating this to me betrayed a sort of serene indifference to whether I even understood that he saw right through me that I found incredibly impressive and genuine — here in Master Gurpreet was a man with, as they say, nothing to prove. But I didn’t, instead I more or less conned myself into sticking with going in to see Dr. G. twice a week for almost nine months (toward the end it was only once a week because by then the cancer had been diagnosed and he was getting radiation treatments every Tuesday and Thursday), telling myself that at least I was trying to find some venue in which I could get help finding a way to be genuine and stop manipulating everybody around me to see ‘the statue’ as erect and impressive, etc.

Nor however is it strictly true that the analyst had nothing interesting to say or that he didn’t sometimes provide helpful models or angles for looking at the basic problem. For instance, it turned out that one of his basic operating premises was the claim that there were really only two basic, fundamental orientations a person could have toward the world, (1) love and (2) fear, and that they couldn’t coexist (or, in logical terms, that their domains were exhaustive and mutually exclusive, or that their two sets had no intersection but their union comprised all possible elements, or that:
‘(∀x) ((Fx → ~ (Lx)) & (Lx → ~ (Fx))) & ~ ((∃x) (~ (Fx) & ~ (Lx))’ ), meaning in other words that each day of your life was spent in service to one of these masters or the other, and ‘One cannot serve two masters’ — the Bible again — and that one of the worst things about the conception of competitive, achievement-oriented masculinity that America supposedly hardwired into its males was that it caused a more or less constant state of fear that made genuine love next to impossible. That is, that what passed for love in American men was usually just the need to be regarded in a certain way, meaning that today’s males were so constantly afraid of ‘not measuring up’ (Dr. G.’s phrase, with evidently no pun intended) that they had to spend all their time convincing others of their masculine ‘validity’ (which happens to also be a term from formal logic) in order to ease their own insecurity, making genuine love next to impossible. Although it seemed a little bit simplistic to see this fear as just a male problem (try watching a girl stand on a scale sometime), it turns out that Dr. Gustafson was very nearly right in this concept of the two masters — though not in the way that he, when alive and confused about his own real identity, believed — and even while I played along by pretending to argue or not quite understand what he was driving at, the idea struck me that maybe the real root of my problem was not fraudulence but a basic inability to really love, even to genuinely love my stepparents, or Fern, or Melissa Betts, or Ginger Manley of Aurora West High in 1979, whom I’d often thought of as the only girl I’d ever truly loved, though Dr. G.’s bromide about men being brainwashed to equate love with accomplishment or conquest also applied here. The plain truth was that Ginger Manley was just the first girl I ever went all the way with, and most of my tender feelings about her were really just nostalgia for the feeling of immense cosmic validation I’d felt when she finally let me take her jeans all the way off and put my so-called ‘manhood’ inside her, etc. There’s really no bigger cliché than losing your virginity and later having all kinds of retrospective tenderness for the girl involved. Or what Beverly-Elizabeth Slane, a research technician I used to see outside of work when I was a media buyer, and had a lot of conflict with toward the end, said, which I don’t think I ever told Dr. G. about, fraudulence-wise, probably because it cut a little too close to the bone. Toward the end she had compared me to some piece of ultra-expensive new medical or diagnostic equipment that can discern more about you in one quick scan than you could ever know about yourself — but the equipment doesn’t care about you, you’re just a sequence of processes and codes. What the machine understands about you doesn’t actually mean anything to it. Even though it’s really good at what it does. Beverly had a bad temper combined with some serious fire-power, she was not someone you wanted to have pissed off at you. She said she’d never felt the gaze of someone so penetrating, discerning, and yet totally empty of care, like she was a puzzle or problem I was figuring out. She said it was thanks to me that she’d discovered the difference between being penetrated and really known versus penetrated and just violated — needless to say, these thanks were sarcastic. Some of this was just her emotional makeup — she found it impossible to really end a relationship unless all bridges were burned and things got said that were so devastating that there could be no possibility of a rapprochement to haunt her or prevent her moving on. Nevertheless it penetrated, I never did forget what she said in that letter.

Even if being fraudulent and being unable to love were in fact ultimately the same thing (a possibility that Dr. Gustafson never seemed to consider no matter how many times I set him up to see it), being unable to really love was at least a different model or lens through which to see the problem, plus initially it seemed like a promising way of attacking the fraudulence paradox in terms of reducing the self- hatred part that reinforced the fear and the consequent drive to try to manipulate people into providing the very approval I’d denied myself. (Dr. G.’s term for approval was validation.) This period was pretty much the zenith of my career in analysis, and for a few weeks (during a couple of which I actually didn’t see Dr. Gustafson at all, because some sort of complication in his illness required him to go into the hospital, and when he came back he appeared to have lost not only weight but some kind of essential part of his total mass, and no longer seemed too large for his old desk chair, which still squeaked but now not as loudly, plus a lot of the clutter and papers had been straightened up and put in several brown cardboard banker’s boxes against the wall under the two sad prints, and when I came back in to see him the absence of mess was especially disturbing and sad, for some reason) it was true that I felt some of the first genuine hope I’d had since the early, self-deluded part of the experiment with Naperville’s Church of the Flaming Sword of the Redeemer. And yet at the same time these weeks also led more or less directly to my decision to kill myself, although I’m going to have to simplify and linearize a great deal of interior stuff in order to convey to you what actually happened. Otherwise it would take an almost literal eternity to recount it, we already agreed about that. It’s not that words or human language stop having any meaning or relevance after you die, by the way. It’s more the specific, one-after-the-other temporal ordering of them that does. Or doesn’t.

It’s hard to explain. In logical terms, something expressed in words will still have the same ‘cardinality’ but no longer the same ‘ordinality.’ All the different words are still there, in other words, but it’s no longer a question of which one comes first. Or you could say it’s no longer the series of words but now more like some limit toward which the series converges. It’s hard not to want to put it in logical terms, since they’re the most abstract and universal. Meaning they have no connotation, you don’t feel anything about them. Or maybe imagine everything anybody on earth ever said or even thought to themselves all getting collapsed and exploding into one large, combined, instantaneous sound — although instantaneous is a little misleading, since it implies other instants before and after, and it isn’t really like that. It’s more like the sudden internal flash when you see or realize something — a sudden flash or whatever of epiphany or insight. It’s not just that it happens way faster than you could break the process down and arrange it into English, but that it happens on a scale in which there isn’t even time to be aware of any sort of time at all in which it’s happening, the flash — all you know is that there’s a before and an after, and afterward you’re different. I don’t know if that makes sense. I’m just trying to give it to you from several different angles, it’s all the same thing. Or you could think of it as being more a certain configuration of light than a word-sum or series of sounds, too, afterward. Which is in fact true. Or as a theorem’s proof — because if a proof is true then it’s true everywhere and all the time, not just when you happen to say it. The thing is that it turns out that logical symbolism really would be the best way to express it, because logic is totally abstract and outside what we think of as time. It’s the closest thing to what it’s really like. That’s why it’s the logical paradoxes that really drive people nuts. A lot of history’s great logicians have ended up killing themselves, that is a fact.

And keep in mind this flash can happen anywhere, at any time.

Here’s the basic Berry paradox, by the way, if you might want an example of why logicians with incredible firepower can devote their whole lives to solving these things and still end up beating their heads against the wall. This one has to do with big numbers — meaning really big, past a trillion, past ten to the trillion to the trillion, way up there. When you get way up there, it takes a while even to describe numbers this big in words. ‘The quantity one trillion, four hundred and three billion to the trillionth power’ takes twenty syllables to describe, for example. You get the idea. Now, even higher up there in these huge, cosmic-scale numbers, imagine now the very smallest number that can’t be described in under twenty-two syllables. The paradox is that the very smallest number that can’t be described in under twenty-two syllables, which of course is itself a description of this num- ber, only has twenty-one syllables in it, which of course is under twenty-two syllables. So now what are you supposed to do?

At the same time, what actually led to it in causal terms, though, occurred during maybe the third or fourth week that Dr. G. was back seeing patients after his hospitalization. Although I’m not going to pretend that the specific incident wouldn’t strike most people as absurd or even sort of insipid, as causes go. The truth is just that late at night one night in August after Dr. G.’s return, when I couldn’t sleep (which happened a lot ever since the cocaine period) and was sitting up drinking a glass of milk or something and watching television, flipping the remote almost at random between different cable stations the way you do when it’s late, I happened on part of an old Cheers episode from late in the series’ run where the analyst character, Frasier (who went on to have his own show), and Lilith, his fiancée and also an analyst, are just entering the stage set of the underground tavern, and Frasier is asking her how her workday at her office went, and Lilith says, ‘If I have one more yuppie come in and start whining to me about how he can’t love, I’m going to throw up.’ This line got a huge laugh from the show’s studio audience, which indicated that they — and so by demographic extension the whole national audience at home as well — recognized what a cliché and melodramatic type of complaint the inability-to-love concept was. And, sitting there, when I suddenly realized that once again I’d managed to con myself, this time into thinking that this was a truer or more promising way to conceive of the problem of fraudulence — and, by extension, that I’d also somehow deluded myself into almost believing that poor old Dr. Gustafson had anything in his mental arsenal that could actually help me, and that the real truth was probably more that I was continuing to see him partly out of pity and partly so that I could pretend to myself that I was taking steps to becoming more authentic when in fact all I was doing was jerking a gravely ill shell of a guy around and feeling superior to him because I was able to analyze his own psychological makeup so much more accurately than he could analyze mine — the flash of realizing all this at the very same time that the huge audience-laugh showed that nearly everybody in the United States had probably already seen through the complaint’s inauthenticity as long ago as whenever the episode had originally run — all this flashed through my head in the tiny interval it took to realize what I was watching and to remember who the characters of Frasier and Lilith even were, meaning maybe half a second at most, and it more or less destroyed me, that’s the only way I can describe it, as if whatever hope of any way out of the trap I’d made for myself had been blasted out of midair or laughed off the stage, as if I were one of those stock comic characters who is always both the butt of the joke and the only person not to get the joke — and in sum I went to bed feeling as fraudulent, befogged, hopeless and full of self-contempt as I’d ever felt, and it was the next morning after that that I woke up having decided I was going to kill myself and end the whole farce. (As you probably recall, Cheers was an incredibly popular series, and even in syndication its metro numbers were so high that if a local advertiser wanted to buy time on it the slots cost so much that you pretty much had to build his whole local strat- egy around those slots.) I’m compressing a huge amount of what took place in my psyche that next-to-last night, all the different realizations and conclusions I reached as I lay there in bed unable to sleep or even move (no single series’ line or audience-laugh is in and of itself going to constitute a reason for suicide, of course) — although to you I imagine it probably doesn’t seem all that compressed at all, you’re thinking here’s this guy going on and on and why doesn’t he get to the part where he kills himself and explain or account for the fact that he’s sitting here next to me in a piece of high-powered machinery telling me all this if he died in 1991. Which in fact I knew I would from the moment I first woke up. It was over, I’d decided to end the charade.

After breakfast I called in sick to work and stayed home the whole day by myself. I knew that if I was around anyone I’d automatically lapse into fraudulence. I had decided to take a whole lot of Benadryl and then just as I got really sleepy and relaxed I’d get the car up to top speed on a rural road way out in the extreme west suburbs and drive it head-on into a concrete bridge abutment. Benadryl makes me ex- tremely foggy and sleepy, it always has. I spent most of the morning on letters to my lawyer and C.P.A., and brief notes to the creative head and managing partner who had originally brought me aboard at Samieti and Cheyne. Our creative group was in the middle of some very ticklish campaign preparations, and I wanted to apologize for in any way leaving them in the lurch. Of course I didn’t really feel all that sorry — Samieti and Cheyne was a ballet of fraudulence, and I was well out of it. The note was probably ultimately just so that the people who really mattered at S. & C. would be more apt to remember me as a decent, conscientious guy who it turned out was maybe just a little too sensitive and tormented by his personal demons — ‘Almost too good for this world’ is what I seemed to be unable to keep from fanta- sizing a lot of them saying after news of it came through. I did not write Dr. Gustafson a note. He had his own share of problems, and I knew that in the note I’d spend a lot of time trying to seem as if I was being honest but really just dancing around the truth, which was that he was a deeply repressed homosexual or androgyne and had no real business charging patients to let him project his own maladjustments onto them, and that the truth was that he’d be doing himself and everybody else a favor if he’d just go over to Garfield Park and blow somebody in the bushes and try honestly to decide if he liked it or not, and that I was a total fraud for continuing to drive all the way in to River Forest to see him and bat him around like a catnip toy while telling myself there was some possible nonfraudulent point to it. (All of which, of course, even if they weren’t dying of colon cancer right in front of you you still could never actually come out and say to somebody, since certain truths might well destroy them — and who has that right?)

I did spend almost two hours before taking the first of the Benadryl composing a handwritten note to my sister Fern. In the note I apologized for whatever pain my suicide and the fraudulence and/or inability to love that had precipitated it might cause her and my stepdad (who was still alive and well and now lived in Marin County, California, where he taught part-time and did community outreach with Marin County’s homeless). I also used the occasion of the letter and all the sort of last-testament urgency associated with it to license apologizing to Fern about manipulating my stepparents into believing that she’d lied about the antique glass bowl in 1967, as well as for half a dozen other incidents and spiteful or fraudulent actions that I knew had caused her pain and that I had felt bad about ever since, but had never really seen any way to broach with her or express my honest regret for. (It turns out there are things that you can discuss in a suicide note that would just be too bizarre if expressed in any other kind of venue.) Just one example of such an incident was during a period in the mid-’70s, when Fern, as part of puberty, underwent some physical changes that made her look chunky for a year or two — not fat, but wide-hipped and bosomy and sort of much more broad than she’d been as a pre-teen — and of course she was very, very sensitive about it (puberty also being a time of terrible self-consciousness and sensitivity about one’s body image, obviously), so much so that my stepparents took great pains never to say anything about Fern’s new breadth or even ever to bring up any topics related to eating habits, diet and exercise, etc. And I for my own part never said anything about it either, not directly, but I had worked out all kinds of very subtle and indirect ways to torment Fern about her size in such a way that my stepparents never saw anything and I could never really be accused of anything that I couldn’t then look all around myself with a shocked, incredulous facial expression as if I had no idea what she was talking about, such as just a quick raise of my eyebrow when her eyes met mine as she was having a second helping at dinner, or a quick little quiet, ‘You sure you can fit into that?’ when she came home from the store with a new skirt. The one I still remembered the most vividly involved the second-floor hall of our house, which was in Aurora and was a three-story home (including the basement) but not all that spacious or large, meaning a skinny three-decker like so many you always see all crammed together along residential streets in Naperville and Aurora. The second-floor hallway, which ran between Fern’s room and the top of the stairway on one end and my room and the second-floor bathroom on the other, was cramped and somewhat narrow, but not anywhere close to as narrow as I would pretend that it was whenever Fern and I passed each other in it, with me squashing my back against the hallway wall and splaying my arms out and wincing as if there would barely be enough room for some- body of her unbelievable breadth to squeeze past me, and she would never say anything or even look at me when I did it but would just go on past me into the bathroom and close the door. But I knew it must have hurt her. A little while later, she entered an adolescent period where she hardly ate anything at all, and smoked cigarettes and chewed several packs of gum a day, and used a lot of makeup, and for a while she got so thin that she looked angular and a bit like an insect (although of course I never said that), and I once, through their bedroom’s keyhole, overheard a brief conversation in which my stepmother said she was worried because she didn’t think Fern was having her normal time of the month anymore because she had gotten so underweight, and she and my stepfather discussed the possibility of taking her to see some kind of specialist. That period passed on its own, but in the letter I told Fern that I’d always remembered this and certain other periods when I’d been cruel or tried to make her feel bad, and that I regretted them very much, although I said I wouldn’t want to seem so egotistical as to think that a simple apology could erase any of the hurt I’d caused her when we were growing up. On the other hand, I also assured her that it wasn’t as if I had gone around for years carrying excessive guilt or blowing these incidents out of all proportion. They were not life-altering traumas or anything like that, and in many ways they were probably all too typical of the sorts of cruelties that kids tend to inflict on each other growing up. I also assured her that neither these incidents nor my remorse about them had anything to do with my killing myself. I simply said, without going into anything like the level of detail I’ve given you (because my purpose in the letter was of course very different), that I was killing myself because I was an essen- tially fraudulent person who seemed to lack either the character or the firepower to find a way to stop even after I’d realized my fraudulence and the terrible toll it exacted (I told her nothing about the various different realizations or paradoxes, what would be the point?). I also inserted that there was also a good possibility that, when all was said and done, I was nothing but just another fast-track yuppie who couldn’t love, and that I found the banality of this unendurable, largely because I was evidently so hollow and insecure that I had a pathological need to see myself as somehow exceptional or outstanding at all times. Without going into much explanation or argument, I also told Fern that if her initial reaction to these reasons for my killing myself was to think that I was being much, much too hard on myself, then she should know that I was already aware that that was the most likely reaction my note would produce in her, and had probably deliber- ately constructed the note to at least in part prompt just that reaction, just the way my whole life I’d often said and done things designed to prompt certain people to believe that I was a genuinely outstanding person whose personal standards were so high that he was far too hard on himself, which in turn made me appear attractively modest and unsmug, and was a big reason for my popularity with so many people in all different avenues of my life — what Beverly-Elizabeth Slane had termed my ‘talent for ingratiation’ — but was nevertheless basically calculated and fraudulent. I also told Fern that I loved her very much, and asked her to relay these same sentiments to Marin County for me.

Now we’re getting to the part where I actually kill myself. This occurred at 9:17 PM on August 19, 1991, if you want the time fixed precisely. Plus I’ll spare you most of the last couple hours’ preparations and back-and-forth conflict and dithering, which there was a lot of. Suicide runs so counter to so many hardwired instincts and drives that nobody in his right mind goes through with it without going through a great deal of internal back-and-forth, intervals of almost changing your mind, etc. The German logician Kant was right in this respect, human beings are all pretty much identical in terms of our hardwiring. Although we are seldom conscious of it, we are all basically just instruments or expressions of our evolutionary drives, which are themselves the expressions of forces that are infinitely larger and more important than we are. (Although actually being conscious of this is a whole different matter.) So I won’t really even try to describe the several different times that day when I sat in my living room and had a furious mental back-and-forth about whether to actually go through with it. For one thing, it was intensely mental and would take an enormous amount of time to put into words, plus it would come off as somewhat cliché or banal in the sense that many of the thoughts and associations were basically the same sorts of generic things that almost anyone who’s confronting imminent death will end up thinking. As in, ‘This is the last time I will ever tie my shoe,’ ‘This is the last time I will look at this rubber tree on top of the stereo cabinet,’ ‘How delicious this lungful of air right here tastes,’ ‘This is the last glass of milk I’ll ever drink,’ ‘What a totally priceless gift this totally ordinary sight of the wind picking trees’ branches up and moving them around is.’ Or, ‘I will never again hear the plaintive sound of the fridge going on in the kitchen’ (the kitchen and breakfast nook are right off my living room), etc. Or, ‘I won’t see the sun come up tomorrow or watch the bedroom gradually undim and resolve, etc.,’ and at the same time trying to summon the memory of the exact way the sun comes up over the humid fields and the wet-looking I-55 ramp that lay due east of my bedroom’s sliding glass door in the morning. It had been a hot, wet August, and if I went through with killing myself I wouldn’t ever get to feel the incremental cooling and drying that starts here around mid-September, or to see the leaves turn or hear them rustle along the edge of the courtyard outside S. & C.’s floor of the building on S. Dearborn, or see snow or put a shovel and bag of sand in the trunk, or bite into a perfectly ripe, ungrainy pear, or put a piece of toilet paper on a shaving cut. Etc. If I went in and went to the bathroom and brushed my teeth it would be the last time I did those things. I sat there and thought about that, looking at the rubber tree. Everything seemed to tremble a little, the way things reflected in water will tremble. I watched the sun begin to drop down over the townhouse developments going up south of Darien’s corporation limit on Lily Cache Rd. and realized that I would never see the newest homes’ construction and landscaping completed, or that the homes’ white insulation wrap with the trade name TYVEK all over it flapping in all the wind out here would one day have vinyl siding or plate brick and color-coordinated shutters over it and I wouldn’t see this happen or be able to drive by and know what was actually written there under all the nice exteriors. Or the breakfast nook window’s view of the big farms’ fields next to my development, with the plowed furrows all parallel so that if I lean and line their lines up just right they seem to all rush together toward the horizon as if shot out of something huge. You get the idea. Basically I was in that state in which a man realizes that everything he sees will outlast him. As a verbal construction I know that’s a cliché. As a state in which to actually be, though, it’s some- thing else, believe me. Where now every movement takes on a kind of ceremonial aspect. The very sacredness of the world as seen (the same kind of state Dr. G. will try to describe with analogies to oceans and whitecaps and trees, you might recall I mentioned this already). This is literally about one one-trillionth of the various thoughts and internal experiences I underwent in those last few hours, and I’ll spare both of us recounting any more, since I’m aware it ends up seeming somewhat lame. Which in fact it wasn’t, but I won’t pretend it was fully authentic or genuine, either. A part of me was still calculating, performing — and this was part of the ceremonial quality of that last afternoon. Even as I wrote my note to Fern, for instance, expressing sentiments and regrets that were real, a part of me was noticing what a fine and sincere note it was, and anticipating the effect on Fern of this or that heartfelt phrase, while yet another part was observing the whole scene of a man in a dress shirt and no tie sitting at his breakfast nook writing a heartfelt note on his last afternoon alive, the blondwood table’s surface trembling with sunlight and the man’s hand steady and face both haunted by regret and ennobled by resolve, this part of me sort of hovering above and just to the left of myself, evaluating the scene, and thinking what a fine and genuine-seeming performance in a drama it would make if only we all had not already been subject to countless scenes just like it in dramas ever since we first saw a movie or read a book, which somehow entailed that real scenes like the one of my suicide note were now compelling and genuine only to their participants, and to anyone else would come off as banal and even somewhat cheesy or maudlin, which is somewhat paradoxical when you consider — as I did, sitting there at the breakfast nook — that the reason scenes like this will seem stale or manipulative to an audience is that we’ve already seen so many of them in dramas, and yet the reason we’ve seen so many of them in dramas is that the scenes really are dramatic and compelling and let people communicate very deep, complicated emotional realities that are almost impossible to articulate in any other way, and at the same time still another facet or part of me realizing that from this perspective my own basic problem was that at an early age I’d somehow chosen to cast my lot with my life’s drama’s supposed audience instead of with the drama itself, and that I even now was watching and gauging my supposed performance’s quality and probable effects, and thus was in the final analysis the very same manipulative fraud writing the note to Fern that I had been throughout the life that had brought me to this climactic scene of writing and signing it and addressing the envelope and affixing postage and putting the envelope in my shirt pocket (totally conscious of the resonance of its resting there, next to my heart, in the scene), planning to drop it in a mailbox on the way out to Lily Cache Rd. and the bridge abutment into which I planned to drive my car at speeds sufficient to displace the whole front end and impale me on the steering wheel and instantly kill me. Self-loathing is not the same thing as being into pain or a lingering death, if I was going to do it I wanted it instant.

On Lily Cache, the bridge abutments and sides’ steep banks support State Route 4 (also known as the Braidwood Highway) as it crosses overhead on a cement overpass so covered with graffiti that most of it you can’t even read. (Which sort of defeats the purpose of graffiti, in my opinion.) The abutments themselves are just off the road and about as wide as this car. Plus the intersection is isolated way out in the countryside around Romeoville, ten or so miles south of the southwest suburbs’ limits. It is the true boonies. The only homes are farms set way back from the road and embellished with silos and barns, etc. At night in the summer the dew-point is high and there’s always fog. It’s farm country. I’ve never once passed under 4 here without seeming to be the only thing on either road. The corn high and the fields like a green ocean all around, insects the only real noise. Driving alone under creamy stars and a little cocked scythe of moon, etc. The idea was to have the accident and whatever explosion and fire was involved occur someplace isolated enough that no one else would see it, so that there would be as little an aspect of performance to the thing as I could manage and no temptation to spend my last few seconds trying to imagine what impression the sight and sound of the impact might make on someone watching. I was partly concerned that it might be spectacular and dramatic and might look as if the driver was trying to go out in as dramatic a way as possible. This is the sort of shit we waste our lives thinking about.

The ground fog tends to get more intense by the second until it seems that the whole world is just what’s in your headlights’ reach. High beams don’t work in fog, they only make things worse. You can go ahead and try them but you’ll see what happens, all they do is light up the fog so it seems even denser. That’s kind of a minor paradox, that sometimes you can actually see farther with low beams than high. All right — and there’s the construction and all the flapping TYVEK wrap on houses that if you really do do it you’ll never see anyone live in. Although it won’t hurt, it really will be instant, I can tell you that much. The fields’ insects are almost deafening. If the corn’s high like this and you watch as the sun sets you can practically watch them rise up out of the fields like some great figure’s shadow rising. Mostly mosquitoes, I don’t know what all they are. It’s a whole insect universe in there that none of us will ever see or know anything about. Plus you’ll notice the Benadryl doesn’t help all that much once you’re under way. That whole idea was probably ill-conceived.

All right, now we’re coming to what I promised and led you through the whole dull synopsis of what led up to this in hopes of. Meaning what it’s like to die, what happens. Right? This is what everyone wants to know. And you do, trust me. Whether you decide to go through with it or not, whether I somehow talk you out of it the way you think I’m going to try to do or not. It’s not what anyone thinks, for one thing. The truth is you already know what it’s like. You already know the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let any- one know. As though inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if we are all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes.

But it does have a knob, the door can open. But not in the way you think. But what if you could? Think for a second — what if all the infi- nitely dense and shifting worlds of stuff inside you every moment of your life turned out now to be somehow fully open and expressible afterward, after what you think of as you has died, because what if afterward now each moment itself is an infinite sea or span or passage of time in which to express it or convey it, and you don’t even need any organized English, you can as they say open the door and be in anyone else’s room in all your own multiform forms and ideas and facets? Because listen — we don’t have much time, here’s where Lily Cache slopes slightly down and the banks start getting steep, and you can just make out the outlines of the unlit sign for the farmstand that’s never open anymore, the last sign before the bridge — so listen: What exactly do you think you are? The millions and trillions of thoughts, memories, juxtapositions — even crazy ones like this, you’re thinking — that flash through your head and disappear? Some sum or remainder of these? Your history? Do you know how long it’s been since I told you I was a fraud? Do you remember you were looking at the respicem watch hanging from the rearview and seeing the time, 9:17? What are you looking at right now? Coincidence? What if no time has passed at all?* The truth is you’ve already heard this. That this is what it’s like. That it’s what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless in-bent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you’re a fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know this, and of course you try to manage what part they see if you know it’s only a part. Who wouldn’t? It’s called free will, Sherlock. But at the same time it’s why it feels so good to break down and cry in front of others, or to laugh, or speak in tongues, or chant in Bengali — it’s not English anymore, it’s not getting squeezed through any hole.

_______________

* One clue that there’s something not quite real about sequential time the way you experience it is the various paradoxes of time supposedly passing and of a so-called ‘pres- ent’ that’s always unrolling into the future and creating more and more past behind it. As if the present were this car — nice car by the way — and the past is the road we’ve just gone over, and the future is the headlit road up ahead we haven’t yet gotten to, and time is the car’s forward movement, and the precise present is the car’s front bumper as it cuts through the fog of the future, so that it’s now and then a tiny bit later a whole different now, etc. Except if time is really passing, how fast does it go? At what rate does the present change? See? Meaning if we use time to measure motion or rate — which we do, it’s the only way you can — 95 miles per hour, 70 heartbeats a minute, etc. — how are you supposed to measure the rate at which time moves? One second per second? It makes no sense. You can’t even talk about time flowing or mov- ing without hitting up against paradox right away. So think for a second: What if there’s really no movement at all? What if this is all unfolding in the one flash you call the present, this first, infinitely tiny split-second of impact when the speeding car’s front bumper’s just starting to touch the abutment, just before the bumper crumples and displaces the front end and you go violently forward and the steering column comes back at your chest as if shot out of something enormous? Meaning that what if in fact this now is infinite and never really passes in the way your mind is supposedly wired to understand pass, so that not only your whole life but every single humanly conceivable way to describe and account for that life has time to flash like neon shaped into those connected cursive letters that businesses’ signs and windows love so much to use through your mind all at once in the literally immeasurable instant between im- pact and death, just as you start forward to meet the wheel at a rate no belt ever made could restrain — THE END.


So cry all you want, I won’t tell anybody.

But it wouldn’t have made you a fraud to change your mind. It would be sad to do it because you think you somehow have to.

It won’t hurt, though. It will be loud, and you’ll feel things, but they’ll go through you so fast that you won’t even realize you’re feeling them (which is sort of like the paradox I used to bounce off Gustafson — is it possible to be a fraud if you aren’t aware you’re a fraud?). And the very brief moment of fire you’ll feel will be almost good, like when your hands are cold and there’s a fire and you hold your hands out toward it.

The reality is that dying isn’t bad, but it takes forever. And that forever is no time at all. I know that sounds like a contradiction, or maybe just wordplay. What it really is, it turns out, is a matter of perspective. The big picture, as they say, in which the fact is that this whole seem- ingly endless back-and-forth between us has come and gone and come again in the very same instant that Fern stirs a boiling pot for dinner, and your stepfather packs some pipe tobacco down with his thumb, and Angela Mead uses an ingenious little catalogue tool to roll cat hair off her blouse, and Melissa Betts inhales to respond to something she thinks her husband just said, and David Wallace blinks in the midst of idly scanning class photos from his 1980 Aurora West H.S. yearbook and seeing my photo and trying, through the tiny little keyhole of himself, to imagine what all must have happened to lead up to my death in the fiery single-car accident he’d read about in 1991, like what sorts of pain or problems might have driven the guy to get in his electric-blue Corvette and try to drive with all that O.T.C. medication in his bloodstream — David Wallace happening to have a huge and totally unorganizable set of inner thoughts, feelings, memories and impressions of this little photo’s guy a year ahead of him in school with the seemingly almost neon aura around him all the time of scholastic and athletic excellence and popularity and success with the ladies, as well as of every last cutting remark or even tiny disgusted gesture or expression on this guy’s part whenever David Wallace struck out looking in Legion ball or said something dumb at a party, and of how impressive and authentically at ease in the world the guy always seemed, like an actual living person instead of the dithering, pathetically self-conscious outline or ghost of a person David Wallace knew himself back then to be. Verily a fair-haired, fast-track guy, whom in the very best human tradition David Wallace had back then imagined as happy and unreflective and wholly unhaunted by voices telling him that there was something deeply wrong with him that wasn’t wrong with any- body else and that he had to spend all of his time and energy trying to figure out what to do and say in order to impersonate an even marginally normal or acceptable U.S. male, all this stuff clanging around in David Wallace ’81’s head every second and moving so fast that he never got a chance to catch hold and try to fight or argue against it or even really even feel it except as a knot in his stomach as he stood in his real parents’ kitchen ironing his uniform and thinking of all the ways he could screw up and strike out looking or drop balls out in right and reveal his true pathetic essence in front of this .418 hitter and his witchily pretty sister and everyone else in the audience in lawn chairs in the grass along the sides of the Legion field (all of whom already probably saw through the sham from the outset anyway, he was pretty sure) — in other words David Wallace trying, if only in the second his lids are down, to somehow reconcile what this luminous guy had seemed like from the outside with whatever on the interior must have driven him to kill himself in such a dramatic and doubtlessly painful way — with David Wallace also fully aware that the cliché that you can’t ever truly know what’s going on inside somebody else is hoary and insipid and yet at the same time trying very consciously to prohibit that awareness from mocking the attempt or sending the whole line of thought into the sort of inbent spiral that keeps you from ever getting anywhere (considerable time having passed since 1981, of course, and David Wallace having emerged from years of literally indescribable war against himself with quite a bit more firepower than he’d had at Aurora West), the realer, more enduring and sentimental part of him commanding that other part to be silent as if looking it levelly in the eye and saying, almost aloud, ‘Not another word.’





articles

The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace: Defining voice of depression?

Beyond the Trouble, More Trouble By Elizabeth Wurtzel

THE UNFINISHED: David Foster Wallace’s struggle to surpass “Infinite Jest.”

happier note, here's his kenyon college speech without having to buy that cash-in book




*

p.s. Hey. If you have the time and are in the mood to read some brilliant and very sad writings this weekend -- and you people in the East Coast blizzard zone might be ideal targets (sorry) -- you might want to lift your finger off the track pad and run your eyes carefully through one or more of these David Foster Wallace essays, gathered for you by the inspiring writer and d.l. Postitbreakup. The rewards are great, so give it some thought, won't you? Thank you ever so much, Mr. P. Also, re: a different matter, if anyone out there has any guest-posts they want to build and send my/the blog's way, that would be a huge help to me as I'm in one of my occasional phases where a lot of real life plus lack of time/ inspiration is playing havoc with my post making abilities. So, if you have something you could give the blog and its readers, that would be really great, thanks. ** 5STRINGS, Hi. You're like ... what's that ... uh, Kris Kristofferson (?) quote, ... uh ... 'You're a walking contradiction, partly ... '. I forget the rest. Anyway, that can totally work, obviously. Me, I'm, like, ... I don't care about story-telling very much, and I love poetry, and I think the new writing is super fashion-y (in a good way), so, yeah. A friend of your mom's is into slave culture? How so? You gotta fill that out for me, man. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, D. Yes, the Cop Killer guy/story has made the news over here. I think his manifesto is what got the French intrigued. As I see you know by the FaBlog, that is quite a text there. I love all the TV references and stuff. It's not quite Unibomber level, but it was a nicely head scratchy read. ** Rewritedept, Hey. Cover looks nice. Yeah, you should probably put your name on there somewhere. Never read Svenonious's books. They're good? What are they? Nope, didn't listen to it yet, sorry. Life intrudes. It's on the conceptual turntable for this weekend. On the 'Hey Ma' related post, it's your call. Whatever you want. I think probably it should take place in one post, but it can be a giant one, you like. I know The Witch. I like The Witch. In fact, I'll go listen to them, but not until after the MBV owns me. I'll try to have a fun weekend. I'll figure something out. You too. ** Tonyoneill, Hi, Tony! Oh, wow, that's a good question, but, hm, let me go smoke a cigarette in the Recollets courtyard for a minute and think about that, and I'll be right back. ... Okay, it's a strangely hard question. I mean, there's the kind of hidden 'worlds' and 'corridors' that are in the structure of certain films themselves, like 'Marienbad' and 'Providence' and Robbe-Grillet films, and those tend to excite me the most. There's Lynch, pretty obviously, like that spooky hallway in the beginning of 'Lost Highway' where it seems like Bill Pullman and whole movie ends up getting lost. When I think about actual secret corridor stuff, I seem to end up thinking about kind of dumb blockbuster movies like, I don't know, Indiana Jones and 'Hellboy' and that sort of thing, or about certain horror movies like, uh, 'House of 1000 Corpses', or ... there's that kind of awful (to my mind) movie 'Cube' that's like a movie-as-puzzle. Hm, let me think about it more today and see if I can come up with much better examples 'cos I surely can. Weirdly, I still haven't listened to the new MBV. Kind of bizarre that I haven't. A time and place problem, but I absolutely will this weekend. You okay inside the blizzard? The latest news here has NYC being hit more by a ton of slush rather than by a ton of hardcore snow? More soon. Awesome to see you, T! ** David J. White, Hi, David! Yeah, I understand. Definitely the best idea is to take the story and form where you need/want them to go for your film and avoid slavishness 'cos that's always seem like a bad idea. I guess it's naturally hard for me to get out of my own thinking about the piece and how/why I made it, and that's just my problem. You know, like, in the fiction piece, the whole point is that it's the voice of the boy on the far left, and that's why the piece has that title, so changing that makes me confused because the film isn't about what the fiction piece was about, so, yeah, I just need to get my head around the change and figure out what the title means re: the film and stuff like that, which is nothing but interesting to do. So, yeah, mainly, thank you again so very much. ** Cobaltfram, Sounds like your comment yesterday got disappeared like comments here do sometimes for ultra-mysterious reasons. I'm so happy to hear that Chad liked 'The Sluts' so much. Yeah, obviously, that means a lot. Hm, my ranking of my own stuff, well, let's see ... I'm actually not as into 'The Sluts' as I am into most of my other novels, which is weird since it seems to be the most popular one. So, it would probably be down in the lower realms, which isn't really so low since I am proud of all my novels, rightly or wrongly. At this point, I'd put 'TMS' at the top, 'MLT' a close second, then, uh, either 'Guide' or 'Period', and then, after them, 'Try' and 'God Jr.', and then, after them, 'The Sluts', 'Closer', and 'Frisk', not necessarily in that order. I don't know. That would be my 'hierarchy' as of this morning. Austin, new Herzog, presumably seeing pals, ... very nice. Okay, have a great weekend in a high style of your choosing. ** Scunnard, Thanks, buddy. Oh, a Day coming from you would be a veritable life/blog saver, if it's easy and if you don't mind. Thank you! A thoroughly excellence-stuffed Saturday and Sunday to you. ** Bitter69uk, Hey, man! How are you doing? It's great to see you! Really glad you dug the Butoh and its related post. Actually, I once read an interview with VHoKB where Butoh was cited as a big influence, so there you go! Wow, really nice recent Nico post on your site! I'm going to go over that in detail later on. Everyone, d.l. bitter69uk has a superb looking post about Nico up on his always compelling Bitterness Personified blog, and you should really go check it out, and you can do that because it's as simple as being right here. Kudos, sir! ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Nice photos of the shows. Lookin' good. Everyone, do you want to go see visual evidence of a exhibition by Jutta Koether and another group show via the eyes and lens of _Black_Acrylic? Easy. ** Billy Lloyd, Hi, Billy. I agree about the Romantic era's betterness. I was only into the Renaissance period thing for a bit because I was in love with a guy who really was. You know how that goes. Our Recorder Consort group was hired to play at the annual Renaissance Faire, if you know what that is, and after six weeks of standing around all day amidst people dressed up in Renaissance costumes and talking in fake Shakespearean accents, I was way, way over that era. Really nice book covers. Simple but elegant and personal too, nice! Sure, I would love to read the advice you gave them if you don't mind copying and pasting. That would be great! The twins sound very cool and like unique dudes. And your relationship with them is very sweet, and it's no doubt being hugely influential for them. Oh, man, good luck getting that Monopoly game in your winning circle. ** Steevee, Slush attack: that's what the news is saying re: NYC and environs. We're getting slush here too today, but it's melting into dew at the ground's first touch. Good luck with all of that, my friend. ** Grant Scicluna, Hey! Yeah, starting every scene as though it's in action and barreling ahead was a big strategy. I'm really glad it was effective. Thank you so much! And thanks for not erasing the output from your keyboard cleaning. That was fun. And thank you yet again about the 'God Jr.' scene. You're so kind, Grant, that's so good of you. It always surprises people when I say this, but I don't like 'Salo'. But you have to understand that the Sade novel was massively important to me and changed my life and helped set my goals as a writer, so I'm not that objective. For me, the film is really reductive, and Pasolini's decision to ground it in politics is an interesting decision, but the complexity of the novel and characters' and authorial motivations is lost in part because of that decision, and I find the visualizations of the violence way too literal and theatrical, but I think trying to portray those kinds of horrors in an illustrative way is kind of a losing battle in general. So, yeah. But, like I said, the book is far too important to me to get my head out of it and see the film only for what it is. You and many others whose opinions I highly value love the film, so I know/ believe that the problem is my problem. You have a superb weekend too! ** Michael J Seidlinger, Hi, Michael! I'm so glad you came back! My pleasure, my honor, etc., etc., sir! Congrats, and I'm so happy to see the great response that 'MPS' seems to be getting across the board so far. Awesome! ** Sypha, I read that Rhode Island got one of those state of emergency things imposed on it, so, yeah, I assume you're pretty socked under. Enjoy it, and fingers crossed that your power doesn't fail you! ** Misanthrope, I haven't seen you this far down in the comments arena for ages. Good sign re: zzzz? The Chabon does sound tricky. Sounds kind of racist to me based on what you say. Maybe it's a parody of racism? I don't know. Curious to hear your final judgement once the covers are closed for good. ** L@rstonovich, Larsty, my old buddy! It's a heck of a great thing to see you, pal! What's up? What's good? What's new, what's old? Thanks for the Korine compilation! Much love, me. ** Un Cœur Blanc, Hi! Michaux is really wonderful, yes! I feel like reading him now. I feel like you must be getting the full effect of the blizzard where you live. Are you? If so, I hope its beauty outweighs its anchoring effect. Great weekend to you irregardless! ** Okay. Like I said, DFW, courtesy of Postit, will fill your weekend with major value, if you let him/them. See you on Monday.

________________
'The Titanic resort, 885 feet long, 11 stories high, weighing over 46,000 tons, and containing 1,200 rooms, would have been one of the most heavily themed fantasy resorts in Las Vegas. Our guests could have enjoyed the experience of staying aboard one of the ship's 800 state-rooms or at the adjoined Iceberg Hotel, which was to have included Ice Cave tunnels and an underwater glass people-mover to see the Iceberg's underbelly and shops. The concept was rejected by the Las Vegas City Council. This was proposed for the big lot across the strip from the Sahara.' -- collaged








___________________
'There's no skimping on details of how the luxurious $5-billion, 10,000-room, five-star, five-diamond, 250-acre Moon resort would have looked. The complex included the Moon Casino, replete with multiple levels of gaming floors that culminate in the all-night party that is the Metropolis Discotheque. At the center of the Resort complex there was the Crater Wave Pool, with its surrounding private pools and spas. The 500-foot pool was to have lapped gently to the rhythm of a true ocean tide. Guests could have frolicked in the Sea of Serenity Aquatic Center then pour themselves directly into the Crater Pool via waterslides. The Lunar Lander Lounge at the center of the Pool would have been accessible via glass underwater walkways beneath the Pool's surface.' -- collaged










____________________
'Jethro's Beverly Hillbillies Mansion & Casino is envisioned in this artist's rendering. Max Baer Jr., who played Jethro Bodine in the "Beverly Hillbillies" television series, proposed the casino/hotel complex in the 90s and wanted to build a 240-foot-high oil derrick with a 70-foot shooting flame to lure customers. After years of being in the works, the project never got off the ground and kind of sputtered out. On August 15, 2003, Max Baer Jr. was back. He announced that he and his partners had purchased a building to relaunch the project. The building they chose was formerly a Wal*Mart department store that had been abandoned.' -- collaged







_____________________
'The 3000-room The Palace of the Sea Resort and Casino looked very intriguing. The yachts in the harbor were to be high-roller suites. The Sky Wheel, would have been over 600 feet tall (another world record for Vegas). The casino/lobby building resembled the Sydney Opera House. The hotel weighed in at 60-floors and had a sail-like shape.' -- collaged






___________________
'Aimed directly at the baby-boomer demographic, The Addams Family Resort and Casino was another really bad idea.' -- collaged






_____________________
'Although Vegas is known for its surreal architecture and mega-resorts, this hotel would have brought a fresh new look to a thriving city. JDS/Julien de Smedt Architects in collaboration with artist Olafur Eliasson designed the Mondri and Elano Hotel in Las Vegas. They wanted to create a genuine experience while extracting the identity of the Mondrian and the Delano Hotels without producing copycat versions. Another goal was to balance the project’s large scale with the need for intimacy on a smaller scale. The project was cancelled in 2012.' -- collaged










_______________________
'There have been two locations for the London Resort and Casino, and both of them have had a giant observation wheel (from the Giant Wheel Co.) The resort was to have included a Harrod's department store, Big Ben, the Tower Bridge, a Piccadilly Square shopping area and many other London themed attractions.' -- collaged







____________________
'In 1993, the Desert Inn was purchased by ITT/Sheraton. The Desert Inn had a large surface parking lot to the south of the resort (which now holds Wynn Las Vegas). Their first plans were a Balinese Resort called Desert Kingdom.' -- collaged








___________________
'Protests from nearby neighbors helped to block construction of the original 800-foot ride at the Stratosphere. This Dream was proposed back in 2002. If it had been built, I'm sure that the Ivana, Allure and Liberty Towers would have chosen a different neighborhood. The roller coaster would have dropped passengers from the hotel's tower and across Las Vegas Boulevard at top speeds of 93 mph. Residents said the roller coaster would discourage new residents from moving in and contributing to the revitalization of the area.' -- collaged






___________________
'A knockoff of New York City's East Village in Las Vegas -- with its own version of the city's Meatpacking District and Washington Square was planned for 44 acres at the northwest corner of Tropicana Avenue and Paradise Road, converting the conspicuously idle acreage into a 1-million sq. ft. hotel-office-and-retail project. The 27-building, 959,645-square-foot, entertainment complex was being developed by Mark Advent, a developer of the New York-New York hotel-casino. "I've been hand-picking our tenants. I don't want it to look like a regional mall or life-style center that you'd see somewhere else", said Advent in 2007. The project was cancelled in 2011.' -- collaged









______________________
'In 1982 architect Martin Stern Jr. (the designer of the International and Xanadu) was commissioned to design a huge expansion for the Landmark. However, Landmark's owner Ed Wolfram was convicted of embezzling $47 million from his brokerage firm, Bell & Beckwith. The Hotel was seized and put up for sale and we all know the rest (in peace).' -- collaged






____________________
'A giant exhaust pipe shaped hotel. This rendering of the Harley Davidson Hotel and Casino uses the site directly east of The Palms on Flamingo Road.' -- collaged






____________________
'Montreux Las Vegas was Phil Ruffin's proposed replacement for the soon to be demolished New Frontier. The project was expected to open in early 2009. Montreux would have been a 2,750-room "Swiss-themed" hotel with a 104,000-square-foot casino and massive shopping mall linked directly to the Fashion Show Mall. It would have hosted an array of restaurants, bars and nightclubs, and a 465-foot-tall observation wheel (similar to the London Eye), that scooped riders from the floor above the casino.' -- collaged







______________________
'A massive, $5+ billion project—including what would be the largest casino on the Strip—bearing the Plaza's name was supposed to open in 2011, but there's been no construction on the massive lot since the hotel was put on hold in 2008. The plans include: Seven towers containing 6,700 keys (4,100 hotel rooms and 2,600 resort condominium units), 175,900 square feet of casino area (making it the largest casino on the strip), 134,500 square feet of restaurant area, 347,887 square feet of retail area, 539,607 square feet of convention space, a 50,000-square foot health club, a 1,500-seat theater, and 227,038 square feet of open space on the roof top of the podium that includes gardens and pool areas. The grand total for the project includes 3,317,400 square feet of parking garages and a total area of 15,080,846 square feet.' -- collaged








_______________________
'Entertainment designer Gary Goddard submitted an idea to the Las Vegas downtown redevelopment competition back in 1992 to build a full-scale USS Enterprise Resort. “My concept was to do something so large and so epic, it would fire the imaginations of people around the world," Goddard wrote. If it had actually happened, the Enterprise would have been immense. Goddard claims the $150 million attraction would have been made at full scale, and would have included all the “rooms, chambers, decks and corridors that we knew from the movie.” People would have gotten to dine in Starfleet comfort in its dining area, and some ideas for “interesting ride elements” were kicked around including “a high speed travelator that would whisk you from deck to deck.” Goddard put about five months of effort into the project and had the backing of the Paramount licensing team and the Las Vegas mayor and redevelopment crew, but ultimately it was studio chairman Stanley Jaffe who shot it down. “I don’t want to be the guy that approved this and then it’s a flop and sitting out there in Vegas forever,” Jaffe allegedly said.' -- collaged








*

p.s. RIP: Richard Artschwager. ** Postitbreakup, Hi, Josh! Mega-thanks for the DFW post. It was/is phenomenal, and, yeah, I'm very grateful. And thank you too for giving your attention and mind over to the Butoh post. And yet one more thanks, buddy, for the kind words re: 'MLT'. Oh, yeah, maybe I could ask for guest-posts on FB, but I try not to do too much on there for whatever reason. If desperate measures end up being called for, though, I probably will. Movies-wise, as far as fairly imminent ones, I'm most looking forward to the new Harmony Korine and, of course, the new Malick. Really, really good luck on the follow up interview. Try not to put too much importance into it and get too stressed out or feel like it's some kind of giant make or break thing or that, if you get a negative outcome, which very hopefully you won't, it speaks to your worth or lack there of because, man, it so doesn't. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, David. I think you know I was a friend and am still a fan of Jonathan's younger brother Danny, drummer extraordinaire with The Three O'Clock and The Quick. Well, I think most people of brains and note agree with you about 'Salo'. It's just one of those things. ** Cobaltfram, Really glad you got into the Butoh post. It's much harder to see that work performed now than it was back in the late 80s when it was 'hot' and 'trendy' in the theater/   performance world for a while. But, yeah, it's a very trippy, great theater form at its best. I don't really have strong feelings about Nicki Minaj one way or the other. I've liked her more eccentric stuff pretty well, and other stuff of her s just sounds like somewhat clever product to me. The pop/HH/flash genre she works in isn't really my thing as a general rule. Well, remember that I almost never reread my older books, so it could be that if I pulled 'Frisk or 'The Sluts' off the shelf and read them, I would like them more. Do ever write poetry? I often write poetry between fiction projects. ** Tosh, Hi, Tosh. Glad you enjoyed the DFW work, yeah. His passing was a very black day, both because I admire his work tremendously, and also because I had the privilege to know him personally a little. ** _Black_Acrylic, Obviously, great if you can get to Amsterdam for the Mike Kelley show. I'm heading up there on Friday. I hope you can work that out. That would be fantastic ** Sypha, Hi, James! I got your email/post, and it's really incredible! Thank you so much! I've put it together, and it'll launch here on Saturday, the 23rd. Yeah, it's a beautiful post, James, and I'm really grateful, as will be everybody here once they get their eyes on it. ** Grant maierhofer, Hi, Grant. Thank you a lot for emailing me the chapbooks and stuff! I really appreciate it, and I will try to overcome my emailing bad habits and get back to you asap. Did you go see Roggenbuck? I hope to get to see him be himself full frontal at some point. 'Bish Bosch', yeah, astounding. I haven't seen 'Bronson' yet. Have been meaning to for ages. I think your mention will be the trigger. Thanks for the link, man. I'll copy, paste, and click it when I get out of here. The best to you! ** Kyler, Hi Kyler! ** Bill, Hey. Thank you so much for your tremendous help re: the Butoh thing. I just put together said Ulli Lommel Day for, err, next week, I think. What a guy. Oh, I'm not sure if you saw my question the other day, but do you remember the name of that kind of kooky little museum in Amsterdam that I think you checked out when you were there last? I'm going up there this weekend, and I want to visit it, and I'm forgetting its name. Thanks. ** Steevee, Hi, Steve. Excited for your piece on 'Room 237', very. ** 5STRINGS, I have a pretty singing voice, apparently, but it's kind of fragile and weak, and it doesn't do me much good. Interesting family stuff. My family is weird, but they're pretty prim re: their bodies and stuff. Their brains are kind out of there though. Hm. Yeah, I'm sorry, but DFW was so incredibly not an ass either as a person or as a writer. I can't understand why you would say something like that about him, but life is life or something. ** Billy Lloyd, Love is the great deranger, god love it. Dude, you sound like an evil Monopoly genius, but in the good way, although you seem like you'd be scary to play the game with, but also in a good way. Thank you so much for posting the advice you gave to the twins. That was beautiful and kind (to them, to me) and so very wise through and through. I agreed with everything and felt lightbulbs turning on in my mind with every space break. Really, that was a total joy to read, Billy, and thank you so very much! ** David J. White, Hey again to you, David. No, that makes a lot of sense. Your approach and decisions, I mean. Thank you for explaining that. It's really interesting to be able to step outside the impulses I had and the decisions I made originally and see the source material differently. It's really cool. Yeah, thank you a lot! ** Scunnard, Life's good. Well, if you want to and can pull together a post, I'd be way chuffed and grateful, but only if it's fun and no problem for you. Sure, more project details, great, man. And a question is cool, of course. I'll try to get off my cyper-ass and answer it. ** Chelsea Kane, Hi, Chelsea! Thank you so much for coming in here! I remember meeting you in DUMBO. Cool. Sure, obviously, it would be very awesome to read that screenplay if you find it. You're coming over here? We should have a coffee or something if you want and have time. The Nouveau Festival will be happening at the Pompidou then, and that should have some cool stuff in it. I always recommend the Museum of Hunting 'cos it's genius and not at all like the name makes it sound. Hm, I'll have to check to see what else is happening here then. Anyway, yeah, great to see you! ** Thomas Moronic, Hi, T! Super great to see you! My weekend was okay. Got some snow, but it didn't stick to the earth. Hope yours ruled in some fashion. How are you? What's going on? ** Misanthrope, Sleep doofus, nice. Did you know that the word doofus was used for the first time in 1960? But they're not sure how it came about. I just looked that up. Oh, man, ugh, shit about your nephew getting arrested. And, obviously, about him doing the rock throwing thing. I mean, kids do random bad shit without the kind of developed conscience that you end up acquiring with age, etc., and hopefully the arrest shocked him into understanding how consequences work, at least. The follower thing, yeah. It's an awfully good thing that he has you to follow. Hopefully, he'll figure out that following you won't land him in the pokey. ** Paradigm, Hi, Scott! Thank you so very kindly about the in-progress post! That stalling going on in your writing right now is completely natural and part of the process, as I'm sure you know. The introduction and history of weeds in Australia ... that's a curious and very interesting thing right there. When were they introduced and why, if you can say? Talk about stalled: my novel is still very stalled out. I'm back in it mentally and thinking about it and trying to find the way forward, but I still can't seem to add much new writing to it. I don't know. I'm waiting for a breakthrough, and I assume it will come, or it won't, I guess. Thank you for asking. ** Rewritedept, Hi, Chris. That's a really intense and scary and moving story, man. Suicide is a tough one for me, so, yeah. I really appreciate that you feel okay to share that with me, and I'm, you know, touched and honored that you consider me to be a support system, and tears are okay. I felt some welling up when I read that. I did listen to it, but just once so far. I think it's pretty stunning, but, obviously, it needs to be listened to a lot for its greatness and gravity to get completely through, and at least I'm on my way. My weekend? Lowkeyish. It snowed a bit, which was nice. Was gonna meet up with Gisele, but she has the flu, poor thing. Worked some. Wandered about some. Finalized my upcoming trip to Amsterdam. Yury is very busy getting his fashion line ready for its upcoming launch, so I didn't see him much. Your story wasn't at a 'waah' thing, no, no way, and you aren't a whiny bitch either. No worries, and quite the opposite. Hope the shower was just the thing you needed. Oh, and I've got your hometown in the blog's spotlight today. How about that? ** Right. I've got a real 'never built' fetish, and Vegas's version of 'never built' has its own special something or other, so check it out, and see what you think. See you tomorrow.

'In Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s hyperliterate work -- whether video, installation or film, or a mixture of the two -- time and space are the media. She doesn’t set out to prove something; she’s more like a scientist building an experiment. The hypothesis behind a recent multi-media performance “K.62”: “What if the time you spent going to the theater was, in fact, more important than the performance itself?’” The piece, with its if-a-tree-falls-and-no-one-hears-it ambiguity (it seems Gonzalez-Foerster’s answer is yes) and cross-cultural references, is emblematic of a lot of her work.

'The artist builds environments layered with personal memories and cultural citations. Her short films have turned the spotlight on cities through a series of seemingly mundane experiences. She turned the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern into a dystopian vision of London’s future where you could pick up a copy of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds and read it under supersized versions of a public sculpture by Alexander Calder and Louise Bourgeois. At the Dia Foundation’s Hispanic Society, she built dioramas, with the help of the Natural History Museum, filled with books instead of fauna.

'In situations like this, ideas of beginning and end are meaningless. Her work relies, instead, on an audience to activate it. She presents the situation, and then it’s open to the audience to play the role of detective. But what about those people who left the performance? If they didn’t make it all the way to the big reveal, did they fully experience the piece? “It’s one of the possibilities,” says Gonzalez-Foerster. “It’s also one possibility that’s given to any audience at any show—to leave; why not? Maybe the person who left, she got out and then she did something else that she wouldn’t have done… it’s still connected. I would say this is the beauty of that structure. At one point, the way it’s set, it can include almost any accident or event.”

'If you follow that logic, then the community created with “K.62” includes the audience in the theater, all the Ks, and every one of the people they pass on their journeys. You could probably say that about everything -- the idea of the unfortunate butterfly who flaps his wings in China causing a rainstorm in Central Park -- but how often do you think about it? That’s the space where Gonzalez-Foerster works.

'To get to those questions, those elemental experiences, you have to shake things up, change some parameters, and maybe even get a little uncomfortable, she explains. It’s an artistic sentiment that spills into her real life, half of which is spent in her native France, the rest in Rio. “This is why I like to live in Brazil and, in a way, I would say ‘less-controlled’ environment—because the fact that certain things are less predictable makes me feel that I have to be more awake. It’s almost like something uncomfortable wakes you up, but then it means you’re also more conscious of nice things, you know?”

'That doesn’t mean she enjoys playing some sadistic game of puppet-master. It’s more of an Andy Kaufman-like attempt to wake people up. “At one point, yeah, you feel a bit evil, but then you also know it’s for the beauty of something.”

'This attempt to shake the status quo is why her work frequently references others, whether through appropriation or collaboration, with an audience, or with other artists. (With Balenciaga designer Nicolas Ghesquière, she deconstructed and rebuilt the concept of a retail store; she frequently works with the likes of Pierre Huyghe and Rirkrit Tiravanija).

'“I don’t believe in style and identity,” she says, suggesting that what she finds interesting instead is revealing those things that she is made of—the books and films and people and places that she’s encountered all her life. “For me, the whole thing is an endless chain. At one moment, as a person, you are one possible editing of all this material."' -- Heather Corcoran, Flaunt



___________________
Stills & installation shots
































_____
Further

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster Official Website
DG-F @ 303 Gallery
DG-F @ Esther Schipper Gallery
DG-F @ Anna Sanders Films
'DG-F: personal.public.space'
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster 'chronotopes & dioramas' @ Dia Foundation
'On DG-F's TH.2058' @ Tate Modern
DG-F's 'Six Rooms for Enrique Vila-Matas'
Podcast: Enrique Vila-Matas and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster: Live
Podcast: 'Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster: Private view with Adrian Searle'
'Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster is taking the town by storm'
'The Multi-Faceted Cinema of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster'
Books by and about DG-F



_______
Interview
by Hans Ulrich Obrist




I always felt that routine is the enemy of exhibitions.

DG-F: Yes. There is also something very slow in the art world. People build a stage for a concert in one day; they do more in one day than they do in a gallery space in a year in terms of activity. Of course each system has it’s timing, but once you have been dealing with other speeds it is really hard to go back to this slowness.

That is the great thing of Dave Eggers’ book [You Shall Know Our Velocity] which is about knowing all the velocities. It’s impressive to see a fashion show structure being installed in a museum: it is installed at 6 am, the fashion show takes place during the day and at 6 pm it is already away, in the van!

DGF: In a museum any wall is like a white canvas, so any gesture becomes very important. I am really tired of that!

The number of such expanded field examples in your work increased exponentially. I am thinking not only of the art projects, such as the house in Japan or the parks. We are sitting in the café of the Cité de la Musique where you were involved in a display of a sonic exhibition, “Espace Odyssée.”

DGF: Yes. I am very happy to look at any proposal coming from the most varied fields, where there is a certain program, an idea, some time and a fee. It’s not that I want to be totally subjective and go my own way. On the contrary, I want to interact with all types of questions. There is nothing new in this attitude. In the ’50s for example, there was a spreading of artists’ activities into other disciplines.

This position was also strong in the ’20s, in the Russian avant-garde.

DGF: Yes. The interaction with a diverse range of systems and structures was its radicality. There is something indulgent sometimes in the art world that I want to escape.

Recently somebody told me about the great landscape architect Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster! They didn’t know that you had an artistic background. There are other people who see your films at film festivals and talk about this young filmmaker. Suddenly you are gathering a multitude of identities.

DGF: I don’t want the films to be seen as artist’s films or the garden to be seen as an artist’s garden. I think it is important for artists to develop their role as producers or directors, which means providing a public situation for an audience — an exhibition, a theater piece or a film serve this purpose too. And for that you get a fee.

There’s a recurrent question in my interviews... what is your unrealized project?

DGF: The thing I have been dreaming of for some years is a swimming pool on the beach. This is why I went to Brazil; I wanted to make it there. It would be a kind of ‘tropical university’: a place, a swimming pool, with some umbrellas to create shades. You sit in the water on the beach and discuss your ideas and projects! It has never been realized until now.

What is your next project?

DGF: Writing a science fiction novel together with the artist Philippe Parreno.



_______________
11 works in motion

_______________
DG-F Shortstory(2009)






________________
DG-F Return to Noreturn (2012)
'"Six months after returning from the Land of Oz, Dorothy Gale has become a melancholic child who cannot sleep, as she is obsessed with her memories of Oz." Gonzalez-Foerster uses this quote of Walter Murch’s 1985-film Return to Oz as a starting point for her solo show "Return to Noreturn" at the gallery. Like Dorothy revisits Oz in her dream, the artist returns to her film Noreturn (2009), which was shot at the exhibition "TH.2085" in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, to decompose and rearrange its content. Various elements that appear in the film, such as a red and green curtain or the yellow and blue bunk beds are presented as separate pieces. The film itself is shown in the second space and marks the end of the exhibition.'-- Esther Schipper Gallery






_________________
DG-F Exotourisme Trailer (2012)
'As a result of the prestigious Prix Marcel Duchamp that she received last autumn, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster developed Exotourisme for the Centre Pompidou. It is an installation in which film, music and sound play an important role. The visitor is taken to a specific place in the museum where he sees an enormous screen that has been located in an unusual architectural setting. On the screen, a (video) film is projected that is a cross between a fragment from a science-fiction film from the early 1960s, a liquid wheel and an LSD trip.'-- Rotterdam Film Festival






_______________
DG-F T. 1912 (2011)
'The sinking of the Titanic on April 14, 1912, has continued to move and fascinate for generations. Artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster created a site-specific staged audience experience in the Guggenheim Museum's rotunda, inspired by this historic event and wherein the audience played a role. Gavin Bryars's The Sinking of the Titanic was be at the core of the installation, performed by The Wordless Music Orchestra.' -- The Guggenheim






__________________
DG-F & Ange Leccia Des Film à Faire(2008)
'Short film from a series of works by various artists under the rubric Stories on Human Rights.'-- artfortheworld001






_______________
DG-F Atomic Park(2004)
'Atomic Park, made by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster in 2004, begins in blown out color before snapping to grainy monochrome as it tracks a car entering White Sands National Monument in New Mexico, home to the Trinity nuclear test site. From a distance we watch a family share a picnic and play in the sand dunes. The surveillance video quality of the footage and our knowledge of the park’s history would be enough to inject menace into the vacation scene before us, but Gonzalez-Foerster does not stop there. Bubbling to the surface of the soundtrack are snatches of dialogue from The Misfits, Marilyn Monroe’s cry “MURDERERS” bringing Atomic Park from disquiet observation to outright indictment.'-- Union Docs






__________________
DG-F and Ari Benjamin Meyers T.451(2012)
'This is a small part of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Ari Benjamin Meyers performance T.451 which took place in Stockholm at the 27th of May 2012 and was captured on film by me, an audience member. The performance was inspired by François Truffaut's film Fahrenheit 451 from 1966 and its original music score by Bernard Herrmann. The movie was in turn based upon Ray Bradbury's dystopian novel of 1953 with the same title. Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which paper spontaneously ignites. The "T" in T.451 may account for Tensta, which is a suburb of Stockholm where the performance took place, but perhaps also for "Text".'-- Olle Sellfors








_________________
DG-F from Parc Central(2008)
'A collection of 11 short poetic psycho-geographic portraits of cities and spaces from artist Dominique Gonzelez-Foerster. This collection of films from cities across the globe provides further evidence of Gonzalez-Foerster's unmistakable sense of urban ambience and tropical melancholia. In a conversation between the artist and Jacques Ranciere published in Art Press, the philosopher, reflecting on the dialogue between East and West in her work, observes, "What is interesting is what they over there have done with what they borrowed from us here. You don't get that here, maybe because we have the idea that there are no more journeys left." That may be the case, but after seeing Gonzalez-Foerster's films I want to go places: Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia, Taipei, and of course Japan, though I'm not sure if her Japan really exists or whether it's a semiotic fantasy after Roland Barthes.'-- Daniel Birnbaum, Artforum



Hong Kong


Taipei


Kyoto


Buenos Aires




*

p.s. Hey. ** Armando, Hi, Armando. Yes, I read about that anniversary yesterday, and there seemed to be a lot of people marking the occasion by paying tribute to her, so I think your hope is being realized, which is obviously a very good thing. ** Grant Scicluna, Hey. Oh, Vegas is such a singular place, unlike anywhere else in the world, hideous and amazing, an extravagant, crystalline example of humankind's peculiar notions of pleasure and utopia, and, for that reason, I think it's a place that's very good to experience, in a small dose, at least. I wonder what I would think of 'Salo' if I wasn't so attached to the novel. I really don't know. I'm sure I would like it more, but I'm strangely not a Pasolini fan in general. I respect his work, and I can see why it's important, but it has never spoken to me. Strange, I know. So thrilled that you think so highly of 'A Man Escaped', of course. That makes my heart more heart-like. Yeah, I can imagine that 'Mala Noche' hasn't stood up incredibly well, and also that it remains charming. I haven't seen or talked to Gus in years now, but we were quite friendly, and I think we would still be quite friendly if our orbits intersected, which they undoubtedly will. ** Misanthrope, Hi, G. Arguing with the liquored-up is a dodgy prospect, true. It can be interesting, though. All that loosened up internal world stuff of theirs to fish around in and work with or something. I just looked up the origin of the word dork, and the word originated as a term that refers to a blue whale's penis. How it transformed into the term we use today seems to be a mystery. ** Scunnard, Yeah, chuffed sometimes leaps into my vocabulary, and I have no idea why. It's kind of a nice sounding word that doesn't sound like it would mean happy. That might be it. Something pulled together would be way sweet, buddy. All is well here, and there? ** Wolf, Wolf! I've been wondering where and how you are. And now you're here, and I am very happy. Very chuffed. 2 or 3 giant, life-changing decisions at the same time? Wow, I don't know. Like ... 1 decision that has 3 parts that have to fit together properly or something? I can add my intuition or pragmatism or whatever to the dilemma if you want to tell me more, and if a caring outsider's take would help. I would so totally love to see you in Paris. Those intended dates are tricky 'cos I'll be away from Paris from the 8th to the 11th. Grr. Are your dates flexible? Mine aren't, unfortunately. Can we make this happen? Please say yes. I'll be around here except for those four days. We got soggy snow, a couple of hours of it, but it died on impact with the earth. Hardly counts. No, totally, the Moon Hotel is The One. That it never existed is a crime worthy of a Hague trial. Buddy, I'm so thrilled to see you! ** Billy Lloyd, Sad love story. When I was 16, I was in love with this boy who was a vegetarian, and I became a vegetarian to impress him, and, literally, the day after I became a vegetarian, he went back to eating meat again, and I stayed vegetarian defiantly so he wouldn't think I was pathetic, and I'm still a vegetarian, so I guess that's kind of some weird version of undying love or something. I'm too laid-back and LA to play games with people who really, really want to win. It always freaks me out, and I always just end up quitting. So, maybe I'll just watch you play sometime if I ever get the chance. The advice you gave to the twins is definitely the kind that will sink in slowly over time. I bet it'll be their Bible or something. That does sound like an interesting new song. I'm very interested in that combination of types of people in my work, so, yeah, I'm very curious to see how that turns out. Could be amazing. ** Cobaltfram, Very happy to have made your day. Yury's launch is in very early March, I think. A related blog post, sure, I think I can do that. Yikes! That song/vid you linked me to is quite a song/vid. Can't imagine you'll have too much trouble getting middle schoolers on board. Working on the genre novel is a good in-between project occupation even though it's not really in-between, I guess. Be as patient as you can re: NYC news. This phase of careerdom can feel very, very, very slow. ** David Ehrenstein, Danny is a higher up guy at a record company, and, one of the bands he was in -- the great Three O'Clock -- is reuniting to play Coachella this year, so I think he's doing good. I don't think anyone has ever been 'all over me', but it's a nice thought. ** Tosh, See what I told you about my 'never built' fetish? Even Downtown Vegas doesn't have much seedy in it anymore, or not when I was last there ten years or so ago. Still can't believe they closed the Liberace Museum. Have a slight hope that the Soderbergh HBO biopic might give it a second life somewhere. ** 5STRINGS, I'm always afraid that I'm going to cry when I hear my voice too. I'm not buff. Sturdy, maybe. Seems like we shouldn't talk about DFW anymore, so let's not. What did you have done to your hair? Installation art does 'new' like nobody's business sometimes. It's in interesting effect, kind of logical, I guess. ** Bill, I agree about the Star Trek hotel. I don't see how it could have failed, actually. Yes, Het Illuseum, that's it. I totally spaced out. Thank you! And the Vrolik, that's a good one too, thanks again! I'm going up there on Friday, coming back on Sunday night. What did desperation give you? Luckily, desperation can be the font of genius given the proper aligning of certain biological stars. ** Alan, Hi, Alan. ** Rewritedept, Hi. Leaky bong, suckage, sorry. And about your jeans. I only have two pairs of jeans too. Well, three if you count the really holey ones that are hard to pull off wearing with any style. Ah, so you're anti-crazy big hotels. That's interesting. I wish they had all been built, but that's easy for me to say in Paris. The Amsterdam trip is completely for pleasure. Never been to Reno. Can't even picture what it looks like. I guess that imagine a pint-sized Vegas with less high end, moneyed up hotels. ** Empty Frame, Hey, man! Good to see you, pal. Those drawings sound very awesome, of course. Glad to hear that you're doing the wise spending of your time thing. 'How's My Drinking'! Your day was set! ** Thomas Moronic, Hi, T! Sorry about he heavy shit with the kids at school. Life is so fucking unfair so often to kids. Guest posts, dude, thank you so kindly. I hope you got some good sleep, and that things have settled down in some way today. ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hi, Jeff. Glad you're with me on the might-have-been of Vegas. What are the freelance jobs? Hard to say? I know both of those French publishers by name, but I don't have an immediate impression of them. Do you want me to check around about them? No problem if you do. You know, I can't even think of the last film I saw. I seem to be completely out of the habit lately. I don't know why. What have you seen and especially liked? ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. I always found Artschwager's work hard to feel passionate about, but I did quite like some of his things, and I always admired how singular and on his own track he was. Great about you scoring the trip to see the Mike Kelley! I can give you my thoughts and report early next week, if you like. Sure, I would be totally into doing that conversation for YnY. I would be honored. Thank you wanting and asking. ** Paradigm, Hi, Scott. I agree with you about architecture, I think. Yeah, I do. Oh, so 'weed' is a much more general term than I had thought, but that makes total sense. The backstories sound really fascinating. It really does sound like a rich area to do work in and around. Yeah, obviously, I guess, let it take the form it will take. It's good you have a clear preconception, though. Allowing content-driven mutations is one of the excitements of writing. I hope so re: my novel. I am having a hard time shaking off the feeling that the novel, as written so far, is all wrong and a failure. I think it will or would need major work, and I have to decide if I can find a way to salvage and transform it. Hard to tell right now. Not a great time, writing-wise. Thank you so much about the Day! And please have a great, great one. ** Sypha, The Moon one is my number one. Good, hopefully the post and reaction will have some kind of curative powers. I can't imagine that they won't. ** Steevee, Basically the same here in France re: the coverage of the Pope's resignation, although with maybe more noting of the strange lack of noting of his Hitler Youth past. ** Chris Dankland, Hi, Chris! I know, the Moon one, holy shit! Want. You should definitely check out Vegas for real at some point. It's like this insane experimental Outsider Artwork. Kind of a must at least once in a lifetime. I got the post you sent me! Thank you so, so much! It's superb, and I got it set up while I was coffeeing this morning, and it'll pop up here on Wednesday, the 20th. You rule, man, and thank you again so very much! Excellent day to you and yours! ** Un Cœur Blanc, Hi! No, I haven't gotten it yet, but, as I think I've said before, the US-to-France mailing time is very unpredictable. I'll let you know when I do, and thank you kindly, my friend. Saki sounds like a lovely weapon against blizzard. Or a great friend for a blizzard maybe. Hm, let me think about your question re: the sea. I can't think of anyone at this second, but I'm sure I can with further thought. Love, me. ** Okay. My galerie houses a show by the super interesting artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, and, if you don't know her work, I hope that by the time you've explored the show, you'll feel like your attention span was successfully targeted. See you tomorrow.

it's been a fun-filled and jam-packed year so far. got a new camera and went from 5 to 16 megapixels. visited the bay area twice: a day trip to san jose with dylan to get groceries for lunar new year, and a trip to SF with sheila and steve to see ian hunter at the fillmore. met mike bordin from faith no more at the mill valley market. and also i just walk around my little town and, you know, take pictures. here's a big ol' stack for your perusal and hopefully your enjoyment.











be my valentine?

















































the city-block sized abandoned rose nursery in SF. i could do a whole post about that place sometime.









DN in SJ









oh california, i love you.





san jose haul









mike bordin. nice guy. most outrageous dreads i've ever seen on a white guy. sheila told him about when we used to go to the record store and mike patton would wait on us when he was a teenager. after this, he walked up the hill with his bag of organic oranges. that should have been my life. mill valley rocks. it's also expensive as fuck.









north beach, SF. i couldn't even go IN there. too much fun.





for math tinder









mrs lennon.

















fillmore chandelier





still rockin' at 73

















me and sheila in golden gate park. bike rental: 5 bucks an hour. photo: steve stratton.





SF haul: punk history books, velvet underground book, eileen myles, john waters, carnivorous plants and more.






*

p.s. Hey. Today, legendary and long-term d.l. plus noted photographer/video and music maker Michael Karo does Northern California with his trusty, well-connected camera, and you are hereby invited to piggyback the results. Please do, seriously, thanks, and thanks galore to Mr. Karo. ** Misanthrope, Perhaps. A really big blue dick no less. Don't know. Meaning erodes in mysterious style. Oh, I don't know, call me whatever, but I keep thinking they'll reach a budget deal even as they use our trusting natures to politic their asses off. Hope so. Don't panic yet. ** Scunnard, Got it. Everything's groovy now. It's all put together and in place. You and everybody else will see it on Tuesday, the 26th. You are a sublime saint for making it, and your name is a GbV song running through my head until further notice. Chuffed, chafed in a positive sense, oh yeah, that's interesting. ** Pilgarlic, Hey, old buddy! Great to see you, pal! Man, such very sad stuff about Tybee. It breaks my heart, even as your lyrical paean to the place intersects my sympathy with feelings of wonder. I'm so sorry, man. I do want to get the new Neil Young. Maybe today. He/Crazy Horse are playing here in a few months, and I might go see them, although the venue is huge and kind of off-putting. I was really surprised that no one until you noted that East Village hotel/complex. It was such a wimpy disaster of an intended thing. Thanks for your thumbs up on the idea of contacting George's brother. Well, if the guy I'm going to contact is actually George's brother, because I still don't know for sure. Yeah, I think it's important to do for a bunch of reasons, and one is that I'm about 60% sure my George novel is an unsalvageable disaster, and it's probably desperate measures time if I have any hope of saving it, and I don't have a ton of hope re: that, but maybe just maybe that reality check could make a difference. Anyway, I'm gearing up to make the approach. And, yeah, I really appreciate your support and kind thoughts on that front. ** David Ehrenstein, Hey. As Grant said, I was saying that I could imagine 'Mala Noche' might not hold up in relation to his thoughts thereby. I haven't seen it in many years. No, my 'Porcile' viewing and studying didn't really change my relationship to Pasolini's stuff. Maybe one of these days, or maybe not, who knows? ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hi, Jeff. Next time I'm around knowledgeable folk, I'll at least make a casual enquiry re: those presses, and if anything useful transpires, I'll let you know. LHotB has been on a long hiatus. A few books I really wanted to snag wound up at publishers that were understandably more appealing to those books' authors. I need to get back on the LHotB horse, and I'm angling towards doing that. Wow, you've seen a bunch of films. I haven't seen any of those except for 'Amour'. I will definitely investigate 'Szinbad'. I'm sold. No, I didn't see the recent Garrel. It slipped by and away, but I'll haul it in somehow ere long, I think. ** Cobaltfram, Hi, John. 'Art is hard.' Truer words hath ne'er been spoke. I think he's doing fine, very busy, nervous, ... Like I think I said before, I've hardly seen him lately due to said busyness, but I think he's fine. The publishing stuff is murder on everyone. Other than Steven King, etc., I guess. I think I'll be free around 7-ish. Not completely sure at this moment, but probably. Let's check in when you wake up, and try to sort that out if we can. ** Wolf, Hi, Wolfster. I got to know DG-F a bit recently as she's friendly with Gisele. She's a super great person. I like her personally a whole lot. 13th - 19th should work just fine for me, yeah. That would be really great! And let's Skype, for sure. I'm mostly around until Friday when I go to Amsterdam, and then I'll be mostly around again from Monday onwards. Most any time. Let's coordinate by email, I guess? That Ribollita looks so delicious. I would love a batch. A batch would kill what ails me, clearly. Love to you! ** MANCY, Hi! So happy that the intro made it through to you. Cool. MBV seems pretty sublime, yeah. Haven't heard the new Iceage yet. I just saw that it can be streamed on Pitchfork, so I'm heading over there today. I got tickets to finally see them live here in a few weeks, which I'm very excited about. ** _Black_Acrylic, Glad you were intrigued, thanks. The review, cool. I'll get to it pronto. Everyone, the one and only _Black_Acrylic has reviewed a new show by the interesting artist Jutta Koether, and that's your cue to do yourselves a favor and read it right here. ** David J. White, Hi, David. Oh, I like 'Philosophy in the Bedroom' very much, of course. It's definitely my favorite of his shorter works. What's the project that you're thinking of being associated with? A film? I could see it making the transition into film fairly well, I think. ** Grant Scicluna, Hi, man. Thanks re: the DG-F work, and I'm happy to have eased your qualms re: Vegas. It's only what it is, but it's definitely what it is in an inimitable way. And thank you too about the 'AIDS' piece. That was the hardest thing I ever had to do as a journalist. I hope everything goes amazingly well on Friday. Let me know. ** Steevee, Yikes, I'm glad your mom's break is a painless one at least. ** Sypha, Oh, so you know the routine then. Good to know what to expect, obviously. The 'Grindhouse' project sounds awesome, and it sounds like a fun and stress-free, at least relatively, project is probably a great thing for you to do right now in terms of getting you back in the groove in general. ** Rewritedept, Hi. Maybe it's like living in a neighborhood that straddles Disneyland or something, but without the $90 fee to enter. I imagine that would suck the magic out the place. Okay, Reno, sounds okay, if that's your plan and not just the alcohol's momentary daydream or something. There's only one House with Boys left, and it's the one that was always the worst one, which is weird, and I won't be patronizing it while I'm there in any case, no. Congrats about the push-ups upgrade. I don't know if I could even do one of them. Don't think I'll try to find out. Thanks for the info about the Svenonious book. I'll check around for it. ** Postitbreakup, What is a coding test? Man, crossed and swollen and multiplied fingers for you on that. Cool, I don't know that Lynch short film. Thank you! Everyone, Postitbreakup has hooked up anyone who's interested to a new short film by David Lynch called 'Idem Paris' and you can both read about it and watch it here. ** Chris Dankland, Hi, Chris. Thank you, and I'm glad that the work was of interest. Oh, cool that you get to read much less review the new Tao novel. Obviously, I'm super jazzed to read that novel. That Gabby Gabby review that you might or might not have written was excellent and got me to immediately get that book, so thanks and kudos maybe to you. Excited to read your thoughts on 'Taipei', very! Thank you for everything, man. ** Billy Lloyd, Not a bad story of your life if you have to have a life story, and I guess we all do. It was very endearing. You know, genius resides in that tricky, blurry area between awesome and embarrassing, or that's kind of always been my thinking. You have to go for it. I have total faith in your instincts. You've never given me any reason not to go whole hog in the faith department. Interesting about your presentation. I guess I think I know what your opinion on that is. But ... hm. How did it go? Are you chilling post wowing them now? ** Okay. May the rest of your day be filled with Michael Karo's visions of No. Cal., and take care until I see you again tomorrow.

'The hooky yet hard-edged, guitar-driven musical style known as power pop didn’t generate spontaneously. There were threads and uprisings—disconnected sounds that later combined into something like a movement—as early as the late ’60s, when some young rock-‘n’-roll fans were already starting to rebel against rock’s increasing pretensions and ponderousness. The impulse that led to power pop was already alive in the network of collectors of obscure ’60s garage-rock singles, and in the creators of the disreputable pop hits classified as “bubblegum.” Some key songs by Badfinger and The Move were power pop before the genre really existed, and once the sound became more viable and widely imitated, it was easier to trace the roots of the genre back to rockabilly, doo-wop, girl groups, and the early records of The Beatles, The Byrds, The Beach Boys, The Kinks, and The Who.

'Power pop evolved throughout the ’70s and early ’80s, running parallel and sometimes absorbing other trends like glam rock, pub rock, punk, new wave, college rock, and neo-psychedelia. But for the core power-pop sound—the one that came closest to breaking through to the mainstream and challenging ’70s rock radio’s preference for grandiosity—the best place to start is with The Raspberries. The Cleveland band’s 1972 single “Go All The Way” (written by lead singer Eric Carmen) is practically a template for everything the genre could be, from the heavy arena-rock hook to the cooing, teenybopper-friendly verses and chorus. The body of the song was The Who; the soul was The Beach Boys. The Raspberries only lasted five years, breaking up in 1975; and they only recorded four albums, of which only the twin 1972 releases Raspberries and Fresh really fulfill the promise of “Go All The Way.” Still, The Raspberries’ initial fusion of fist-pumping guitars and sugary melodicism—and the chart success they had at the start—inspired young rockers across the Midwest.

'While The Raspberries didn’t last long enough or stay true enough to popularize power-pop, the genre’s next big band had a stronger impact. Cheap Trick, formed in Rockford, Illinois in 1973, were pegged by critics early as one of the great hopes for the survival of meat-and-potatoes American rock ’n’ roll. Less cutesy and more muscular than The Raspberries, Cheap Trick really picked up the post-Beatles mantle of Badfinger, and gave it some middle-American blue-collar beef. Cheap Trick spent the next decade as solid sellers, while scoring the occasional chart breakout, but the band warred with its own sound throughout the ’80s, sometimes embracing pop, and sometimes rebranding as a mainstream hard-rock group, complete with power ballads and glammy videos. The reasons for Cheap Trick’s identity crisis may have had something to do with the trouble power pop had catching on—not just with the public, but with the top rock critics of the era, who were frequently distrustful of the genre’s elements of sweetness and simplicity. Even the acts that the critics did embrace often languished in obscurity, as Cheap Trick did in the early going.' -- A.V. Club







____
Shoes
'The brilliant quintessence of American power pop hails from Zion, Illinois and began by recording at home on a 4-track, which resulted in a self-released LP that attracted national attention and (eventually) a major-label contract. Bassist John Murphy, guitarists Jeff Murphy and Gary Klebe and drummer Skip Meyer blend electric guitar — loud, distorted and multi-tracked, yet sweet — with breathy, winsome vocals to create melodic rock made most impressive by the strength of three equally talented singer/songwriters.'-- Trouser Press



'Too Late'


'Now and Then'


'Cruel You'


______
Pezband
'Formed in the late seventies, Pezband combined Beatles-esque melodies with a gritty rock ‘n roll edge. The band released three studio albums from 1977 till 1979, all of which were critically acclaimed. Rolling Stone cited their 1978 sophomore release, Laughing In The Dark as one of the best albums of the year, and Billboard and Trouser Press sang their praises as well. However, Pezband’s adoring reviews didn’t translate into album sales, and the band broke up shortly after they released their third studio album in 1979, Cover to Cover.'-- Chicagoist



'Love Goes Underground'


_________
The Bongos
'The Bongos emerged from Hoboken, and Manhattan's New Wave and No Wave venues such as Tier 3 and the Mudd Club, with a guitar-driven pop that belied a strong influence of the avant-garde. What set them apart from other such groups of the era were their sudden guitar outbursts or saxophone improvisations that echoed the work of Lou Reed, Ornette Coleman, or Captain Beefheart within the context of a pure, melodic pop song. In addition, unlike many of their peers, the group explored unabashedly sensuous dance rhythms that made their recordings dancefloor favorites.' -- collaged



'In the Congo'



____________
Great Buildings
'Great Buildings was one of a series of bands that were part of Columbia Records "Developing Artists" series in the early 80's. (Paul Collins' Beat, The Laughing Dogs, 20/20, Tommy Tutone and others) Danny Wilde and Ian Ainsworth (former singer/guitarist and bassist with Los Angeles Sparks-loving glam/bubblegum band The Quick) went on to form Great Buildings. They recorded the Apart From The Crowd album for Columbia in 1981 before breaking up a short time later. Danny Wilde went on to release several solo albums for Geffen before teaming up again with Solem to form the Rembrandts.'-- Powerpop Presents



'Another Day in My Life'



__________
Phil Seymour
'Born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Phil Seymour is probably best remembered for his time with the Dwight Twilley Band, who turned out some of the finest pop songs of their era, including the classic "I'm on Fire." After two albums (1976's Sincerely and 1978's Twilley Don't Mind), Seymour left to pursue a solo career. While waiting for a recording deal, he began recording solo sessions, as well as contributing session work for Tom Petty, 20/20, and Moon Martin. His self-titled debut was well received at the time (the single "Precious to Me" made it to number 22 on the pop charts) and has become highly revered in power pop circles as one of the landmark albums of the era. In 1984, Seymour was diagnosed with lymphoma. He returned to Oklahoma, carrying on at a diminished pace and recording infrequently, until the disease took his life on August 17, 1993 in Tulsa.'-- allmusic



'Love Receiver'


_______________
The Three O'Clock
'The Three O'Clock were the quintessential L.A. Paisley Underground band. Lead singer and bassist Michael Quercio in fact coined the term to describe the set of bands, including the Dream Syndicate, Rain Parade, Green On Red and the Bangles, who incorporated the chiming guitars of the Byrds and the Beatles into their pop songs with a psychedelic bent, and the clothes to match. Their final album and first for Warner Brothers/Paisley Park (Prince was a fan), proved to be their undoing, as they never really fulfilled the label's expectations and Quercio refused to be pigeonholed as a pretty-boy pop star or spokesperson for the premature retro revival.' -- collaged



'With a Cantaloupe Girlfriend'


'Fall to the Ground'


'Jet Fighter'



___________
Off Broadway
'The year is 1980, and Chicago based power pop outfit Off Broadway has just released their first album, ON. The critically acclaimed debut album includes the singles “Stay in Time” (which reached #51 on the Billboard Hot 100) and “Full Moon Turn Your Head Around,” and goes on to sell nearly 300,000 copies in Chicago alone (more than most modern bands sell on a national level). The music industry is buzzing over this young Midwestern power pop band, and a bidding war amongst over a dozen major record labels begins. In the end, Off Broadway signs with Atlantic, but the glitz and glamour of being on a major label never come into fruition for Off Broadway.' -- Chicagoist



'Bad Indication'



____
20/20
'One of the key bands in the Los Angeles power pop explosion of the late 1970s and early ‘80s, 20/20 never quite scored a hit single, but they were a powerful draw on the West Coast in their heyday, and their signature song, "Yellow Pills," became a cult favorite, covered by a number of later power pop acts and providing a noted pop fanzine with its name. In 1978, the group came to the attention of Greg Shaw, who was documenting the new L.A. pop scene with his label Bomp Records. Bomp released 20/20's debut single, "Giving It All" b/w "Under the Freeway," which earned enthusiastic reviews as the group worked the L.A. club circuit. Portrait Records, a subsidiary of CBS, signed the group, and 20/20 went into the studio with producer Earle Mankey (formerly of Sparks) to cut their first full-length album. The LP, simply titled 20/20, received rave reviews, but while "Yellow Pills" received scattered airplay on progressive outlets around the country, radio didn't embrace the single as they had with the Knack's "My Sharona" (doubtless due to the song's oblique drug references).' -- collaged



'Yellow Pills'


'Nuclear Boy'


'Remember the Lightning'



_______
The Boys
'Although the Boys never achieved massive commercial success, their music legacy has been carried on by influence. German punk band Die Toten Hosen championed their music for more than a decade, covering several songs and introducing new fans to the Boys. They also recorded cover versions of some songs, namely "First Time" and "New Guitar in Town" for their album Auf dem Kreuzzug ins Glück - 125 Jahre die Toten Hosen and "Brickfield Nights" for the cover album Learning English, Lesson One. In the late 1990s, Japanese band Thee Michelle Gun Elephant had a hit with a Boys cover. This prompted the re-release of several Boys albums with encouraging international sales (more than 30,000 albums being sold in Japan alone).' -- collaged



'Brickfield Nights'



__________
The Records
'Like the Motors, the Records were reborn pub-rockers, who made a giant leap into the present by leaving their history behind and starting afresh with finely honed pop craftsmanship and the full-scale record company support they had never previously enjoyed. While the Motors went for grandiose production numbers, the Records — led by ex-Kursaal Flyer drummer/songwriter Will Birch — made sharp, tuneful confections that offered maximum hooks-per-groove in a classic Anglo-pop style not unlike the Hollies, with similarly brilliant harmonies and ringing guitars.'-- Trouser Press



'Starry Eyes'



___________
The Plimsouls
'From inception, the Plimsouls, formed by singer, guitarist and songwriter Peter Case (who had previously fronted power pop band The Nerves), quickly became a crowd favorite in the Los Angeles club scene. Long Beach promoter Stephen Zepeda signed the group to his Beat Records label for a five-song EP called Zero Hour. Guitarist Eddie Muñoz joined the group during the recording of the EP. The band achieved national popularity in 1983 when the single release "A Million Miles Away" was included on Valley Girl's motion picture soundtrack and became a minor hit. The band, which also appeared on camera in the film performing the song and parts of two others, quickly re-recorded the song for inclusion on a second album, Everywhere At Once, produced by Jeff Eyrich, but broke up shortly after.'-- collaged



'A Million Miles Away'


'Now'



______
The Pop
'The Pop recorded two albums for Arista in the late ’70s, but could never shake the impression that they were little more than an attempt to build the ideal power-pop band from scratch. The Pop believed in the new DIY values of the punk ethic and their first LP shows it. It is an eclectic powerful combination of Punk meets Pop and two of the album's songs, "Down On The Boulevard" and "Animal Eyes" soon became authentic anthems on the Southern California music scene, mostly through air-play on The Rodney Binginheimer radio show on KROQ and the bands extensive clubs dates up and down the coast. The Pop called it quits on July 4, 1981.' -- collaged



'Go!'


______
The dBs
'The dBs released their first album, Stands for Decibels, in 1981, to critical acclaim but negligible sales. Their sound was a modernized version of earlier power pop, with precise arrangements and highly accomplished instrumental work. Chris Stamey and Peter Holsapple were the band's songwriters, and while Holsapple was skilled in the composing of fairly straightforward tunes such as "Big Brown Eyes" and "Bad Reputation," Stamey's songs, which include "Espionage" and "Tearjerkin'," tended to be somewhat more experimental. They released a second album in 1982, Repercussion, which built upon the strengths of the first album, and also released singles such as "Judy." These two albums, recorded on the British label Albion, have since been reissued on one compact disc.'-- collaged



'Black and White'


__________
Cheap Trick
'Combining a love for British guitar pop songcraft with crunching power chords and a flair for the absurd, Cheap Trick provided the necessary links between '60s pop, heavy metal, and punk. Led by guitarist Rick Nielsen, the band's early albums were filled with highly melodic, well-written songs that drew equally from the crafted pop of the Beatles, the sonic assault of the Who, and the tongue-in-cheek musical eclecticism and humor of the Move. Their sound provided a blueprint for both power pop and arena rock; it also had a surprisingly long-lived effect on both alternative and heavy metal bands of the '80s and '90s, who often relied on the same combination of loud riffs and catchy melodies.'-- allmusic



'Way of the World'


'Come On Come On'


'She's Tight'




*

p.s. Hey. So, tomorrow I'm going to Amsterdam for the weekend. As far as you're concerned, this means that the p.s. tomorrow is likely to be a bit rushed as I try to get it done pre-departure time. On Saturday, you will get a hopefully lovely rerun post and no p.s. per say. On Monday, everything will be back to normal with a new post, full p.s., etc., at which point I will catch up with the comments from both Friday and Saturday ** Scunnard, Hi. Certain things (age, location, general profession, etc.) about the seeming brother of George match, and others (for instance: wow, does he look different, if that's him, etc.) make me wonder. Mm, I just want him to be the right guy, I guess. I don't like the uncertainty. A friend of mine is going to make the initial contact with him for me to see if he's the guy and if he will be willing to talk to me 'cos I'm scared a bit shitless. Oh, thanks about the DG-F post, man. ** Misanthrope, Who ever knows with those motherfuckers. It just always seems like these really hyped up crises always get 'solved' albeit in some disappointing, heavily compromised way. Rallo?! Rallo is still alive? You're kidding me. Weird, cool. ** xTx, Extie! My pal! Err, no, 'Billie' has not arrived. Hm. It is getting a little long. I'll go down to the office today and make sure they don't have some package for me that they forgot to tell me about because that has happened. Yikes, want! Very, very top notch news about your progress on the novel! Mega-whoopie! Mine, err, is crapped out right now, so, bleah, yeah, but I'm a stubborn motherfucker, so it's not over yet. I miss you too! All love to you! ** Cobaltfram, Hi, John. Sorry about the non-Skyping last evening. Yesterday got away from me. New Park Chan-Wook definitely has potential, I agree. I'm curious. It would be nice if Glass did something interesting again. I'll use that link, thanks. I'm not giving up on the George novel yet, but I think it's good to be realistic so I won't crash and burn inside if/when it gives up my ghost. Art, yeah, but it and love are kind of all we've got or something. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, D. That thing Bill is doing sounds fun. If I were nearby, I would go and learn a lot. Give him a big 'merde' for me. ** Billy Lloyd, Balls plus great instincts and inherent talent. In your case, you'll nail it, in other words. Assembling a team to make it happen, that sounds really logical to me. And it seems like angling for a label is the obvious and right thing to do, at least to start with. Let me know how your talk is received. Snow, awesome. We're still without. Word is that it might rain-snow today, which is the worst. With my luck, we'll get a massive, gorgeous blizzard while I'm in Amsterdam, where it never snows, which will have turned into a chilly swamp by the time I get back. Fully and heavily enjoy your London/ Oxford trips. Anything particularly exciting pre-planned? We can compare our respective trip notes upon our respective returns. ** Steevee, Hi, Steve. Thank you for the sympathy. No, I've never gotten this far into a novel and still felt this deeply negative about it, but I've never written a novel like this one before, so it's hard to compare its status to the other ones. I don't know. I'm going to trying to fix it, at least for now. Yeah, thanks, man. ** _Black_Acrylic, You got snow. Hunh. Usually, when you get it, we get it, but not this time unless today holds a big surprise. Thanks for the tip/link re: the AN website. That does look useful, and it's a swell review, man. A real pleasure. ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hi, Jeff. I hope so too re: the novel. I'm not giving up yet. Thank you. I've listened to the MBV twice, and it's really gorgeous, and I can tell it's going to unfold and unfold in an amazing way. I actually really like the later Celine novels. 'Normance', 'Castle to Castle', 'North', all pretty fantastic, I think. I haven't read the posthumous one, 'Rigadoon', but I want to. ** Statictick, Hi, N! Dude, spooning vs. commenting, no contest. Hope it was a soup spoon. Hope it was a ladle. Awesome re: possible guest-post, man. Really sweet of you. ** Trees, Hi, Ted. Thanks about my novel problems. I tried stepping away from it for a few months, and that didn't work, so I'm trying fiddling with and chiseling what I've already written rather than trying to generate more prose. We'll see if that helps. Cutting back could be plenty. I hope whichever route you go does the trick. All your upcoming book stuff is really exciting. Remember that I'd love to celebrate any of them on the blog, if you like. It is weird how multi-tasking just happens so naturally and easily sometimes, yeah. Weird stuff: the brain, I guess. ** Sypha, My sympathies to you re: the Gaga cancellations. Your worrying about her feelings on the matter is very odd and sweet. ** Un Cœur Blanc, Hi. Oh, thanks. Saki is mysterious and kind of magical to me for some reason. It could partly be the little bottle and cup. It would be nice to drink it while not in a restaurant. I think that's the only place I've ever tasted it. Nice pic of Bacon. He looks very tender. ** Grant maierhofer, Hi, Grant. Really interesting about the sigil thing. That whole novel, 'Guide', is a sigil. Novel as sigil, or vice versa. I can't say whether it worked or not because I think that would fuck something up, as I understand the principle. I am excited to read 'Rontel'. I have to get on ordering it. My opinion on 'Cremaster' has changed towards the more positive as time has gone on. Partly for the reasons you mention, I mean for the reasons that you say you're taken with it. The hype around it at the same was very off-putting, or it was to me. Thanks for being into Little Caesar. It was cool, and it was great to do, but, man, it was so much work to put together entirely on my own. I don't miss typesetting machines and laying-out and the physical pasting and the endless trips to the post office whatsoever. But, yeah. My agent has been trying off and on for years to get Grove to put out a single volume version of the Cycle, but they're just not interested at all. They think that would cause them to earn even less money on the books for whatever reason, and those kinds of decisions always drive everything, I guess. Good day to you! ** Chris Dankland, Hi, Chris. The very first blog post, which was on my old, dead blog, happened on May 15, 2005. My first blog didn't get hacked in the usual sense of the word. Back in those days, Blogger had this annoying set-up where people could flag a blog as offensive, and, if it got flagged a certain number of times within 24 hours, the blog would be automatically shut down, and, when that happened, all of the images in blog would be deleted. Basically, someone who hated the blog, or, more likely, hated me, hit the 'flag' button a ton of times one day, knowing that would kill the blog. When I managed to get Blogger to finally restore the blog, it was empty, and I just gave up on it because refilling it with the images would have taken an insane amount of work. Anyway, it got 'hacked' and died on November 20, 2006. Zac's piece in 'Userlands' was his first published work, yeah. The online writing scene in those days was nothing at all like it is now, to the point where the premise of the 'Userlands' anthology seemed very fresh and novel, which is pretty funny to think about now, and which shows you how fast the online writing scene grew. Thanks for saying 'Userlands' was ahead of the curve. I think it was, yeah, if only by accident. It was well received and did pretty well, but I had hoped that there would be more concentration on the importance of the blog context and how that affected the work and the community in which the writers interacted, but there wasn't a lot of thought put into that, or not to the degree that I thought was important to the project. Mm, I can't remember exactly when HTMLG started, or exactly when Tao's online movement/ sites/ self-branding outreach started. I guess the main difference between then and now is the obvious one, i.e. that back then it was still about posting fiction and poetry online whereas now the forms dictated by the internet's shape and dimensions and possibilities are very central to so much of the forms being used by current writers in Alt Lit and otherwise. So, I think it's significantly different now. Re: underrated sites and blogs, mm, I'll need to think about that and get back to you 'cos I think there are a bunch, and I would really collect my thoughts and check my bookmarks and stuff. Yeah, online writing is a huge and completely fascinating area/topic, for sure. I know I think about it and what it means and the innovations and things happening because of it a lot. Anyway, there are my initials answers, and I'm very happy to talk a lot more about that and about my experiences, if you like. It's inspiring. My word overuses are legion. Like 'yeah', which I type at the drop of a hat. And also starting sentences with the word' oh'. Bad habit, but whatever, I guess. Thank you a lot about the red lightbulb pieces, man. They're from that book 'The Weaklings (XL)' that's coming out. Great day to you, sir. ** Grant Scicluna, Howdy, Grant. Thanks a lot re: the novel struggles. I mean, it makes sense that this one would be the extremely hardest one and the most likely to fail. I'm trying to tackle the biggest thing of all, and it could be way too big for me. Still trying, though. I really hope the meeting goes incredibly well today, and, yeah, try not to worry, and that's the spirit, and ... how did it go? Hm, I don't remember there being a film outlined from 'A Herd'. Maybe I'm just forgetting, or maybe I never knew about it? So, as far as I know or can remember, I don't know anything about that possible project. Hunh. Best of the best to you, man. ** Adrienne White, Whoa, hey, pal! How utterly sweet to see you here! Wowzer! I hope you're doing really, really great! Are you? Much love to you! ** Bollo, Hey, J! No problem, man, just very happy to see you. Very cool score on the books and stuff. So fucking wish I could see/go to that show of yours that you noted on FB. Are those pix from that show? Wait, hold on, ... oh, yes, they are. Seeing them is way better than nothing. They look fantastic! I'll pore over them heavily a little later, and have a huge blast at the opening! Everyone, the ultra-great visual artist Jonathan Mayhew who hangs around under the guise Bollo has an exhibition opening imminently called 'Envelope' at the Ballina Art Center where his work will be shown alongside works by the artist Alan James Burns, and you can see some beautiful photos of Mr. Mayhew's work in the show here, and, if you're in Ireland, you can find out more about the show and how to see it here. Awesome! Happy V Day to you too! ** Right. Today I present some awesome past music makers who were into creating very precise, self-reflexive and/or subversive perfect pop songs in hopes of spreading brainy joy, and, if you would like some brainy joy in your life, I recommend give the post your attention. See you tomorrow.

________________



Dzimicek, 21
Prague

I am a boy whom you will meet first time but you will want to meet till your death.

Dicksize M, Uncut
Position More bottom
Kissing Consent
Fucking More bottom
Oral Versatile
Dirty No
Fisting No
S&M Soft SM only
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour 15 Dollars
Rate night ask



________________




redhotchocoboy, 22
Manila

Shower together + Good time with melted chocolate on our body.

Service starts as I bathe you. Both of us will shower together and I'm gonna take good care of you as we take a bath. Then the next part is, when our bodies are heated up, I will pour melted chocolate on your body and you can do it to mine too. THEN ILL EAT YOU UP. LITERALLY... Then extra service can start there. And we can continue it on the bed.

I know this is not the solution, but this will open up possibilities. I BELIEVE IN KARMA.

Dicksize L, Cut
Position More top
Kissing Consent
Fucking Top only
Oral Versatile
Dirty No
Fisting No
S&M No
Client age Users between 24 and 70
Rate hour 2500 Dollars
Rate night 4000 Dollars



______________



sexy-arm-guy, 22
Paris

im very talkative i love hangout with my friends,,chatting. i have more friends because im kind person and very friendly..so if you dont like me...its okey.small thing... i tried.

Dicksize M, Cut
Position Versatile
Kissing No
Fucking Versatile
Oral No
Dirty No
Fisting Active
S&M No
Fetish Leather, Sportsgear, Rubber, Underwear, Skins & Punks, Boots, Uniform, Sneakers & Socks, Jeans
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour ask
Rate night ask



_______________




Timid_shy, 23
Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

I used to be athletic like in my photo but I'm start to look like a bear.

Into: bareback, deep throat, rimming, sneakers, breeding, double fucking, fisting, dildos, tt, cbt and others.

I still have the best ass in the world.

Dicksize L, Uncut
Position Bottom only
Kissing Consent
Fucking Bottom only
Oral Top
Dirty WS only
Fisting Active / passive
S&M Yes
Fetish Leather, Sportsgear, Rubber, Underwear, Skins & Punks, Boots, Uniform, Formal dress, Techno & Raver, Sneakers & Socks, Jeans, Drag, Worker
Client age Users 18 to 80 years
Rate hour 8 Euros
Rate night 100 Euros



_________________



BlessMe, 18
Tampa

hello my name is Adrian and i got red brownish hair and blue eyes im 5'9 and im 18 and im good looking and skinny and im 150 Ibs and im very attractive and i live in Florida and im single and im emo scene boy and bisexual

i like writting poems and i like partying and drinking and i like going snowboarding with my friends and i like rich men who are into emo scene boys and i like watching horror movies while i'm getting fucked

i like to be fucked raw and i like it repeatedly and i like to get bred and i like to to get my ass eaten for hours and i like everything except hermatolagina and i like my nips that are extremely tiny but wired to be played with

i dislike cheaters and hackers and i dislike fakers and i dislike wannabes and i dislike country music and i dislike losers and i dislike everyone more attractive than me although there aren't many

Dicksize M, Cut
Position More bottom
Kissing Consent
Fucking More bottom
Oral Top
Dirty WS only
Fisting No
S&M Soft SM only
Fetish Leather, Skater, Rubber, Skins & Punks
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour ask
Rate night 250 Euros



________________




dangerous_child, 19
Bogota

I do not belong to your world but my world you love. JUST TRUST ME. I wont let you be harm in my side but make sure that you will not harm me too much. Some harm is ok. Maybe between a lot harm and some. See photo.

Dicksize XL, Uncut
Kissing Consent
Fucking More bottom
Oral Versatile
Dirty No
S&M Soft SM only
Fetish Sportsgear, Underwear, Uniform, Formal dress, Worker
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour 100 Euros
Rate night 250 Euros



_________________





MASSAGGIATOREROTICO, 20
Milan

James.
Blond, green eyes. Professional, cleaning, CONFIDENTIALITY, with diploma in thai art.

I am horny, sexy ass hell.

*** NO to STARVED to DEATH or similar stuff, because I get the fuck off easy.

Dicksize XXL, Uncut
Position Versatile
Kissing Yes
Fucking Versatile
Oral Versatile
Dirty Yes
Fisting Active / passive
S&M Yes
Fetish Leather, Sportsgear, Skater, Rubber, Underwear, Skins & Punks, Boots, Lycra, Uniform, Formal dress, Techno & Raver, Sneakers & Socks, Jeans, Drag, Worker
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour 170 Euros
Rate night 500 Euros



_____________




Marcello_Ozturk, 18
Koln

flip me over to the other side of me.

Dicksize M, Cut
Position Bottom only
Kissing Yes
Fucking Bottom only
Dirty No
Fisting Active / passive
S&M Yes
Fetish Leather, Sportsgear, Skater, Rubber, Underwear, Skins & Punks, Boots, Lycra, Uniform, Formal dress, Techno & Raver, Sneakers & Socks, Jeans, Drag, Worker
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour 200 Euros
Rate night 1000 Euros



________________






boatsexparty, 21
Las Palmas, Spain

sex party every monday on a gay sailing boat

12 guys on the boat!

gods of sex and free expression!

we just want to try and explore the world of homosexual

we just want to ride hot gay asspussies and enjoy

╔═ ╗╔╗╔╗╔══╗╔╗─╔═╗─── ╔══╗╔╗──╔╗╔╗╔ ═╗ ║╔═╝║║║║║╔═╝║║╔╝╔╝─────║╔═╝║║──║║║║║╔╗─║ ║╚═╗║║║║║║──║╚╝╔╝─╔══╗─║║──║║──║║║║║╚╝╔╝ ║╔═╝║║║║║║──║╔╗╚╗─╚══╝─║║──║║──║║║║║╔╗╚╗ ║║──║╚╝║║╚═╗║║╚╗╚╗─────║╚═╗║╚═╗║╚╝║║╚╝─║ ╚╝──╚══╝╚══╝╚╝─╚═╝────╚══╝╚══╝╚══╝═╝

Dicksize XL, Cut
Position Top only
Fucking Top only
Dirty No
Fisting Active
S&M No
Fetish Leather, Skater, Rubber, Underwear, Skins & Punks, Boots, Lycra, Uniform, Formal dress, Techno & Raver, Sneakers & Socks, Worker
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour 300 Euros
Rate night 500 Euros



_______________




nailer, 18
Seattle

hey the names nailer, im 18. we all need to find ways to carry our own shit, our own trauma, like a torch and take the power away from the heteronormative. i am a punk, vegan, kinda-faggy teenager who has decided to step up to take some dicks up the ass and is a super inspiring weirdo.

Dicksize M, Cut
Position Versatile
Kissing Yes
Fucking Versatile
Oral Versatile
Dirty No
Fisting No
S&M Soft SM only
Fetish Rubber, Underwear, Uniform, Formal dress, Jeans
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour 7 Dollars
Rate night 15 Dollars



________________




EdieSedgwick, 18
Dubai

Hello guys, im ukrainian, from 1 january in Dubai! DownTown !
;) ;)
from 1 - 8 january
but maybe 1 month;)

New young crispy, innocent, gentle and tender boy ;) ;) ;)

Dicksize L, Uncut
Position Bottom only
Kissing Consent
Fucking Bottom only
Oral Versatile
S&M Soft SM only
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour ask
Rate night ask



________________





SOULneedsBODY, 20
Copenhagen

hello guys lets call me "daniel". I AM A BOY series and disinhibited. you just need someone to use? that's me. i like money & cock. i am well designed thin. i have an arched ass (very rare!). intense rimming. you can also use me as secuirity guard in Copenhagen.

Position Versatile
Kissing No
Fucking Versatile
Oral Versatile
Dirty No
Fisting No
S&M No
Fetish Underwear, Formal dress, Jeans, Worker
Client age Age 20 to 35
Rate hour 80 Euros
Rate night ask



__________________



why_are_you_you, 20
Tel Aviv

IAM LOOKING FOR SOMEONE WHO IS INTERESTED OR WILLING TO EXPERIENCE MY "PERFECT MEMORABLE SERVICE" THAT HE OR SHE WILL NEVER FORGET IT TRUE WHOLE LIFE.

I have very attractive face,Iam as a stand 5’7 in height and no go to gym and no taking some Medicine like Steroid or anything to make my body Big. so for sure its Easy to Make my Cock Hard Because Iam Not taking any Kind of Medicine.

So my Cock is Delicious and perfect to Easy to Enter it in your ass and Mouth. You feel My wet juicy cum and can cum More times Not only 1 time But More times and still Creamy delicious And Full .. My capacity is 5 times.

also while my Partner (You) like can Fuck me deep and really really can feel it while fucking me and see my Eyes And Lick Hot Sexy Lips too and my Neck using a warm and hot tounge of my partner (You).

And i want to be come Honest to you that No Lies or No hiding secret that my Tender juicy Hot cock is not so Long or not so Thick But i assure you its Delicious Clean and so Much Sticky.

AND I ASSURE THAT IF YOU TRY ME YOU CAN CALL ALL ”SAINTS NAME” AND YOU WILL FORGET YOUR NAME AND WHERE U LIVE TOO.

Dicksize L, Cut
Position Versatile
Kissing Yes
Fucking Versatile
Oral Versatile
Dirty Yes
Fisting Active / passive
S&M Yes
Fetish Leather, Sportsgear, Skater, Rubber, Underwear, Skins & Punks, Boots, Lycra, Uniform, Formal dress, Techno & Raver, Sneakers & Socks, Jeans, Drag, Worker
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour ask
Rate night ask



________________




WienerInFurs, 18
Lille

Thank you very much, I'm a complicated

Christian.

I do what we all

do.

I am here from some

reason.

I am a 18 year old hot boy from France not only

beauty.

I am very curious to know new people, I look

message.

I do not speak German

more.

I love to see you

Hijinx.

Dicksize XL, Uncut
Position Versatile
Kissing Yes
Fucking Versatile
Oral Versatile
Dirty WS only
Fisting Active
S&M Soft SM only
Fetish Sportsgear, Skater, Underwear, Techno & Raver, Sneakers & Socks, Jeans
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour ask
Rate night ask



______________



Lozenge, 22
Toronto

How does it make you feel when the guy standing at your doorstep looks totally different from the photoshopped pretty pictures you saw when you booked him?

Do the empty words - masculine, discreet, sexy, horny, high-class and fit - that abound in all escort profiles - bore you?

Is there more to Canada than maple syrup?

If the questions above got you thinking, here are a few facts about me:

I am a BITCH = Beautiful, Intelligent, Talented, Charming, and HOTTTT. I get fucked. I HAVE LEATHER CLOTHES. I enjoy sex and casualities that accompany it. I have a Big ASS!!!For a big Penis!!!

Dicksize L, Uncut
Position Bottom only
Kissing Consent
Oral Bottom
Dirty Yes
Fisting No
S&M No
Fetish Leather, Sportsgear, Skater, Boots, Lycra, Sneakers & Socks, Jeans, Drag
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour ask
Rate night ask



________________



Hole4XXXXL, 24
Manchester

I'm russian guy. If you are looking for someone to listen I can listen your very deep thoughts that can't even get into your mouth.

Do you need hole for your dick? Hello nice to meet you. I want to be fucked by very large dicks.

I love use my tongue in your body. I loved to be sucked by someone who gives me pleasure. All I want to do is fuckin' and fuckin' and fuckin'.

Don't let my glasses fool you, I can get into a pretty crazy scene. So if you want to be my highness just contact me. Oh the photo is simbolic.

Dicksize L, Uncut
Position Bottom only
Kissing Consent
Fucking Bottom only
Oral Top
Dirty No
Fisting No
S&M Soft SM only
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour 100 Pounds
Rate night ask



__________________




Honey4bees, 19
Las Vegas

I want fuck. but you need to pay me good.

Dicksize XL, Uncut
Position Versatile
Kissing Yes
Fucking Versatile
Oral Versatile
Dirty WS only
Fisting Active / passive
S&M Yes
Fetish Leather, Sportsgear, Skater, Rubber, Underwear, Skins & Punks, Boots, Uniform, Formal dress, Sneakers & Socks, Jeans, Worker
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour ask
Rate night ask



_________________



Ben_Davis, 19
Moscow

Hi i live in london. I can do the craziest things You dreamed about. This is going to be another dimension. If you want to book me i have to come to russia. If you spend good money your dream become true. I am a simple guy and I always feel life like being a little punk.

Role Active
Endowment 7.5ins (19cm) Uncut
Body type Slim
Body hair Smooth
Height 5ft 9in (175cm)
Weight 8st (51kg)
Eye colour Brown
Hair colour Black
Tattoos No
Orientation Bi-Sexual
Kiss Sometimes
Smoke Sometimes
Drink No
Drugs No
Availability Incalls + Outcalls
Times Midday-10pm
1Hour £140 £160
1½ Hours £210 £240
Per extra hour £140 £140
Overnight £600 £600



__________________




Notinterested, 18
Sedona

i have a boyfriend. he loves fucking and i love being screwed tightly because i'm all about him and he's all about me and we don't give a dang about nobody...........!

Dicksize XL, Uncut
Position Versatile
Kissing Yes
Fucking Versatile
Oral Versatile
Dirty WS only
Fisting Active / passive
S&M Yes
Fetish Leather, Sportsgear, Underwear, Boots, Uniform, Sneakers & Socks, Worker
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour ask
Rate night ask



_________________




very_large_chicken_male, 24
Rotterdam

i have a partner before, i give everything. i give up my career and show my faithful love. even a lot of gays who show interest on me, even offering me money for sex, or for just trip sex, but i refuse because i honor our relationship...

now, i am single, i realized that it takes a long journey to find a true loving person for lifetime partner.... hope their is a serious out their and fight and value my self...

I don't like pretender,,, i prefer to be with gays than bisexuals, coz bisexuals now a day are not true to their self most of them are pretender, while gays, they where true to their self and honest in quiet sometimes...

Dicksize L, Uncut
Position Versatile
Kissing Yes
Fucking Versatile
Oral Versatile
Dirty No
Fisting No
S&M Soft SM only
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour 120 Euros
Rate night 400 Euros




*

p.s. Hey. Morning. Like I said yesterday, I'm going to need to be quite swift in my p.s.ing today since I have a train to Amsterdam to catch in just a short while, sorry. Also on repeat, in case it was missed: Rerun post and no p.s. tomorrow, and then a fresh post and lengthy p.s. again on Monday. ** Wolf, Wolfy! So great to talk to you the other day. I'm sorry I was all bent partly out of shape, but everything's good now, and talking with you was a real help. Wow, Toefl test, that takes me back. Yury had a Toefl testing and retesting period back when we were first trying to get him into the States. You'll ace that easily, I think, wait, no, I know, but, yeah, urgh. All right, I hope that our respective weekends are long since stamped with badassness by the next time I get to do the comment-to-p.s. thing with you again. ** Misanthrope, Still think they will get it done even though I woke up to a probably hysterical news reports that the sequester is inevitable, blah blah. Still mindboggled that Rallo is back. I gotta link that shit up. Tell me when. ** David Ehrenstein, It kind of does, right? Want to see 'Dark Blood'. It sounds really fascinating. Surely, it'll play here in Paris in some context. I'll keep my eyes peeled. ** Michael_karo, Thank you a whole hell of a bunch of times over, buddy. ** xTx, Hi! No, it's not here. I checked. Not time to panic yet based on past international mail experiences, but I'm relieved to know there's a Plan B vis-a-vis the LA pad, worst comes to worst. Oh, you know, I always seem to find a way to torture my stuff into behaving again, or I have, and I'm a hard head, and, yeah, hopefully it will be fine. In the meantime, you go ahead lap me, okay? Love back to you! ** Rewritedept, Hi. Big Star was pre-proto-Power Pop. I was working with bands in the established or post-established genre. Love the Replacements, but they're not really Power Pop, I don't think. They were their own thing, I think. I always recommend LA as a place to move to pretty much everybody, so I'll give you that recommendation too because ... why not? Hope all that shit gets sorted into joy before Monday, man. ** Steevee, Hi, Steve. Look forward to reading the review, of course, probably after the weekend, I think. Everyone, Mr. Steve 'Steevee' Erickson reviews the new Chilean film 'No' @ Gay City News meaning @ here. Read it, dudes. 20/20 wasn't so popular in their day. Had a cult following, I guess. Their videos got a bit of rotation on MTV. Their albums charted, but in the lower rungs. They were particularly popular in LA because KROQ loved them and played their stuff often. 'Yellow Pills' became a minor hit when it was used in the film 'Scarface', but that was after the fact, and I think they had broken up by then. Unless I'm wrong, I'm pretty sure that the Dutch plan to ban sales of cannabis and hash to tourists was killed before it was implemented just a few weeks ago. I guess I'll find out while I'm there. I don't/won't smoke, but if the coffee houses are closed, it'll be very obvious. ** MANCY, Hi, man. So true about a Big Star Day. I just need to figure out a way to do it so it isn't just another standard Big Star roundup. I'll get on that and try next week. I like the new Iceage album a ton too, at least on first listen. The darker Rites of Spring comparison is interesting and smart, yeah. I'm very excited to see them finally. I've been told they like my books, so I'm hoping to meet them, if I can figure that out and figure out a way not to faint while introducing myself. ** 5STRINGS, Thanks! My Valentines Day has now been nailed into place. Lovely. Everyone, Valentines Day through the inimitable aesthetic of 5STRINGS. I'll have Amsterdam-based fun, I'm pretty sure, and you find a way to have some based fun too. ** Billy Lloyd, Team assembling, hard, yeah, I bet. How are you trying to find the right person to do the visual aspects? There'll be a way. Maybe you just need someone to implement the technical aspects of your vision, or do you not trust your ideas in that area, or ... ? I think I will have the best time in Amsterdam, thank you. I think I missed out on getting tickets for the Bjork Paris residency too. Shit. I hope your weekend in league with your friend and his sugar daddy pans out fully to your specifications. If he's a true sugar daddy, he'll surely bow to and bankroll your and your friend's every wish. Hm, weird, yeah, about the Valentines card thing. I hope your head organized the choral thing. I bet it did. Awesome weekend to you, Mr. Lloyd. ** Pilgarlic, Ah, man, I love the Raspberries. You just have to get into the wimps trying to be tough guy power chord mongerers or something maybe. Having seen the Replacements live a lot back when, the idea of a reunion sans youth and drunkenness makes me nervous. Great weekend, bud. ** Chris Dankland, Hi there, Chris! I'm really glad that my initial thinking out loud was helpful. Your new questions and insight are fantastic and provoke much thinking on my part, way too much to toss off in this rushed p.s., so, if it's okay, I'm going to wait and talk with you about this in a relaxed, think-heavy way on Monday instead of short shrifting it now. I'll return to your comment and blab accordingly at the very top of the p.s. on Monday. And it'll probably be until then before I get to read the Grizzly Bear article, but that sounds super interesting, so I definitely will. Okay, talk to you properly on Monday. Have a superb weekend! ** Un Cœur Blanc, I completely forgot it was Valentines Day until nighttime rolled around and I made my first troll through my Facebook news feed and remembered. So, it was a day like any other. Yours sounds way better. Wow, that's very intriguing: what you're working in and reading re: Blanchot and Barthes. It makes me really wish I could be inside your head. I hope your weekend gives you everything you could possibly want and ask of it. ** Sypha, You are, it's really true, man. ** Cobaltfram, Hi, John. Yeah, going to the big A with my great pal Zac for reasons having to do with nothing but pleasure. But the official reason, which is to see the Mike Kelley retrospective, will have some serious sadness attached to it, as, as I think you probably know, he was a very good, old friend of mine, and he killed himself just about a year ago. But, long story short, the trip should be great. As I told Un Cœur Blanc, I forgot it was Valentines Day until there were only a couple of hours of it left, so it didn't really exist for me, which was, you know, fine. I've read 'Crime and Punishment'. Yeah, it's excellent. Proust, whoa! If memory serves, you have a fun weekend scheduled for yourself, and I hope it turns out that way at the very least. ** Jeff, Hi, Jeff! Great to see you! Wow, that is really something! I won't get to listen until this weekend or after, but, yeah, that's wow and very nice. Everyone, d.l. Jeff was listening to the album "Le Universe Perverse" by Witchboy only to discover that one of tracks is named after and dedicated to the extremely great, late, extremely missed d.l. and artist Antonio Urdiales, and he has hooked everyone up to the track, which is called "Rave Requiem for Antonio", and which you can hear on Bandcamp right here. And, if that's not enough, here's Jeff's favorite track made by the legendary Antonio, and if you want some genius, click that and listen. Thank you so much for that, Jeff. I'm well, and I hope you are too. ** Postitbreakup, Hi, Josh. Okay, then, fingers even more and continually crossed for you. No, this isn't the 'get away and work' trip. This is for fun and adventure. But we're working on getting the 'serious' trip figured out, so it shouldn't be too distant. I hope your weekend deserves you. ** Okay. It's escorts day again. Be with them today and tonight. The blog will pop up again as usual tomorrow right around this time, and I'll pop up 'in person' again right around this time on Monday.

----



"When I'm working I never need an entourage or anyone with me. Time has no meaning; I don't notice how many weeks or days go by. I'm so totally absorbed that I really like to be alone. Actually, it's not only when I'm working; I like to be alone in general. I have a hunger for it. I eat up silence." -- Tuesday Weld



p.s. Hey. I'm in Amsterdam. Even though I'm writing this on Friday, I think I'm probably having a fantastic time. Are you? Hope so. Obviously, given the Friday dating of these sentences, there will no full-fledged p.s. today, but I will catch up with your comments on Monday. In the meantime, why not enjoy some stuff about the great Tuesday Weld? See you just post-weekend.

Hui Cao










Cao Hui

























Alessandro Puccinelli






Hui Cao























Alessandro Puccinelli










Cao Hui






Hui Cao









*

p.s. Hey. A mysterious reader of the blog named Jamison Davey read my call for guest-posts and sent in what you see today without a word of explanation or a self-identifying sentence. I think it's a puzzle. I think in the process of figuring out. Want to try? If you do, or if you don't, I hope you'll enjoy the thing, and I send my thanks to Mr. or Ms. Davey, whoever you may be. Otherwise, I'm back from Amsterdam, obviously. I had completely amazing trip. People asked about it, so I guess I'll talk about it to whatever degree down below. First, I'll return to Chris Dankland's comment from Thursday as promised, and then I'll catch up in general. ** Chris Dankland, Hi, Chris. Did you write your 'wiki' piece? I'll go check your blog a bit later to see if it's up. 3am Magazine was a pretty key site, yeah. Still is, although it just has richer surroundings now. There were people publishing chapbooks online pre-Alt Lit, but it was pretty rare, and there was still the big 'loser' stigma about self-publishing back then, so you didn't see it so much, or you didn't get the kinds of alerts and directives to them that you now do. What you say about the current state of self-publishing seems really right and wise to me. I think you're right about Heiko Julien's ebook being a kind of turning point of sorts, or it seemed that way to me too. The macro thing seems quite new. There were collage works made before, with Photoshop or handmade then scanned, but they were usually illustrative rather than a thing made within the idea of the macro being a literary form. Basically, everything you say about the influence of Twitter and web/page design makes complete sense. I haven't read the Grizzly Bear article yet, but I will. Anyway, not such fascinating answers, but the dialogue is great, so I'm happy to talk with you about this in an ongoing way or whenever you like. ** Friday ** Scunnard, Late happy birthday, man! I hope you had to the fight escorts off. ** Misanthrope, It is worrisome, sure. Being disempowered sucks. Next week or this week for Rallo? Bring it on! ** David Ehrenstein, Top of the Monday to you, sir. ** 5STRINGS, Drag pageant, so ... how did it rate? You didn't flunk, I bet. Wedding? Wow, that's a lot of contrast going on there. ** Rewritedept, I like all the Replacements up through 'Pleased to Meet Me', but, for me, they never topped 'Let It Be'. I'll try to do a Replacements post of some sort, okey-doke. I'm not sure if I know what or who Mr. Show is, but you can make a post about them/him/it, yes, awesome. Awesome too about the mix. I'll go get it look. It's looks great in the list. Everyone, Rewritedept made a mix-tape that he kindly wishes to share with all of us. The tracklist is too long to repost in this context, but the mix is full of unexpected goodness in very numerous forms, so I say get it in your ears. Do that here. ** Wolf, I'm not surprised that the Toefl was a toughie. Yury failed it three times back in the day. Ironic, yes. Not that Yury failed it, I mean about what you present as ironic. I only got a skimmy my read on the meteor thing 'cos I was doing Amsterdam, but, among your multiple choices, I pick Ben_Davis19 as the power behind its throne. Big surprise. ** Bill, Yeah, didn't call ahead to the iLLUSEUM, which, yeah, turned out to be a big mistake, but it was nice enough peering in its windows. Did your scrambling pay off in post-deadline champagne swilling? ** _Black_Acrylic, Great news from the physio! Great, Ben! The MK show is incredible. Quite a large show. The late work upstairs was particularly incredible, not just because I hadn't seen most it before. Yeah, I think it's a really stellar show. You'll be very happy. I was extremely fortunate to get to see a couple of Mike's very early performance works. "Monkey Island' and another one, but I can't remember its title for the life of me. More on Mike as/if you like it. ** Billy Lloyd, Hi, Billy. Hm, did it work out with the friend you though might be suitable to help with the visual design? Did you dance and make out with Italians or their exotic equivalent? One so hopes so. Anyway, let me know how your Saturday and Sunday paid off. ** Cobaltfram, Hi, John. Trip was incredible, thanks. I wrote about Mike and interviewed him a bunch, and there is one conversation with him in 'SiH', yeah. No, I don't think I have much loyalty to the Valentines Day brand that I can think of. It's no big deal at all over here, so it was easy to miss. ** Un Cœur Blanc, Hi! He did and was, I agree. ** Grant Scicluna, Hi, Grant. My pleasure on the stacking front. Excellent, excellent news about how well the meeting went, man! That's so great! Hm, well, if that 'A Herd' film thing is in my archives, I must have known about it at one time, but I honestly have no memory of that whatsoever. Weird. It must have happened back in the time when 'A Herd' was first published, so in '81 or '82, and, yeah, I don't remember a thing. Curious. ** Saturday ** _Black_Acrylic, Howdy! ** James, Hi, James! Really nice to see you! The Amsterdam visit was heavenly, thanks, but I didn't see your sensi comment in time, oops, but I might be going back up there ere long, and I'll make a note. ** Bitter69uk, Hi, man. Glad you're on the Tuesday Weld track. Oh, yeah, the Chet Baker hotel. I lived in Amsterdam for 2 1/2 years in the '80s, so, yeah, seen the place and the plaque. Thanks for thinking of my complicated pleasure. ** Unknown/Pascal, Hey! I recommend 'Play It As It Lays'. Probably the best film she ever appeared in, and possibly her greatest performance. Very sorry to hear about your mum. I hope she's so much better really soon. I'm doing great, thanks! I did get the SY zine, yes, thank you so, so much! It's really awesome! Hope things are going splendidly for you in every way that is allowable. ** Rewritedept, Not so busy really. Or not busy with the p.s., I mean. Yeah, Shadow Morton died. He did a lot more than just write 'Leader of the Pack'. He was one of the truly great auteurs of 60s rock. A major guy. His work with the Shangri-Las as a writer and producer is up there with most genius rock ever made, I think. RIP. I talk my weekend up just a few lines down. It was extremely awesome. Why Fort Collins? What's there? The other places I know and understand why in theory. My favorite Van Sant is 'Paranoid Park', I think. ** Postitbreakup, Thank you for talking to the folks, Josh. And a big, gigantic whoo-hoo on the job thing! Yes! And you start today? No, a week from today, okay. You should let yourself have a happy, celebratory week. You way owe it to yourself. ** Bollo, Really, the work in your show looks so incredible, man! Pretty blown away, even through the filter of jpegs. ** Thomas Moronic, Hi, T! My trip to Amsterdam could not have been better. I went with my dear friend Zac, and we saw the amazing Mike Kelley show twice -- it's really something and does his work proud. We went to this very weird museum out of town near the town of Leiden called Corpus where the building is in the shape of a giant sitting man, and you basically take a tour through the inside his body. It was trippy and weird and great. We went to the Amsterdam Dungeon, this touristy high end spooky house, which is actually really good.  We saw a bunch of art and different things, and we had great progressive talks about art and the respective projects we're working on. We saw a lot of stuff, too much to list. Zac is my favorite person in the world, and it was inherently just so great to spend the time with him. I've come back very inspired and revved up, so, yeah, it was an amazing trip. Thanks for asking. And, obviously, if you could put together guest-posts, I would be thrilled and super grateful. Love to you, man. ** Pilgarlic, Hi, man. You're a Weldhead, cool. She rules in numerous respects. The coffeehouse situation there is the same as ever. Every street has one or ten of them, and nothing has changed at all. The 'news' about them being restricted seems to be a totally unfounded rumor, as far I can tell. ** Steevee, Hi, Steve. How was the Ruiz? ** Statictick, Hi, N. I'm so very sorry for your great loss. I'm so, so sorry to hear that. Major hugs to you. At least that's very good news about Hebb's enthusiasm. It would obviously be a total boon if Dynomoose wanted to reenter our fray. Very cool that you and James have connected so well! ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hi, Jeff. The Mike Kelley is going to NYC -- I don't know which museum -- and to MoCA in LA. I'm not sure if it has other stops. Mm, favorite Haneke ... maybe, even though it might be an odd choice, I liked 'White Ribbon' the best, off the top of my head. ** Sypha, That's a lot of Bowie. A lot of good Bowie. I wouldn't rush to get the later New Order albums. Severely diminishing returns after 'Technique' to my mind. ** Chris Dankland, Hey! Amsterdam was incredible, thank you. You're talking Robert Pollard!  Happiness! Yes, a bunch of the early GvB songs are inspired by his teaching days. Most famously, 'Gold Star for Robot Boy', but a lot of them are in different ways. ** Misanthrope, Hi, G. No, I don't think about that. About readers expectations re: 'the extreme', etc. I know that people associate me with that kind of content and presentation, but, no, the expectation has no bearing whatsoever on what I write. I don't feel obliged at all, and nor does it feel like a burden to me when I'm writing. When I read reviews that keep referring to me as the extreme writer guy, that can feel like a burden, but only in regards to the hassles my work has being received. But, when I'm writing, that stuff never crosses my mind. Did you think it would? ** Okay. We seem to be caught up and on our way again. Check out the thing in front of your faces today, make what you will of it, and I will see you tomorrow.

'I just watched a movie called Diary of a Cannibal and I want you to remember this name: Ulli Lommel. Why? This movie, shot on a home video camera with a script that was probably written on the back of an envelope had me wanting to actually bless my fast forward button. Diary consists of bad acting, non-existent lighting, jarring edits, and endlessly repeated scenes that go nowhere and mean nothing. That’s because Ulli Lommel is without a doubt the worst director currently alive. It’s a shame there isn’t some crap movie SWAT team to swoop in whenever a film of this caliber is being extruded to kill everyone involved. At the very least Lommel should have a restraining order making it a felony offense for him to come within 500 yards of any motion picture camera. Though this talentless hack continues to put out the worst film in history, again and again and again, he has somehow managed, since 2004, to release a mind boggling eleven films. Proof positive that God cares nothing for our day to day lives, this string of cinematic drek makes a conscientious reviewer search for new ways to say “horrible”. What do you say when “suck” just doesn’t remotely cut it? I’ve settled on “pukes”. As in: Every film by Ulli Lommel pukes.' -- The Plugg

'Ulli Lommel is the worst director ever to take a DV camera over his shoulder and persuade people to be in his alleged “movies.” Completely artless, without a shred of style or care, Lommel has recently embarked on a string of serial killer movies, exploiting them in such a flat amateurish way that no enjoyment can be derived from them whatsoever. Some people collect stamps. Lommel has just found a way to make his hobby of making crappy fact-based movies pay. Lommel seems like a disgruntled dad, angry that his kids won’t do wacky things for his home movies, who gathers up a bunch of his friends from work and says, “Act scary for the camera! Scary!”. And he’s getting paid by Lions Gate Entertainment, who seem to think they’ve cornered the market on horror just because the Saw movies have done well. That doesn’t mean you can market any low-grade piece of micro-shit out to the public and not expect to have the good name of your studio sullied.' -- Wildside Cinema

'I've long stated that I feel Ulli Lommel is one of the worst directors ever. I'm not alone in this opinion. At last count 4 of his films are in imdb's list of the BOTTOM 100 films. Several other movies of his have scores lower than that but have not reached the minimum amount of votes to be included on the list. A look at any of his movies from the past 2 decades will be met with a dozen user reviews all calling it "The Worst Movie Ever." The reason I've crossed paths with his filmography so many times is because Ulli Lommel's DTV work isn't just bad, it is NOTORIOUSLY bad. With each successive film of his I watch I feel an urge to shout: "Now THIS is the worst movie I've ever seen!" Which is why I find it intriguing that Tenderness of the Wolves is actually a good movie. I think this is the only Ulli Lommel film where he seemed to understand ideas like "implication" or "context." In the end it's good because it wasn't only Ulli Lommel's film. The director is part of a team of artists all working to make one product - a movie. In this case, Lommel happened to be working with a very talented group of artists and it was all of these people working together that make Tenderness of the Wolves a fascinating movie. Ulli Lommel never worked with people that matched the same kind of talent on future projects. I'm pretty sure he'll never come to the the same kind of artistic success he had with Tenderness of the Wolves. And with the good Ulli Lommel movie out of the way, I return to eventually have to wade through the mediocrity and garbage that it is the rest of Lommel's filmography.' -- Geek Juice

'I’ve been vilified for my experimental movies, many of which are marketed as horror pictures. But I see myself as an advocate for the underdog, trying to understand – to give a soul to – those who are demonised by society. I don’t condone their actions, but I want to explain the psychology of people who break the rules. I’m bored to death by the point-of-view of the police detective. I think that art can heal. Within every one of us is a painter, a dancer, a storyteller. I believe that if every individual’s artistic side was nurtured at school, it could channel much frustration and anger, and change the way people live their lives. Change even the way a potential serial killer might have lived his life. Maybe this is just an illusion. But I really do believe that art heals.' -- Ulli Lommel



___
Stills







































_____
Further

Ulli Lommel Official Website
Ulli Lommel @ IMDb
'The Serial Killer Cinema of Ulli Lommel'
'My America', a poem by Ulli Lommel
'Fucking Liberty!: Die Freiheiten des Ulli Lommel'
Ulli Lommel's Facebook page
'Was macht eigentlich... Ulli Lommel'
'Worlds of Ulli Lommel'
'The Top Ten Films by Ulli Lommel'
'The Top Ten Worst Directors'
'SMALLTALK: ULLI LOMMEL' @ Interview Magazine (Germany)
Ulli Lommel @ mubi
Video: Fassbinder & Lommel @ Berlinale 1969



____
Actor

'Ulli Lommel acted in over 28 plays, among them Shakespeare's "Hamlet"--in which he played the lead--22 made-for-TV movies and 18 theatrical films before joining Fassbinder and the Anti-Theater, an inspired theater collective that launched the careers of several prominent German actors including Lommel, Kurt Raab, Hanna Schygulla and Margit Carstensen. As Fassbinder moved from theater to films in the 1970s, rapidly becoming one of the leading voices of the German New Wave, Lommel became one of his closest collaborators. He spent 10 years working with Fassbinder, who was legendary for his prodigious output, directing 41 films in 13 years. Lommel not only acted in 16 Fassbinder productions but also served as producer, assistant director and production designer, on such films as Satan's Brew (1976), Love is Colder Than Death (1969), Effi Briest (1974) and Chinese Roulette (1976). Since Fassbinder's death in 1982, Lommel has been traveling the world and participating in numerous retrospectives dedicated to his Fassbinder years, among them the Museum of Modern Art in N.Y., Harvard, the Louvre, London and Beijing.' -- IMDb



Fassbinder Love Is Colder Than Death (1969)


Fassbinder Beware of a Holy Whore (1971)


Fassbinder Bremen Freedom (1972)


Fassbinder Chinese Roulette (1976)


Fassbinder Satan's Brew (1976)



______
Interview
from Soiled Interviews




What was your upbringing like?

Ulli Lommel: It felt normal, because I didn't know anything else. And it was fun, because I grew up right after WWII and Germany was completely destroyed and all the people that survived this madness were so happy and stuck together and helped each other. There is way too much of everything today. Too many songs that are terrible and too many awful movies, week after week, bombarding us and that's almost worse than being bombarded by the allies in WWII.

Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore (1971) was based on the hectic experience of making Whity (1971). As someone who acted in both films, do you think Beware of a Holy Whore features a realistic portrayal of what happened during the making of Whity?

UL: No, not at all, it's complete fantasy, and anyway, Fassbinder was always drunk during WHITY and probably didn't remember a thing. I actually co-produced WHITY and due to Fassbinder's insane actions which went way beyond being drunk on and off the set non-stop, it almost ruined me. But I forgave him.

Your third feature was Adolf and Marlene (1977). Can you describe this film to our readers? I once read the film is 'lost.'

UL: The Fassbinder Foundation is currently restoring ADOLF & MARLENE (it's a Fassbinder production). I met with Fassbinder in Paris in 1976 in a famous brothel and told him that I had discovered the diary of Eva Braun, Hitler's girlfriend and Fassbinder said let's make a movie! It's a very dark comedy, Michael Ballhaus did the camera and Kurt Raab, the male lead of TENDERNESS OF THE WOLVES, plays Hitler. I myself play Goebbels. The movie was compared to Ernst Lubitsch TO BE OR NOT TO BE. It's one of my dearest films.

What was your relationship like with Fassbinder?

UL: Everything one can imagine and more, that's all I can say. He asked me to star in his first film LOVE IS COLDER THAN DEATH so he could get the financing since I had already become a teenage idol with covers on teen mags etc. and I was box office. I accepted and for the next 10 years collaborated on 21 Fassbinder productions. He was a true genius, with all the madness and the good, the bad and the ugly.

What was your relationship like with Warhol?

UL: Warhol was the opposite of Fassbinder. While Fassbinder tried to jail you in his own prison of the mind, Warhol gave you the key and set you free. I owe Warhol more than I will ever be able to imagine, not to mention the few pieces of Warhol Pop Art I have in my possession and Warhol Polaroids. Warhol was and is out of this universe for me.

You worked with popular German pop singer Daniel Küblböck for your film Daniel – Der Zauberer (2004). How did that collaboration come about and what was it like to work with Küblböck?

UL: He was hated by millions of Germans and I was fascinated by that type of hate towards such an innocent young man and I decided to defend him and stand up for him and make a movie to set the record straight. Needless to say, the haters voted it worst movie ever made, hahahahah! But I like it a lot. Always will. And it got some great reviews too. So what the hell, right? And it made money. Hahahahah!!!

How has filmmaking changed since when you first started? Where do you see cinema heading in the future?

UL: When I started it was much more precious with far less films coming out every week and I much prefer that. The future is something I rarely speculate about, I love memories, I love the past, it's all we have. The present is only an illusion and the future has not arrived yet, we can only dream about it. But every split second the future turns into the past, without ever stopping in the present.



______________________
12 of Ulli Lommel's 29 films

____________________
Tenderness of the Wolves(1973)
'The Tenderness of Wolves is a 1973 West German film, produced by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, directed by Ulli Lommel and based on the crimes of German serial killer and cannibal Fritz Haarmann. It was entered into the 23rd Berlin International Film Festival. Fritz Haarmann (Kurt Raab, who also wrote the film) uses his position as a government inspector to rape and murder young boys in war-torn Germany. After killing his victims, he shares the meat with his circle of cannibal friends.' -- collaged



Trailer


the entire film



_______________
Cocaine Cowboys(1979)
'The premise of this 80 minutes in purgatory is as follows: A rock band smuggles 20 kilograms of cocaine from Colombia to Montauk, Long Island. They throw the cocaine in the sea right in front of their palatial home, then land at the airport. They double back to the house and try to find the cocaine, but are not successful. This was shot at Andy Warhol's home, so they had to give him a part in the movie. He does his Andy things, taking Polaroids, and not playing himself very convincingly. Jack Palance plays the band's manager, and is way too old for the part. He chomps on a cigar and talks about "our music." The rock band, full of people I have never heard of, is pretty awful. The handful of songs, including the title ballad, are all terrible.'-- Charles Tatum



Excerpt


Andy Warhol in Cocaine Cowboys



________________
Blank Generation(1980)
'1980 was an amazing time of ups and downs. Jimmy Carter was President, Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back was released, John Bonham of Led Zeppelin died of alcohol poisoning, comedian Richard Pryor was badly burned trying to freebase cocaine, and Ulli Lommel's Blank Generation was unleashed on an unsuspecting populace. Yes, that Ulli Lommel. Some 30 years ago he was honing his craft on Blank Generation, the story of Nada (Carole Bouquet), a beautiful French journalist on assignment in New York, who records the life and work of an up-and-coming punk rock star, Billy (portrayed by legendary punk pioneer Richard Hell). Soon she enters into a volatile relationship with him and must decide whether to continue with it or return to her lover, a fellow journalist trying to track down the elusive Andy Warhol.'-- Dread Central



the entire film



_____________
The Boogeyman(1980)
'The Boogeyman is a horrible, depressing, trite rip-off of the by far superior Halloween. There is a positive comment on the back of the package by none other than Mr. Happy himself, Leonard Maltin. All I can say is, who the hell paid him to say that? The movie is awful. Think Halloween on a farm with the Clampetts from The Beverly Hillbillies, throw a possessed mirror into the equation, and you've got this unparalled piece of crap. Did the filmmakers think a retarded (I'm talking literally, here) Michael Myers would be scary? The only thing worse than this movie is the video and audio quality. Spotty, grainy, sparse, uneven, and bland.'-- DVD Empire



Trailer


Excerpt



____________________
Revenge of the Stolen Stars(1985)
'They must have paid Klaus Kinski some major dinero for this stinkeroo. YIKES!!!! It is hard to imagine that the great Kinski and Uli Lommel could team up and have a product so sorely lacking in any professionalism whatsoever. I've seen better acting and directing on the TBS monkey channel. I am not going to begin to comment on the movie itself which is so ridiculous as to not even warrant any type of review so as to justify it as a real movie. Based on what I watched (painfully so), the movie should have been filmed on video tape using a hand held home video camera. The budget of this film; about 3 or 4 dollars after Kinski's salary; was more than this disaster deserved.'-- Kinskiville



Trailer


Ulli Lommel on Kinski shooting Revenge of the Stolen Stars



_______________
Zombie Nation(2004)
'Zombie Nation is a 2004 independent horror film directed by Ulli Lommel. Despite the title, only five zombies appear in the entire film. Reception of the film has been overwhelmingly negative. As of February 15, 2011, Zombie Nation is ranked #6 worst movie on IMDb's Bottom 100. I was not sure, at any stage, whether this film was made as a satirical portrayal of low-brow horror films, and the ridiculousness of this genre's position as a segue between proper dramatic film and naff obscenity, or whether it was the result of a group of cashed up wanna be directors/actors/cinematographers who, bursting with the ill gotten prestige of their celebrity parents, have put together a collection of their favourite storylines, scenes, and dramatic effects to create a monsterously absurd turd of a film, starring their friends and a group of pornographic actors. I hope, for the love of God, that it is the former.'-- Timothy Morrissey



Trailer


All of the Most German Scenes



___________________
Daniel der Zauberer(2004)
'Daniel – Der Zauberer is a German grotesque experimental film about the pop singer Daniel Küblböck, starring as himself. The website filmstarts.de referred to the film as Küblböck's insane ego trip that would show from what a maniac hubris he would suffer. The film would be unbearable for non-fans of Küblböck. The performances of the actors would be some of the worst in the history of German cinema. Ulli Lommel and Peter Schamoni would have damaged their reputation. Even in school projects better films would be produced. As of January 2013, Daniel – Der Zauberer is now number 1 on the list of the "Bottom 100 Movies" of all time , as voted by the users of the Internet Movie Database.' -- collaged



Trailer


Excerpt



______________
Killer Pickton(2005)
'Killer Pickton is a 2005 United States production horror film that is loosely based on the crimes of Canadian pig farmer Robert Pickton. The movie was filmed in New Hampshire and was directed by Ulli Lommel. The movie was co-produced and co-written by Ulli Lommel and Jeff Frentzen. Frentzen portrayed the killer, herein called "Billy Pickton", using the stage name Curtis Graan. Killer Pickton became controversial when its planned 2006 release in Australia was delayed when the government of Canada put pressure on the Australian distributor, Peacock Films Ltd., to pull the movie from its release schedule for legal reasons—Canada's ban on publishing details of the alleged crimes prior to Pickton's trial was cited. The film remains unavailable in North America due to the legal problems of distributing the movie in Canada.'-- collaged



Trailer



________________
Diary of a Cannibal (2006)
'Diary of a Cannibal is a 2006 United States production horror film directed by Ulli Lommel. It is possibly inspired by the true-crime story of Armin Meiwes, the "Rotenburg Cannibal" who posted an online ad searching for someone to volunteer to be mutilated and eaten. Unlikely as it may seem, someone actually replied. The cannibal met his intended victim and seduced, murdered, and consumed him. Lommel's film changes the account from a "Rotenburg Cannibal" to a young Los Angeleno girl who is corrupted by her new lover, a narcissistic man who talks her into killing and eating him. The movie has received uniformly negative reviews and has bounced around the bottom-100 list on IMDB. On Yahoo Movies, 24 readers give Diary of a Cannibal an "F" rating.'-- collaged



Trailer 1


Trailer 2



____________
Black Dahlia(2006)
'It's pretty obvious that Lionsgate only released Ulli Lommel's Black Dahlia so that they could cash in on Brian De Palma's The Black Dahlia (much like other recent sound alike ripoffs War of the Planets, When a Killer Calls, and Flight 93). Like many of those, this hit DVD before the big movie it imitates in the preemptive rip-off tradition started by Roger Corman. In short, people are supposed to see this DVD on the shelf and mistake it for the De Palma movie. Working at a video store I have encountered the intentional confusion these ripoffs create time and time again. Apart from those confused into thinking it's something else, who is this movie really for? It's not for mystery fans because everything is spelled out to the point where you wonder why the police haven't solved it. It's not for action fans because the action is rare and pathetic. It could only be for very patient low-brow perverts and ultra-low-brow gore hounds, and those people could easily find better somewhere else. I've been renting straight to video crap all year and this is the worst movie I've found so far. For your own sake, stay far away.'-- IMDb



Trailer


Excerpt



__________________
H.P. Lovecraft's The Tomb(2007)
'HP Lovecraft's The Tomb is a 2007 United States production horror film that is supposedly based on H.P. Lovecraft's 1917 story, "The Tomb". However, many reviewers have noted that the plot of this film is completely unrelated to the Lovecraft short story. The film in fact has no single element whatsoever in common with the short story, save for the title. The film is often compared to the 2004 movie, Saw, going as far as having that series mentioned on the box art. Lommel’s H.P. Lovecraft’s The Tomb defies explanation. He’s locked a bunch of people in that all-too-familiar warehouse set of his and let them run around in a vaguely Saw kind of atmosphere as they try to accomplish the ludicrous task of figuring out why they’re there in the first place and the much more rational task of trying to get out alive. It sounds ludicrous that that could be an actual movie plotline, but it’s Ulli Lommel. And frankly, considering that it’s Ulli Lommel, there is no such animal as too ludicrous.'-- Steve Anderson



Trailer


Excerpt



_____________
Absolute Evil (2009)
'Absolute Evil is a drama film written and directed by Ulli Lommel. The film stars Carolyn Neff, Rusty Joiner and David Carradine. The film premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival on February 8, 2009. The Hollywood Reporter published an online review of Absolute Evil, in which Peter Brunette wrote: "At least once every festival, critics collectively scratch their heads and say "How did THAT get selected?" Absolute Evil is the tentative awardee for worst film at this year's Berlinale. Shot in an ugly digital format (not HD) that is often out of focus, the stock thriller structure also sports horribly cliched, repetitive dialogue, dramatic "gestures" that we've seen a thousand times, and very bad performances (with the exception of David Carradine, who seems to be having the time of his life).'-- collaged



Trailer


Excerpt




*

p.s. Hey. Oh, I thought maybe I should alert you to something, if you're interested. You probably know that there's this abysmal 1996 film based on my novel 'Frisk'. Well, the best thing about it by a zillion miles is the score, which was made by Coil and Lee Renaldo of Sonic Youth. Someone has uploaded the score to Mediafire, and you can download it, and, if you're admirers of Coil's or Ranaldo's work, I recommend that you do because the great majority of the music they created for the film has ever been available before, and it's very good. Anyway, if you like, you can download the score here. ** David Ehrenstein, Thank you on behalf of JD. And, if I had known it was your birthday yesterday while doing the p.s., I would celebrated the occasion like crazy here, so please take a belated ultra-happy birthday from me and from your home away from home. And, last but not least, thank for the of course very interesting and promising sounding FaBlog post! ** Dynomoose, You are indeed back! Yes! Welcome, welcome! Thrilled to have you here again, my old and dear friend! ** Jesse Bransford, Hey, Jesse! Awesome! Email, book to send ... great, I'll go find the former and give you the way to send me the latter, and, yeah, thank you, kind sir! You good? Wait, you totally fucking great? Yes, right? ** Rewritedept, Your weekend sounds to have been pretty okay enough. 'Paranoid Park' is a goodie. Oh, duh, 'Mr. Show', yeah, of course. My brain was ... I don't know where. I interviewed David Cross for Spin Magazine re: the show at the time, so, yeah, I know it. It was excellent, duh, so, if you want to do a related post, please do jump right in. I noticed the Mediafire delete, of course. Glad it's back up, at least for now, and I'll go grab it post-haste post-p.s. Everyone, if you tried to download Rewritedept's mix 'tape' yesterday and failed miserably like I did, it's now in a safer spot and easy-peasy, so go get it here. The Shangri-Las are kind of completely godhead, so, yes, I do highly recommend that you get their stuff. Okay, gotcha, re: the reasons to move where you're thinking of moving. That link to your friend's stickers, etc. didn't work, btw. Thanks, man. ** Kyler, Hi, K! Cool that the FB thing is going so well. Hm, yeah, I'll try to think of a question and pose it to you. Let me think. Maybe re: the book, hm, let me think. Thank you! ** 5STRINGS, Success on both fronts ... why am I not surprised. Everything's complicated. That's why we're not bored all that often, if we're not bored. I only like sculpture when it's complicated, but it can be Minimalist or Pop and still be way complicated. With the ex? Yikes, how was that? Everyone, 5STRINGS goes boom. I would say that qualifies as a boom, yes. ** Steevee, Very interesting re: the Ruiz. I greatly appreciate the thoughts and share. If it played here, and I would guess it has by now, I totally spaced out and missed it. I'm so out of the loop re: film/Paris right now. ** Misanthrope, Cool, Rallo, link, nearness, yum. Mm, gosh, there's probably some subconscious part of me who/that thinks about that issue 'cos I'm fairly attentive to how my work is received, but I think it works like a spy or as a double-agent probably. ** _Black_Acrylic, Psyched is definitely warranted, and, yeah, it'll be great and fun to converse with you re: the show afterwards. I really look forward to that! ** Billy Lloyd, Hi, Billy! Amsterdam was heaven. Best thing we did? There was a lot of bestness. The Mike Kelley show, for sure. We had one hell of a great rijsttafel meal while there. The whole trip was a blur of greatness. Hm, maybe your friend is intimidated? You know, she wants to please you by doing something great and is a bit insecure that she's up to the challenge? Maybe? Okay, your London visit -- if it's over, which I'm not sure it is -- was eventful, for certain. Rick Astley live? That's kind of a pure horror of many shades and tones. The dreams of people who don't get to make out with those with whom they want to make out can be very rich, even richer than if they had been inspired by an actual making out session, so I wouldn't feel bad. Ice skating, that's weird. I just made a plan to visit an ice skating rink re: a possible ice rink-based art project that a friend of mine is doing. Anyway, so, what happened on the second day of the downing of your hair? ** Sypha, I don't know, it's kind of cool that you still have Bowie to explore. It's cool to really know someone's work, but it's kind of sad to have lost one's virginity too. Didion's nonfiction is incredible. Good recommend by Mr. Best, and good choice on your part. ** Statictick, Somewhere, Jamison Davey is smiling at your words, I predict. A nice balancing feeling, yeah, fate can be very kind and fortuitous sometimes, or at least to those who richly deserve such treatment like you. ** Cobaltfram, Every day is Valentines Day in France. There's just nonstop smooching and exchanges of bouquets going on here. No one knows why Mike killed himself. It is a bit painful to talk about, yeah, but, really, no one I know who also knew Mike understands it. I didn't take a single photo in Amsterdam. I kept forgetting to carry my camera. My friend Zac took some, so maybe I'll see what he took and put something together. The next two weekends are the fun ones, ... okay, even better. A shiny future is even shinier than a shiny past, I reckon. Bon day to you. ** Bollo, Hi, J. The Mike Kelley show is kind of a total must-see if possible. The Germs! It was a rich scene and time in LA, and there is a lot of fantastic stuff and bands from that era. I hope the feeling of heaviness went bye-bye. It is bright-ish and sunny (sans -ish) so far today. I hope it swoops over your way. ** Okay. Due to an idea-implant from our very own Chilly Jay Chill, you have an Ulli Lommel fest to get you through the next 24 hours, and then I will be back to interrupt the blog's flow yet again.

DJ Screw – cough syrup
Pimp C – cough syrup
Big Hawk – shot
Fat Pat – shot



































*

p.s. Hey. Today the blog forefronts a crazily informative and sonically delicious fest of Houston-made power music, finessed and annotated and designated by the crazily talented writer and thing-maker and d.l. Chris Dankland. Please lean in or back and read/click and say what you think to Chris until the cows come home, thank you, and gratitude multiply squared to Mr. Dankland. ** Misanthrope, You never know. Or I never did or do. Readership is a weird crapshoot. I see that Dynomoose helped you out conceptually on your cellphone issues. ** David Ehrenstein, Real shame that you didn't get to write that Fassbinder book. Lommel has turned out to be one trippy talent. I still can't tell what the fuck is intentional in those latter films or not. That's saying something. RIP Donald Richie indeed. ** Dynomoose, Nice find on the graphene thing. I clicked over there and ended up poring over what I thought would take but a mere glance. Ha ha, yeah, not sure Lommel's stuff gets priority cueing in one's Netflix waiting line. ** Billy Lloyd, Hi, B! It was awesome! Oh, I should do a Mike Kelley post. Let me see if there's enough online stuff to do his stuff justice. That Rhianna-inspired dance floor moment made a super interesting mental image, at once tragic and bristling with frantic energy or something. I'll report back from our investigation of the ice rink. I tried ice skating when much younger, but I couldn't get my ankles to stay straight. They kept bending in half. I think they're weaklings. That is a quite nice ending to your trip. There's a breakfast restaurant in Paris too: American Breakfast. Serves the American version of breakfast all day and evening, which I'm guessing means scrambled eggs, toast, hash browns, bacon? Did your creativity break through your malaise? Surely it poked through just a little bit. ** Rewritedept, Hi. 'TToW' is interesting, not great, but with weird, good things in and about it. 'Blank Generation' isn't very good at all, but the seeing period punk era stuff is worth it. Richard's a great, complicated, sweet guy. Mellowed, I guess. A lot less drug usage if any. The new Iceage is even better than the first album. I like their drumming, but what I do know about drumming? Well, yeah, my books' outre content and my treatment of it is definitely a turn off and stop sign to most people. It's not just the sex/violence, there's also this prevalent 'who cares about these fucked up boys' reaction. My head and heart just don't have very much in common with most people's heads and hearts, and fiction can only do so much intervening. You either shortchange yourself to draw a ton of reader buddies, or you accept that you'll rarely be understood, and that that's okay. Way it goes. The Butthole Surfers, now that's a band with a fantastic sense of humor right there. Hm, I kind of go for a hallucinatory effect with my writing sometimes or maybe even more than sometimes, so saying my work is hallucinatory doesn't ring untrue to me. I like trying to make prose that seems really simple and flat on the surface do tricks in the reader's head that it couldn't seem like it could do. I think that tattoo might be a source of future regret, if you want my opinion. But I'm honored by your wish to extract the sentence, of course. ** Bill, Ha ha, I did try to find laudatory essays and descriptions of his films to use in the post. I really did. But almost the only positive things I could find were interview answers by him. Okay, well, I'm glad that you sort of made the deadline or were able to sneak past it. Good luck with all that work, man. ** Cobaltfram, Hi, John. I've had people in my life whom I cared about commit suicide since I was a kid, and, yeah, it's a tough thing. Well, I was kind of mostly kidding about the constant romance and wooing and so on in France and just working with the cliche, but cliches don't arise unless they have a basis. Being in love with books is def. a good love, and I will say that that kind of romance is very French. Decent nap? Oh, so your agent is carpet bombing publishers with your mss. That's an interesting tactic. Maybe it's the normal way to do things these days, I'm not sure. Saves time, hopefully. My agent used to do this tactic where he'd hit one or maybe two publishers at a time and use the whole 'this is an exclusive' kind of approach, which, ha ha, never did my mss. much good, come to think of it. Let patience be your byword. Oh, cool that Chad is giving 'TMS' a try. Hope he, you know, likes it. ** _Black_Acrylic, Lommel does seem like he could be a good fit for your pal's film series. Very nice title of his film series, of course. ** Steevee, That is curious about the lack of Fassbinder in Russo's book. I wonder what was about. I really want to see 'Leviathan'. I need to figure out the way. Cool that you interviewed those guys. ** Statictick, Hi. I SOO wish you could see the Mike Kelley show too. It'll be in NYC, so maybe you can scoot over there during the months that it's up. No problem, understood totally, about the guest-post thing. I appreciate you thinking of here in that regard. ** Sypha, Hey. Wow, you started an enthusiastic dialogue on my blog about 'Les Miserables'. I am agog. Wonders never cease. Hope your headache is as dead as a doornail by now. ** Kyler, Hi. ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hm, I can't remember what it was that you wrote that inspired the Lommel post. I just remember it was something. I'm reading the galley of Richard Hell's memoir right now. Yeah, it's a blast. I think I have a couple of the early Raime Eps, yeah. Real good stuff. I do think he's gotten better and better. I'm all about the new Iceage album at the moment. And I just got the new Autechre, but I haven't 'spun' it yet. Well, of course I'm way more than amenable re: any guest-posts you want to make. Potentially forever in your debt is more the reaction I'm having. ** 5STRINGS, Ex-sex. Can be tricky. Sounds like it wasn't. Cool. Hm, I think I think that the higher one's intelligence, the more complicated things become, but I'm hardly a role model. You're confused about sculpture, yes! Confusion is the truth, as they/I always say. ** Pilgarlic, Hi, man. I don't know. The soundtrack file seemed to download okay for me, but then my computer might now be full of termite-like code doing things that I'm misjudging as caffeine-lacking hallucinations. Yeah, weird what memory does to the past. Memory is such an interesting artist. Wow, very cool about her finding that short story draft of yours. Dude, do the rewriting. That's exciting! ** Un Cœur Blanc, Hi! I do know there's an Onyx Street in LA, yes, coincidentally. I've driven on it a number of times. You will already know that I think moving to LA is a lovely idea, given my fondness for the place. I wouldn't bother checking out the 'Frisk' film. It's awful. The score is worth the listen, though. ** Jerry Seinfeld, Jerry! What a strange thing to welcome you here, or, rather, to have my longstanding suspicions that Mr. Dankland was, in fact, merely a mask that you were wearing confirmed! Now, if I may speak to your mask for a moment ... Hi, Chris. Thank you like a hurricane for the amazing post today! Picking a favorite Fassbinder film is tough since he made so many different kinds of films, but I will say, nonetheless, that my favorite Fassbinder film is 'In a Year of 13 Moons'. Great about the Spacedads thing! I have yet to watch one of those Spreecasts. It's hard because, with the time difference, most Spreecasts of interest happen while I'm asleep, and then I space out about checking out the archives, but I will completely for sure watch that one, and almost for sure today. Everyone, there's a new video work by our guest-host du jour Chris Dankland that appears in the midst of the latest episode of the Alt Lit staple and funfest-shped spreecast 'Spacedads', and I hereby highly recommend you click this and watch it, that is if you need any extra encouragement. Seidel's really interesting, right? Excited for his brand new upcoming one. Chekhov is a very interesting point of comparison, hunh, yeah, cool. Boomeranging super awesomeness designation right back to you, man. ** ** L@rstonovich, Larsty! You're back again! You're like the opposite of the blog's one-man mysterious imbedded system of land mines. Or something. You sound like you're doing A-okay. Love the novel carving news, it won't surprise you. Majorly crossed fingers re: the promotion. Would be sweet. You're tumbling? I did not know that you were tumbling, no. Holy shit. I already bookmarked it. Everyone, legendary d.l./writer/sound curator/ musician and I don't know what all else L@rstonovich has a tumblr, and, since he's a god, and since he's not here all that often, I really think you should click this, which will make you wind up at SHNOYTZ, as his tumblr is titled, and then bookmark said locale for future visiting on a highly regular basis. Richard Lloyd with dyed blond hair!?! He's one of my all-time biggest rock star crushes, but that was not a good look for him, jeez. I love seeing you, as if you didn't know. ** Right. It's time for you to get yourself a feel for Houston Rap and think/act/type accordingly. I will see you tomorrow.

Welcome to Gay Marriage Agency “Golden Boys”!

We offer you unique, high-quality, approved by time, and one of the most advanced and honest dating services for single Western gay men interested in meeting handsome Ukrainian and Russian guys living in Ukraine for long-term relationship and building same-sex family.

We are proud that during time of our work dozens of lonely people have met and found their happiness together. We are sure our agency was born under lucky star because all couples who met through matchmaking service of our gay marriage agency are very happy together.

Make the first step to meeting that could change your life by browsing OUR BOYS’ PHOTO CATALOG. You will see so handsome and masculine guys that they will seem to be unreal. But we want to assure you that all our guys are REAL, most of them live in small towns of Ukraine. Some of them have asked us to name nearest big city as their home town because they don’t want to be disclosure by their neighbors – as the place they live in is so small that all inhabitants know each other.

After you made your choice it is time to make the second step. One of the most romantic ways of self-introduction is to write an introduction letter for the guy(s) you liked. This service is FREE OF CHARGE!

And now the third step is in the nick of time – to contact guy on regular basis in case he has shown his interest to your person. We recommend getting into touch with guy using OUR MAIL FORWARDING SERVICE.

Well, you have chosen one or several guys living in Ukraine; your relations are wonderful; you have a premonition of real love and it seems to you that you have found your soul mate; your correspondence is very emotional and enjoyable, therefore it is time for the forth step – PERSONAL MEETNG.

Be happy!





Why our boys are best?

The answer to the question is very simple – a Ukraine gay boy is like Spring, he is bright and every day he’s different, he is mysterious. Who needs a man that is too straightforward and very predictable? It’s boring! Isn’t it better if it rains in the morning and then the sun shines brightly in the sky in the afternoon? It is much more exciting, isn’t it?

As a rule, Ukrainian gay boys and Russian gay boys value what they have, especially their families. Are you ready to reap the harvest? Our culture influences a boy until he’s grown-up. We are still too far from the West, and it’s our big advantage!

Now attention, dear friends! I’ll tell you a secret. According to statistics, there are much fewer divorces in the countryside and small towns than in big cities, so don’t try to necessarily find a life partner from such cities as Kiev, Odessa or Kharkov.

Would you like to see your table as generous as autumn? You know the way already: find a Ukrainian gay boy for you! Why is that? Because their wish to save money forces Ukrainian gay boys and Russian gay boys to cook dishes from anything they can find in the fridge, and these dishes are absolutely delicious! You won’t find the recipes of these dishes in your cookery books because these recipes were inherited by your Ukrainian gay boys from their grandmothers.

If you take an Ukrainian gay boy as your life-partner, you won’t have to eat canned food anymore. However, you’ll have to find glass jars because to prepare homemade sealed food is an old Ukrainian tradition. And don’t think that at the same time Ukrainian gay boys and Russian gay boys forget to look after themselves! Go and see our boys’ catalog!





Farmers Gay Dating

After 16 years of great success in dating between Western gay men and Russian and Ukrainian gay boys we’re starting a new project dedicated to single gay farmers in Western Europe and North America and Ukrainian and Russian single gay boys living in rural areas.

Why are we targeting gay people living in the countryside?

As in the rural areas it is very difficult for gay people to find their match. Many gay farmers feel unhappy because they have to spend the best years of their lives in loneliness. As the situation in Ukraine is the same – the majority of countryside gay boys is lonely and has to hide their orientation even more deep than gay boys in big cities of Ukraine.

As there are many gay men in rural areas seeking on Google: countryside gay dating, agricultural gay dating, gay cowboys, gay farmers, etc.

How to solve this problem?

It is very impractical to resolve this problem with internal resources or in Western Europe or North America. The American or Western European gay boys usually do not like farm work and low wages. The only solution is international farmers’ dating with gay boys from other countries, where gay boys living in rural areas are more adroit at rural work and oriented to a more traditional values.





Successful Stories

Dear Iosif,

This is Patrick, I was a client of yours three years ago. I enjoyed your services very much and would like again the chance to say thank you very much. Anatoly and I are happy to say that we have now been happily together for 2 years and our relationship grows stronger everyday.

Thanks Again,
Patrick and Anatoly (Sydney, Australia)




Dear Friends:

My name is Randy and I live in Georgia. I went over to Kiev and was made to feel right at home. I met with several different guys and found that all of them were handsome and very kind hearted. One very special and beautiful boy won my heart and now we are in the process of obtaining his US visa so he can come to the United States and we can be together forever.

Thanks again
Sincerely,
Randy (Atlanta, Georgia, United States)




Dear Gay Marriage Agency,

Anton is more than I could ever of dreamed of and I owe it all to the GMA. The Gay Marriage Agency made my stay feel so very special and they helped with all my needs. I feel like I have made some great friends over there.

All I can say guys is if you want to find a guy that is very beautiful both inside and outside then write to the GMA agency because with them all your dreams will come true.

Yours sincerely, Tom (Frankfurt Germany)





Dear Iosif,

I have just returned from a trip to Kiev, Ukraine, where I became committed to one of the guys that I met through your services. I wrote to three boys through your very professional services and received two replies, a very high percentage compared to other services (I am 55 years old and wrote to such young Russian boys). Again, thank you for providing me with the opportunity that may be the high point of my life. I hope to write again when Alexander is here.

Stelios (West Hills, California, United States)




Dear Friends,

Through your service I met a delightful, muscular, well-educated guy, with a fresh personality and healthy roots. We exchanged weekly e-mails (weekly because it took him some time to write in English), and a few phone calls. I decided to travel to meet him, well prepared for the reality to be under my rather inflated expectations. It was the other way. The real boy was smarter, prettier, sweeter and more delightful than I could have imagined! I’ve decided on the third day (and cancelled second potential meeting that I had scheduled in case this one did not work out) and to my delight he eventually said yes (he thought I was a bit premature). I met his friends and family (all wonderful and hospitable people). Kiev is a beautiful city (although it gets pretty cold in the winter time) with a lot of things to do.

Thank you,
Perry (Toronto, Canada)




Dear friends,

I had been looking for a Russian boy-friend for five years, even traveling there two years ago. In late Fall of 2003, I found Golden Boys agency. When I talked to Sergey on the phone, his English was excellent.

I met Sergey at the San Francisco, airport in December. It was his first trip to the West Coast. In Ukraine Sergey was a manager on big state factory. We spent one week together, he returned to Kiev for his business , and then returned to San Francisco, on December, 24 2003!

Last week-end we got a four-and-a-half-month-old German Shepherd named Blue Bear, who we train every evening. We also swim at the YMCA and at our tennis club… Oh yes, Sergey now has his pocket money and a credit card.

Sincerely,
Dick (Oakland, California, United States)







We wish you good luck in your search of happiness and love!

The first impression you will make on guy could be deciding. From our experience we know that guy is worrying before the first meeting with the person who has become so intimate and dear during the correspondence, his heart is overfilled with hopes and doubts (we are sure, that yours too).

We have special service for arranging personal meeting that includes airport pick up & drop off, private apartment reservation, organization of meetings with guys, interpretation. You can find details at PERSONAL TOUR page.

We will be happy to help you in meeting intelligent, masculine, caring and handsome life partner who will fill your lonely heart with warmth and love and comfort your home with his care and consideration.

If you are still not sure, you can share your doubts with us by CONTACTING OUR OFFICE and we will answer all your questions in person.













*

p.s. RIP: Kevin Ayers. So sad. You guys probably remember that I did a gig post featuring Kevin Ayers' music just a little over a month ago. It's here. Otherwise, you've probably noticed by now that the p.s. today is not much of a p.s. Sorry for the lack of forewarning. I'm working on a big art project by/with my friend Zac, and an important meeting re: that just got scheduled for this morning yesterday afternoon. So, I'm away doing that, and I will catch up with the comments from yesterday and today when the p.s. comes back in full-bodied form tomorrow. The post today surely needs no intro, I don't think, so try to enjoy it, and I'll see you in the morning.

'Thomas McGuane has steadily produced novels, stories and screenplays, and essays on sports and pastimes like fishing and horseback riding. He has been quietly influential and subtly subversive. Coursing through his work is a current of strident silliness—funny names, wacky characters, outsize occurrences—that flows from Mark Twain, picks up Ring Lardner and others early in the twentieth century, and adds Joseph Heller and Thomas Pynchon, post–World War II.

'In spite of this, McGuane is hard to place. The humor is evident from the start, but there is something stylishly askew. The early novels The Sporting Club (1969), The Bushwhacked Piano (1971), and Ninety-two in the Shade (1973), while full of oddballs in slapstick situations, also feature formalities of diction and syntactical quirks (“Stanton beckoned”; “Little comfort derived from the slumberous heat of the day”) that seem plucked from the Victorians. The Sporting Club’s protagonist even puts himself to sleep reading Thackeray. Complex intellectual formulations pop up, the following (from Ninety-two) occasioned by its narrator’s imagining his “aging lame” father in a whorehouse—horrible thought perhaps, though the narrator wonders if quiescence would be even worse: “A silent man wastes his own swerve of molecules; just as a bee ‘doing its number on the flower’ is as gone to history as if it never was. The thing and its expression are to be found shaking hands at precisely that point where Neverneverland and Illyria collide with the Book of Revelation under that downpour of grackle droppings that is the present at any given time.” One imagines young readers at that time (1973) pausing here to light up, musing, “Like, wow, man.” Early McGuane is full of such moments.

'Still, McGuane’s work dodges the then-discernible categories. He was not part of the Barth/ Barthelme/ Hawkes wing of mytho-historical realism, though he seems to have been a fan, or at least a reader. Critic Dexter Westrum reports that a friend remembered young McGuane paying a quarter for a “first-edition hardcover of The End of the Road, John Barth’s scarcest title.” And while Richard Brautigan (along with Carlos Castaneda and Baba Ram Dass) gets a mention in McGuane’s 1992 novel Nothing but Blue Skies, McGuane is never fixedly part of the hippie-lit set. Pynchon’s 1966 novel, The Crying of Lot 49, does seem to have some bearing on the case. Pynchon, like McGuane, goes readily to comic extremes, and indulges in similarly trippy intellectualizing. Pynchon’s college pal Richard Fariña, whose campus romp Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me was published soon after Crying and sported a Pynchon blurb, might have come to McGuane’s attention. But Fariña, like Pynchon a student of Nabokov’s at Cornell, comes off as Joyce-struck. Classicisms and interior monologue often get in the way of his tenderly slapsticky, innocently iconoclastic prose. Early McGuane is winnowed clean of modernism’s more oppressive effects. ...

'McGuane is one of the rare contemporary American writers whose characters always do things. They run businesses, put up fences, farm, ranch, guide, fish. They are not people on vacations or grants, they are not professors, critics, writers, or artists—or, when they are, they are artists becoming cattle ranchers, as in Keep the Change (1989). In this way issues of class and money arise naturally, between bosses and workers, and the sense of automatic and persistent injustice is apparent and recurrent. The disadvantaged are abundantly aware of this, even when they themselves are acting badly. There’s a crushing moment at the end of the story “A Skirmish” (To Skin a Cat, 1986) when the dirt-poor father of troubled boys who have been tormenting the story’s narrator nevertheless takes his boys’ side, figuring that in the long run his boys “will go where they’re kicked” while the well-off narrator “will always have something [he] can do.” The hint that the safety net money affords tilts the playing field irreversibly in favor of the upper class gives McGuane’s comedy political heft. As McGuane put it to The Paris Review, “I suppose I am a bit left of Left. America is a dildo that has turned berserkly on its owner.”' -- Mark Kamine, The Believer



____
Media


McGuane, Richard Brautigan, a.o. in 'Tarpon'


Excerpt: '92 in the Shade' (1975), based on TM's novel


Excerpt: 'Missouri Breaks' (1976), based on TM's novel


Warren Zevon sings 'The Overdraft', co-written with Thomas McGuane


_____
Further

Thomas McGuane Official Website
'He's Left No Stone Unturned'
Video: Sam Lipsyte on Thomas McGuane
'Thomas McGuane: The lay of the land'
TM interviewed @ Identity Theory
TM's story 'Cowboy' @ The New Yorker
TM's story 'The Casserole' @ The New Yorker
'Captain Berserko Writes a Better Ending'
'Thomas McGuane: FR&R'S Angler of the Year 2010'
'La leçon de vie de Thomas McGuane'
TM's 'Remembering John Updike'
Video: 'Thomas McGuane in “Trout Grass”'
Buy 'The Bushwhacked Piano' @ Amazon



_______
Interview
from The Paris Review




All five of your books seem to have distinctive stylistic features. Could you talk about the specific evolutions your prose has undergone?

THOMAS McGUANE: I started my career distinctly and single-mindedly with the idea that I wanted to be a comic novelist. I had studied comic literature from Lazarillo de Tormes to the present. The twentieth-century history of comic writing had prepared me to write in the arch, fascist style that I used in The Sporting Club. Then the picaresque approach was something I tried to express in The Bushwhacked Piano, although I’ve now come to feel that the picaresque form is no longer that appropriate for writing; writers are looking for structures other than that episodic, not particularly accumulative form—at least I am. Ninety-Two in the Shade was the first of the books in which I felt I brought my personal sense of epochal crisis to my interest in literature. It’s there that you find this crackpot cross between traditional male literature and The Sid Caesar Show and the preoccupation with process and mechanics and “doingness” that has been a part of American literature from the beginning—it’s part of Moby Dick. The best version of it, for my money, is Life on the Mississippi, which is probably the book I most wish I’d written in American literature. When I got to Ninety-Two I was tired of being amusing; I like my first two books a lot, but I tried to put something like a personal philosophy in Ninety-Two in the Shade. That book also marked the downward progress of my instincts as a comic novelist. Starting with Ninety-Two I felt that to go on writing with as much flash as I had tried to do previously was to betray some of the serious things I had been trying to say. That conflict became one that I tried to work out in different ways subsequently. The most drastic attempt was in Panama, which I wrote in the first person in this sort of blazing confessional style. In terms of feeling my shoulder to the wheel and my mouth to the reader’s ear, I have never been so satisfied as I was when I was writing that book. I didn’t feel that schizophrenia that most writers have when they’re at work. That schizophrenia was in the book instead of between me and the book.

The father-son relationship is constantly a major issue in your fiction. Is some of the tension of these fictional relationships autobiographically based?

TM: This is plainly so. If you’d been around me while I was growing up you’d have clearly seen that my relationship with my father was going to be a major issue in my life. My father was a kid who grew up rather poor (his father had worked for the railroad) and who had a gift for English; he wound up being a scholar-athlete who went to Harvard, where he learned some of the skills that would enable him to go on and become a prosperous businessman, but where he also learned to hate wealth. My father hated people with money and yet he became one of those people. And he was not only an alcoholic but a workaholic, a man who never missed a day of work in his life. He was a passionate man who wanted a close relationship with his family, but he was a child of the Depression and was severely scarred by that, to the point where he really drove himself and didn’t have much time for us. So while he prepared us to believe that parents and children were very important, he just never delivered. And we were all shattered by that: my sister died of a drug overdose in her middle twenties; my brother has been a custodial case since he was thirty; as soon as my mother was given the full reins of her own life, after my dad died, she drank herself to death in thirty-six months. I’m really the only one still walking around, and I came pretty close to being not still walking around. It all goes back to that situation where people are very traditional in their attitudes about the family, a family that was very close (we had this wonderful warm place in Massachusetts where my grandfather umpired baseball games and played checkers at the fire station), but then they move off to the bloody Midwest where they all go crazy. I’ve tried to work some of this out in my writing, and my younger sister tried to work it out in mental institutions. She was the smartest one of us all, an absolute beauty. She died in her twenties.

Nicholas Payne in The Bushwhacked Piano says, “I’ve made silliness a way of life.” Was “pranksterism” part of your own life as a kid?

TM: Yes, it was, but there’s more to it than that. We have chances for turning the kaleidoscope in a very arbitrary way. I wanted to be a military pilot at one time and came that close to joining the Naval Air Corps until I got into Yale, which I didn’t expect to happen. One of the practical things they teach combat fliers is that you can only reason through so much, and therefore in a combat situation if at a certain point you feel you can’t reason through a situation, then the thing you must do is anything, so long as you do something. Even in the Navy, with its expensive equipment and its highly predicated forms of action, you are told to just splash something off and do it! Doing something arbitrary or unexpected is probably the only way you’re going to survive in a combat situation. Game theoreticians have made this an important factor. The first strike is really very close to pranksterism. Pranks, the inexplicability of comedy, and lateral moves at the line of scrimmage can sometimes be the only way you can move forward. In silliness and pranks, there is something very great. It’s in that scene I created in Panama—the decision to jump off the diving board not knowing if there’s water in the pool. Sometimes that’s not a dopey thing to do but a very smart thing. It’s the first strike.

Are there any contemporary American writers you especially admire or feel affinities with?

TM: Nobody very surprising, I suspect: I like Barry Hannah, Raymond Carver, Harry Crews, Don Carpenter, Don DeLillo, Jim Harrison, Joan Didion. DeLillo has categorized a certain kind of fiction in a way that seems absolutely definitive: “around-the-house-and-in-the-yard fiction.” There are a lot of good writers who belong to that group—a lot of recent women writers are in that school, for example, and many of them are tremendously good. At the same time, writers with broad streaks of fancifulness or writers who have trained themselves on Joyce or Gogol, as I did, may feel a little reproached when we compare ourselves to these writers who write about the bitter, grim, domestic aspects of living. You feel, gee, I’m pretty frivolous compared to these serious people. Sometimes this can be a misleading reproach because you may decide that you need to change your subject matter if you’re going to be a serious writer.


____
Book

Thomas McGuane The Bushwhacked Piano
Random House

'As a citizen, Nicholas Payne is not in the least solid. As a boyfriend, he is nothing short of disastrous, and his latest flame, the patrician Ann Fitzgerald, has done a wise thing by dropping him. But Ann isn't counting on Nicholas's wild persistence, or on the slapstick lyricism of Thomas McGuane, who in The Bushwhacked Piano sends his hero from Michigan to Montana on a demented mission of courtship whose highlights include a ride on a homicidal bronco and apprenticeship to the inventor of the world's first highrise for bats. The result is a tour de force of American Dubious.' -- Random House

'The work of a writer of the first magnitude. His sheer writing skill is nothing short of amazing. The preternatural force, grace, and self-control of his prose recall Faulkner.... McGuane is a virtuoso.' -- Jonathan Yardley, The New York Times Book Review

'McGuane shares with Celine a genius for seeing the profuse, disparate materials of everyday life as a highly organized nightmare.' -- The New Yorker


______________________
Select sentences and passages

Years ago, a child in a tree with a small caliber rifle bushwhacked a piano through the open summer window of a neighbor’s living room. The child’s name was Nicholas Payne.
    Dragged from the tree by the piano’s owner, his rifle smashed up on a rock and flung, he was held by the neck in the living room and obliged to view the piano point blank, to dig into its interior and see the cut strings, the splintered holes that let slender shafts of light ignite small circles of dark inside the piano.
    “You have spoiled my piano.”

*

    The red Texaco star was not so high against the sky as the Crazy Mountains behind it. What you wanted to be high behind the red Texaco star, thought its owner, was not the Crazy Mountains, or any others, but buildings full of people who owned automobiles that needed fuel and service. Day after day, the small traffic heading for White Sulphur Springs passed the place, already gassed up for the journey. He got only stragglers; and day after day, the same Cokes, Nehis, Hires, Fanta Oranges, Nesbitts and Dr. Peppers stood in the same uninterrupted order in the plastic window of the dispenser. Unless he bought one. Then something else stared out at him, the same; like the candy wrappers in the display case with the sunbleached wrappers; or the missing tools on the peg-board in the garage whose silhouettes described their absence.
    That is why when Payne coming at the crack of dawn, rolling a herd of flat tires, pur- suing the stragglers all over the highway, seemed unusual enough that the station owner helplessly moved a few imperceptible steps toward him in greeting, “Nice day.”

*

    Later, some entirely theoretical argument with the bartender ensued during which the bartender thrust his face over the bar at Payne to inquire how anybody was going to wage trench warfare on the moon when every time you took a step you jumped forty feet in the air.

*

    The man finished and charged Payne three dollars. Payne told him he thought he’d been protecting a dollar and a half’s worth of biness. “Rate went up,” said the man, “with complications of a legal nature.”

*

    And California at first sight was the sorry, beautiful Golden West silliness and uproar of simplistic yellow hills with metal wind pumps, impossible highways to the brim of the earth, coastal cities, forests and pretty girls with their tails to the wind. A movie theatre in Sacramento played 'Mondo Freudo'. In Oakland, he saw two slum children sword fighting on a slag heap. In Palo Alto, a puffy fop in bursting jodhpurs shouted from the door of a luxurious stable, "My horse is soiled!" While one chilly evening in Union Square he listened to a wild-eyed young woman declaim that she had seen delicate grandmothers raped by Kiwanis zombies, that she had seen Rotarian blackguards bludgeoning Easter bunnies in a coal cellar, that she had seen Irving Berlin buying an Orange Julius in Queens.

*

    We each of us know instinctively that hemorrhoids were unknown before our century. It is the pressure of the times symbolically expressed. Their removal is mere cosmetic surgery.

*

    His coordination departed and he made unnecessary noise with his feet. He still bravely managed to get to the edge of the bed and look down at the muzzle of the shotgun bobbing under Missus Fitzgerald’s nose. He had occasion to recall the myriad exquisite ways she had found to make him uncomfortable.

*

    You’re going to get a crack at cooling your heels in our admirable county jail,” she said, moving toward him. “Do you know that?”
    “I just want my walking papers.”
    “No. You’re going to jail you shabby, shabby boy.”

*

    When sophisticated or wealthy women get angry, they attempt to make their faces look like skulls. Missus Fitzgerald did this and looked awfully like a jack-o-lantern. She was that fat.

*

    She had built, with her share [of Mr. Fitzgerald’s G.M. earnings], a wig bank on Woodward Avenue for the storage of hairpieces in up-to-date, sanitary conditions.... Fitzgerald had visited his wife’s operation, walking through the ultraviolet vaults filled from floor to ceil- ing with disinfected hairpieces. It was not the Mountain West in there. Stunted workmen in pale green uniforms wheeled stainless wagons of billowing human hair down sloping corridors. Prototypes of wig style rested on undetailed plastic heads.

*

    “I wonder if you would say ‘oh’ if you were a part-time secretary at the bank if Wy- andotte who had dropped December’s salary on a teased blonde beehive which you had stored all through the summer and broken out for the Fireman’s Ball in November only to find that the expensive article contained a real thriving colony of roaches and weevils; so you spray it with DDT or 2, 4-D or Black Flag or Roach-No-Mo and all the bugs, all the roaches, all the weevils run out and that wig bursts in to flames by spontaneous combustion and the house which you and your hubby—because that’s what they call their husbands, these people: hubbies—burns down around the wig and your nest egg goes up with the mortgage and it’s the end. I wonder then, if you were her and had owned this wig which you had stored privately, I wonder if you would have wondered about a refrigerated fire- proofed wig bank after all? Or not.”
    A little voice: “I would have put my wig in the wig bank.”

*

    The shadows lay this way and that, the way a tide will carry on a particularly shaped bottom, bulging and deepening and only holding fish in specific places. Or the way six grandmothers will fall when simultaneously struck by lightning.

*

    When man tries to devise things for the defeat or alteration of the natural world, usually those things turn out looking like a penis. But the phony phallus here is loaded with renegade sperms in the form of native Florida bats that by nature will not obey the will of man. They cannot be made to devour mosquitos upon man's orders, just as artificial insemination is often a bust, and cloning is risky business. In addition, under the auspices of Florida, such antics are doomed, ludicrous, and sometimes fatal; so the mosquitos remain to pester, infect, and kill.

*

    The bulk of the rest of his time would be used in aimless and pointless research in the natural world, from biology to lunar meditation; all on the principle, the absolute principle, that ripeness was all.






*

p.s. Hey. Apologies for the p.s. interruption yesterday. ** Wednesday ** Tomkendall, Hi, Tom! Always sweet to see you, man. You good? ** Armando, Hi! Happy two-days-late birthday to the Kurt! ** Misanthrope, Cold fusion is the bee's knees. No, wait, friends who buy lots of copies of your books are. ** MANCY, Hi, buddy! ** Cobaltfram, Hi, John. I love 'Topography of a Phantom City'. Sure, read it, def. Great news about the initially heart-warming submission feedback. Keep hanging in there. So, I'm guessing you have a non-ugly car too? Ideally, yeah, I try to be prepared when the submission phase happens. I try to have some project ready to start going, or already going -- a new novel, on those very rare occasions when you can think that far ahead -- or a story or an epic poem or something. It helps a lot. I don't know who Pevear and Volokhonsky are unless I'm forgetting, so, no, I haven't met them, or else I did in passing without appreciating who I'd just met or something. Yury never reads books, but the Russian education system is pretty high end, so he did read the classics and stuff in school. He'll occasionally reference some Russian tome, but not very often. ** David Ehrenstein, G' Morning. ** Rewritedept, Hell's cool. The Richard one at least. It doesn't really surprise me that a lot of people don't care about fucked up young characters since they don't seem to care about fucked up young people in the real world either. Most people are all, like, 'You guys either behave or remind me of my younger self or be sexy or go away'. I'm glad there was that turn around with your band between yesterday and the day before, naturally. ** Heliotrope, Hi, Mark! I know, I know, re: Kevin Ayers. That was deeply sad, unexpected news, ugh. You doing great, my dear pal? Love to you and to you-know-who. ** Ken Baumann, Ken! Long time no talk indeed! I'm doing pretty great at the moment, thank you. I'm still struggling my way back into the novel, but the difficulty of doing that isn't bothering me as much. Been traveling some for lots of fun, and that's been great, and getting the new Gisele piece up and running, and working on some collab projects, and, I don't know, life has felt kind of beautiful lately. I know, I've been spying on the initial dispersion of 'SOLIP' over there in FB and elsewhere. So sweet! Want!!!! When can I get? You're angling for the top three possible responses right there for sure. High five on that trio of hopes and dreams. So, you're doing great, yes, I think? ** 5STRINGS, Okay, so, ex- as slightly less ex- or even non-ex? Am I picking up that signal? Yeah, I'm different. I aim for being confused. I look for the confusing parts. If something is confusing, and if it makes me confused, that's how I know I'm getting and understanding it or that I'm on the right track or something. Your playlist got confusing towards the end, that's cool. ** Steevee, RIP: Kevin Ayers, for sure. ** Dynomoose, Hi, big A! Wow, cool, a treasure trove of stuff I'm excited to check out. I'll hit each one of them today. Oh, right, that brain copying thing. I probably won't still be alive for that one unless my theory that I am immortal proves to be correct. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. ** Brendan, Brendan!?! Hi, pal o pal. Oh, I don't know, I really don't think that d.l.s' visiting habits have any impact on their status, value, and all that stuff. No sweat. You did the wrestling thing with the Joel. I want to do that too. I'm good. New show! Excellent! In LA? At that same gallery? June? Maybe I'll be real lucky and get see to it 3D this time. It won't suck. Send me peeks, and I will be a one-man proof machine re: that fact. New ladyfriend, very sweet! The word ladyfriend makes me think about David Crosby. Weird. It's okay, though. I forgive you. She sounds as cool and as interesting as all get out. So, you're doing really quite well, no? Surely I'll be there during the season, and, yes, Dodger Stadium, a fucking must. Really good to see you, B. ** Sypha, Hi, James. Gotta join with Dynomoose in saying you should do at least just a little more promo and attention-drawing to your book. What's the harm, you know? Oh, right, I remember your 'Les Miz' shirt now! Yeah, I don't know, it's so extremely not my thing that I don't feel like I can even have perspective on it or something. ** Billy Lloyd, Hi, Billy! Okay, I'll give a Mike Kelley post a serious try right away. I figure my ankles must be even wussier by now, so I think I'll just walk around the rink's perimeter thinking about the ice's superficial beauty and go 'aww' at the most weak-ankled skaters. Do you guys have the vegan falafel chain place Moaz there? Their falafels are killer. Very nice news on the creative breakthrough of sorts. Oh, sure, I do exactly the same thing, in effect, in writing. That's the phase I'm in with my novel right now. Just going through the sentences and trying clip out the unnecessary syllables and getting the sentences' rhythms sharper and stuff. I like doing that. It's very relaxing. You're in Oxford now, okay, and how was it? What did you do? ** Thursday ** Un Cœur Blanc, Hi! Oh, I got your gift yesterday! Thank you, thank you! I'm so happy, and you're so nice! Thank you so much! And thank you for the great Pinback live vidclip. It's gorgeous. You know I love them muchly. Here's a live one back for you -- them doing my very favorite Pinback song. ** Misanthrope, Your marriage has never been more of a done deal. The art project thing going to be amazing. Not much to say about it right now, but I will when it gets more on its way. What gear are you getting your ass into? I await your Chabon verdict. ** Dynomoose, Ha ha, you squeezed the post's hell into the perfect hand-basket right there. ** David Ehrenstein, You don't think so, ha ha? ** Sypha, Hi. Okay, but there's still an IRL version there to help flog to those many of us who still like our books best in object form. ** 5STRINGS. Putin-like boy, urp. Yuck. I can't even think of a bigger yuck this morning. Did you call that Disney boy? 'Disney boy' sounds very promising. ** Armando, Dude, your birthday isn't stupid, and I hope you had the happiest birthday ever, even. Did you let yourself have a special kind of fun? Spammer, man, come on, give yourself a loving hug with my name on it, okay? ** Rewritedept, I ignored 'the crap', as you see. Nice, the band comp goal. Have you picked the perfect, most inarguable song? It's too early to talk much about the art project, but I'm sure I will as it gets more developed and ready to happen. Uh, I'm actually not so into talking about my life and the people in it here that much. Once in a while it feels okay, or things slip out because my enthusiasm spills over or something. But that's just not my natural style in general or something. But, yeah, long story short, Zac is very awesome, a brilliant artist, and a very great friend. I'm glad you dug 'Providence', obviously. Skype sometime, okay, we'll sort it at some point. My favorite thing in '1991: The Year Punk Broke' is that footage of Dinosaur Jr. playing 'Freak Scene'. I'll trust you on the tattoo thing. I think they're cool, but I've never gotten one, and I've never come to close to wanting to have one. ** Steevee, Oh, I just thought the site was an obvious scam and that what was written, etc. on there was hilarious. If you look at the site, you'll see that it hasn't been updated since 1993. I guess I don't think the people who do that site care any more about DOMA than the people who send out those spam emails saying a distant, deceased relative has left me a billion dollars care about correct grammar and punctuation. ** Chris Cochrane, Hi, Chris! New Iceage is mega. Yes, I'll get to see you over here before too long at all now! Are you great, man, and, if so, how and why? ** Chris Dankland, Hi, Chris! Thank you so much again, and also for talking to the folks. Yeah, I think, actually, that most of my closest IRL friends are visual artists. Not sure how that happened, but, obviously, there's something to the large artist percentage that's more than coincidence. In LA, the visual artist and writer scenes have always been very mixed together socially. And I 'taught' at UCLA in the Fine Arts department for a few years, and a lot of the student artists I worked with there ended up being close fiends of mine. So, there's that. Roggenbuck's Bieber love is very funny to me. It fits with his thing really well and cleverly, and I guess he really means it since he seems to really mean everything he says. Or he seems to mean for what he says to have the impact that it ends up having. Or something. What a curious fella. I'd like to have an IRL chat one-on-one with him someday, if one-on-ones with him are even possible. My Friday has begun well -- it's snowing! -- and I hope yours will too once your portion of Friday's sun comes up. ** Bollo, Hi, J. Yeah, I'll explain the piece once it gets going. It's really going to be a piece by Zac to which I'll contribute in some fashion that's not yet cemented. Reading'll juice you up, probably. It's good at that. Great day! ** Okay. We're caught up. Today I draw your attention to this jazzy/psychedlic-ish early novel that I like very much by Thomas McGuane. Try it out. See you tomorrow.

I think it is only human nature to look back on our childhoods as a time of idyllic happiness. But that’s a sentiment I’ve never quite understood. To quote from an unpublished short story of mine, “Nostalgizing on one’s childhood memories is like handling a rose: while it is pretty to the eyes and often smells divine, one must be ever wary of the thorns prickling such recollections. For behind the radiance of nostalgia is a shadow that can never be forgotten” (yes, “Nostalgizing” is a word). Even though my childhood was normal and very non-traumatic (some might even say boring), for whatever reason I recall being a very anxious and easily frightened child. I saw the world as a big and scary place, an impression that I’ve never been able to shake as I’ve grown older. Like most children, I had a number of fairly commonplace phobias, such as a fear of death, a fear of bees, a fear of throwing up, a fear of being possessed by the Devil (these, incidentally, are phobias I’ve never been able to conquer). But at the same time, there were other more specific things from my youth that gave me “the howling fantods” (to cop a phrase from the oeuvre of Mr. David Foster Wallace). Overheard stories, stuff I saw on TV or in movies or video games, certain illustrations in books or things that I read, and so on. I’d like to briefly examine a few of these, and maybe in the comments section today you can share with me a few of your own.



Stories

The Rainbow Homily

As many of you know, when I was a child I was raised as a Roman Catholic. So every Sunday I went to Mass with my family at 8:00 AM. The church we went to was Our Lady Queen of Martyrs Church in Woonsocket, Rhode Island (O.L.Q.M. for short). Even though this was not the church I was baptized at (as my parents had been members of a different parish at the time of my birth), it was at O.L.Q.M. that I attended Mass once a week until maybe I was 18 or 19 years old: by then I had a part-time job at the local Super Stop & Shop supermarket (located across the street from O.L.Q.M.) where I often had to work on Sunday mornings, thus letting me off the hook when it came to going to church. I guess I would have liked going to church there more if O.L.Q.M. was a nicer-looking building, but I always thought that it was kind of bland, architecturally speaking, especially when compared to the pictures of the old European cathedrals from the Middle Ages that I would look at in my history textbooks at school. It had like, no stained glass windows or anything like that. It almost felt more like a Protestant church or something. Or a church built post-Vatican II, though O.L.Q.M. was actually built in the late 1950’s, so really, it had no excuse.

Anyway, there was this one priest I liked, Father Barry Gamache was his name. He was the assistant pastor. He wasn’t like most of the other priests at O.L.Q.M. He was like an actual human being, someone who I could relate to. He was a fat, jovial fellow; heck, his cheeks were practically rosy. I don’t think that I ever saw him without a smile on his face. He had his little vices, of course, like all of us: he smoked all the time, and was somewhat obsessed with his golf game, though he freely admitted that he was terrible at golf. He was really popular with the rest of the parishioners. At the start of each of his homilies, he would warm the crowd up, so to speak, with a little joke. Sadly, I’ve forgotten most of the jokes he told, but here’s one that I still recall, after all these years: a guy goes into his kitchen, opens up the freezer door of his refrigerator, and he sees a Bugs Bunny-like rabbit sleeping in his freezer. When the guy asks the rabbit what he’s doing in the freezer, the rabbit answers, ‘I thought it said Westing House!’

As I said, Father Barry wasn’t like some of the other priests at O.L.Q.M. The other priests there were, for the most part, grim old fossils with no sense of humor. I remember one summer when one of those pastors was away on a religious retreat for a week, leaving Father Barry in charge of the parish. That Sunday, when Father Barry stepped out from behind the lectern to deliver his homily, he simply said, ‘When the cat’s away, the mouse will play. You guys get the week off.’ Or words to that effect. And that was it. It was easily the shortest sermon I’ve ever heard in my life, lasting not even ten seconds. Needless to say, the congregation loved that: they laughed and even applauded. And yet, the irony is, it was one of Father Barry’s homilies that scared me more than any other homily that I’ve ever heard in my life.

I forget exactly what year it was, or how old I was… I think I was still in middle school at the time, so I want to say probably 1991, when I was 11 or so. The homily in question consisted of a story Father Barry told us, no doubt as a means of explaining that week’s Gospel reading. I forget if this story was something he had read in a book, or if it was a dream he had had, or just something he made up: the fact that I’ve never been able to track down the story to its original source is something that has haunted me throughout my life. I forget the exact details, but this is what I remember about the story he told us that day:

One day, a rainbow appears in the sky, a rainbow that can be seen at any point on Earth. As people look up at the rainbow in shock, burning letters begin to appear across the rainbow itself. The letters form the following message: that all people’s sins will be unveiled, and that the world will end in seven days. And sure enough, everyone’s sins begin to manifest as words on their faces. By that I mean, say you were guilty of the sin of lust: then the word “LUST” would appear on your face. People all over the Earth panic. They try to wash the words off their faces, but the words remain, despite their best effort. At one point in the story, Father Barry mentioned a couple, a husband and wife I think, who decide to remain married, even when they can plainly see that they’ve been unfaithful to each other. Then on the seventh day the rainbow reappears and the world ends. That’s the gist of the homily, as best as I can recall it.

For years afterwards, I had a bad fear of rainbows. I would get very nervous every time it would rain, and whenever I was outside I tried my best not to look up at the sky, for fear of seeing a rainbow that had words on it announcing the advent of the end of the world (plus, the idea of my sins appearing on my face for all the world to see was also a big part of that worry). I know it sounds silly, and eventually I outgrew it (hell, in college, I joined the campus gay/straight/bi/trans/questioning student group, which was called RAINBOW). A few years ago I began studying the fear of rainbows, and found that it was an actual phobia: iridophobia (incidentally, another phobia I had growing up was fear of buttons, the clinical name for which is koumpounophobia. It’s more common than you would assume. Steve Jobs, for example, suffered the same fear, which is one of the reasons why the elevator in Apple’s Tokyo store has no floor buttons. In my case it was so chronic that, when I was growing up, I would refuse to wear any type of clothing that had buttons on them. Just the act of touching a button would leave me feeling physically ill. Of course, with some people the phobia is so severe that the sight of a button is enough to induce vomiting. I wasn’t that bad though. I still find large buttons to be very disgusting, however).



The Bloody Mary Urban Legend

The following story occurred when I was in middle school, probably the 7th grade. There was this one day at school where all the kids seemed to be talking about the Bloody Mary urban myth. The way they were describing it was, if you stood in front of a mirror in a darkened room and said the words “Bloody Mary” ten times while staring into the mirror, then the bloody disembodied head of a dead witch would appear in the mirror and, if you did not escape from the room or turn the light on fast enough, then she would chop your head off or something. As I said, many of my classmates were talking about this on that day, and some were even saying that they had tried it out themselves and that it was true, that she had appeared in the mirror.

Now, there are two kinds of people in this world: those who make up bullshit stories, and the superstitious, easily-fooled poor souls who believe such bullshit stories. As you can probably have guessed by now, I fall into the latter category. I even asked this one girl who said she had tried it out if she was telling the truth and she looked into my eyes and swore to God that it was true, that she wasn’t lying (I should have known better: this girl really had it out for me that year, for whatever reason: she looked exactly like Anne Frank but she was pure evil, and she took a special delight in tormenting me: once in Home Ec class our assignment was to bake pancakes and after we had baked the pancakes we ate what we had baked and this girl’s hands got all covered in maple syrup and at one point as I walked by her she grabbed my arm and she wiped her hand over my arm, as if it were a napkin, so as a result it got all sticky with maple syrup. It was a very embarrassing situation for me. But years later, I happened to find out that she had gotten knocked up, so, you know, like, karma, but I digress). Long story short, I fell for the urban legend hook, line and sinker, and by the end of that school day I was very shaken up.

I suppose I must have been pale when my parents picked me up from school, because they asked me what was wrong with me. So I told them about how all the kids were talking about Bloody Mary. My parents assured me that it was all a hoax, but I didn’t believe them. To prove it to me, they took me into the bathroom of the first floor of our house. They closed the door and turned off the lights. My dad began chanting “Bloody Mary” at the mirror while I stood at the door, my hand gripped on the knob, beads of sweat popping out on my forehead, and with each utterance of the words “Bloody Mary” my terror seemed to keep rising at a feverish pitch. Finally, with the tenth “Bloody Mary” being uttered, I screamed and ran out of the room, and in the hallway outside the bathroom I (somewhat humiliatingly) burst into tears. Naturally, Bloody Mary did not appear in the mirror. And yet, I developed a phobia that day, not so much of mirrors, but mirrors at night. Even now, to this day, whenever I’m passing by a darkened room at night with a mirror in it, I keep my head down so that I won’t accidentally look into the mirror. I remember in 2011, we had a hurricane hit New England, and we lost power for a day. That night, I had to take a shower in the bathroom, but because we had no lights I had to bring a flashlight in with me, so I could see what I was doing. On the front of the medicine cabinet above the sink is a mirror, the same mirror that my parents chanted “Bloody Mary” into all those years ago. So I covered it up with a towel!




Books

The Man With The Blue Face





When I was a kid, my dad was really into reading fantasy novels, by writers such as J.R.R. Tolkien and Stephen R. Donaldson and Terry Brooks and so forth. He would often describe the plots of these books to me in great detail: I remember how, in trying to read Lord of the Rings myself when I was in middle school, I had found that I had liked my father’s description of the book more than the book itself. But my dad also owned a lot of fantasy novels by lesser known writers as well. Pictured above is the illustration that graces the front and back cover of Robert Silverberg’s 1980 fantasy novel Lord Valentine’s Castle. On the book’s spine there was this creepy-looking man with blue skin who I would always refer to as “The Man With the Blue Face” (my dad would tell me the character’s real name, but I could never remember it). I’ve circled this character in the above JPG, and below is a (somewhat blurry) close-up; my apologies for the poor picture quality…





Anyway, this “Man With the Blue Face,” well, he terrified me, to the extent that my dad had to hide this book on his bookshelf behind another book. Although I don’t suffer nightmares much anymore, when I was a child I had many nightmares, and this Man With the Blue Face probably appeared in like 50% of them. This was one that occurred often: in the nightmare, I’d be lying in bed in my bedroom when I’d hear a voice call my name. Thinking it was my parents, I would go to the top of the stairs and look down. Every time, it would be the Man With the Blue Face standing at the bottom, waiting for me. I would find myself unable to run as he charged up the stairs. He’d grab my ankles and then yank me down the stairs. Then he would drag me along the hallways of the house until we came to the door that led to the basement (the basement of my parent’s old house was also the source of great childhood terror to me: the previous occupants of the house had painted sinister-looking people on the walls, and on one of the other walls there was a large black gaping hole that my parents told me never to stick my hand into: I used to fantasize that it led to Hell, or some alien parallel dimension). The Man With the Blue Face would swing open the basement door and start pulling me down the stairs. Then the basement door would slam shut and I would wake up, usually screaming for my mother.





The above illustration appears in The How and Why Wonder Book of Insects, which my parents had purchased for me at a Toys "Я" Us for $1.08. Written by Ronald N. Rood and illustrated by Cynthia and Alvin Koehler (and published by Price/Stern/Sloan Publishers, Inc. Los Angeles, 1983), it is basically a 48 page informational book about insects, with illustrations (some of which are in color, others in black and white). This drawing appears on page 28, which strikes me as ironic, seeing as I consider 28 to be one of my lucky numbers. At the bottom half of this page, as you can see, there is a black and white illustration of a startled-looking mouse that is surrounded on all sides by five honeybees, who seem to be readying themselves to sting the mouse to death. The text above the illustration says, “A warm beehive sometimes attracts mice and other animals. If a mouse finds the hive, it may eat some of the honey the bees have stored for food. It may build its nest in front of the entrance so that the bees cannot get out in the spring. Often the bees drive the mouse away with their stings. Sometimes they sting it so much that it dies. Then they have to leave the body there. But the bees often cover a dead mouse with their wax, sealing it up so that the air in the hive will stay fresh.” And beneath the illustration is this caption: “The mouse has a sweet tooth, especially for honey, but bees know how to defend their property from enemies.” Perhaps my fear of bees stems all the way back to seeing this picture at an early age?





In the JPG above are some panels from the comic book adaptation of Don Bluth’s classic 1982 film The Secret of NIMH, which was itself an adaptation of Robert C. O’Brien’s Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. I recall being quite fond of the movie when I was a child (in fact, I had had a crush on the animated version of Mrs. Brisby, who I thought was kind of hot). Anyway, this comic book adaptation was published by Golden Press in 1982, and though it was priced at $2.95 my parents had purchased it for $2.46 at Caldor. The illustration in this book that had scared me was on page 29, the portion of the book dealing with the rats and mice trying to escape from the NIMH research labs by fleeing through a ventilator system. At the top of this page in question there was a panel showing some of the rats crawling along a string that stretched like a tightrope at the top of the air shafts. The inside of this air shaft was red, with gaping black holes, making it look more like the interior arteries of the body of some horrific eldritch monster than the inside of an air shaft. I mean, at that point in my life, I had never seen the insides of an actual air shaft, but my gut feeling was that they didn’t look like that. Some of the rats are shown falling to their deaths as they got sucked down the air shafts, horrified expressions on their cartoony faces: at the top of the panel is a caption stating: “But all the mice except Jonathan and Mr. Ages were sucked to their doom down air shafts!” Incidentally, I would sometimes have nightmares in which I’d find myself getting sucked down similar air shafts.



The Johnny Dixon Mysteries of John Bellairs

“I write scary thrillers for kids because I have the imagination of a ten-year-old. I love haunted houses, ghosts, witches, mummies, incantations, secret rituals performed by the light of the waning moon, coffins, bones, cemeteries, and enchanted objects.”
-John Bellairs, Locus 1991

When I was young, I was a huge fan of the gothic novelist John Bellairs (January 17, 1938–March 8, 1991), who pretty much wrote books mainly for kids and teenagers, though he did a few adult novels as well (these adult novels of which I have not read). Not only were they my entryway to the world of Gothic/horror fiction, but also to the art of Edward Gorey, as his illustrations would usually grace the front cover, back cover, and frontispiece of the books of John Bellairs. When I was a kid, I was especially obsessed with his series of supernatural mystery/thriller novels featuring Johnny Dixon. His Johnny Dixon books take place in New England in the 1950’s, and concern Johnny Dixon, a lonely and quiet bespectacled boy who, though he likes nothing more in life than to read his books in peace and quiet, always finds himself being drawn into inexplicable adventures, often revolving around cursed objects, undead wizards, killer robots, time travel, and so forth. Usually accompanying him on these adventures are his best friend and classmate Fergie, his neighbor Prof. Childermass (an elderly man who is Johnny’s second best friend), and Father Higgins, the town priest. The titles of these books were quite evocative: there was The Curse of the Blue Figurine (1983), The Mummy, The Will and the Crypt (1983), The Spell of the Sorcerer’s Skull (1984), The Revenge of the Wizard’s Ghost (1985), The Eyes of the Killer Robot (1986), The Trolley to Yesterday (1989), The Chessmen of Doom (1989), and The Secret of the Underground Room (1990). Following Bellairs’ death in 1991, further Johnny Dixon mysteries were written by Brad Strickland, but I never read those. The first Dixon mystery I read was the third one in the series, The Spell of the Sorcerer’s Skull: I think I got it through my school’s Scholastic book club. I loved it so much that I began collecting the other ones in the series.





Having said that, I also found the books of John Bellairs to be very scary at times. Take The Spell of the Sorcerer’s Skull. In this novel, Johnny Dixon and Prof. Childermass visit an old inn in a little New Hampshire town. The owner of this inn just happens to have in his possession a clock that had been built years ago by Prof. Childermass’ father, a clock that is said to be haunted. In the bottom half of the clock there’s a small dollhouse room, decorated like the parlor of a Victorian house from the 1870’s. Inside this parlor are various objects, including a tiny skull and a doll of a man that’s supposed to represent Prof. Childermass’ granduncle, who was murdered by a sorcerer many years ago. That night, Johnny sleepwalks down to the inn’s basement, where he has a vision in which he sees the doll come to life, only to get smothered to death by a tall, gaunt shadow. That scene is creepy enough, but things get worse. When the Professor touches the skull, he unwittingly is cursed, and later on vanishes. When Johnny visits the house of his friend, he encounters this creepy scene (the fact that it involved a face in a mirror made it doubly nightmarish in my mind):

“Halfway to the window Johnny froze. He had seen something out of the corner of his eye, a sudden image in the small rectangular mirror that hung over the bureau. He turned and looked. In the mirror he saw the professor’s face, looking haggard and disheveled. His eyes pleaded and, as Johnny watched, his lips formed silent words. ‘Help me.’”





Another of the spookier Dixon mysteries is The Eyes of the Killer Robot. The plot for this one is pretty silly: it’s been years since I’ve read it, but I think the story revolved around this: the town that Johnny Dixon lived in was holding some kind of baseball contest where if you could strike out a major league batter, you’d win $10,000, and some evil inventor planned to win the contest by building a robot that resembled a man in a baseball uniform and using “an ancient magical formula” to bring it to life. The crux of the story was that the robot could only be brought to life when a pair of dead man’s eyes are placed within the robot’s head. The inventor had a grudge against Johnny’s grandfather, so to get back at him he plans on using Johnny’s eyes to bring the robot to life. As I said, pretty silly stuff. Still, there are some unsettling moments, such as this one, where Johnny spots a ghost lurking outside his bedroom window:

“But just as he was turning to pull down the bedspread, he froze. Out of the corner of his eye he had seen something.

There was a figure crouching on the porch roof outside his bedroom window.

An icy breath of fear blew across Johnny’s body. In a flash he knew that the creature was someone who shouldn’t be there, someone who couldn’t be there- it was a visitor from another world. Slowly, Johnny turned to face the thing. The flashlight’s beam cast a ghostly sheen on the window, and beyond the glass Johnny saw a fearfully thin shape shuffling forward on his knees. As Johnny watched, rigid with terror, the shadowy form groped at the window… and then Johnny blacked out, and he fell in a heap on the floor.”

By this point, one would think that Johnny should just stop looking at things he notices at the corner of his eye.

Here’s another of the spookier scenes:

“Not far from the back door of the house stood a bench covered with peeling white paint. It was a garden seat, the kind people used to make so they could sit outdoors on hot summer nights. The bench stood in a patch of wild rosebushes not far from the rugged wall of the mountain, which towered overhead. A man was sitting on the bench- a man Johnny had never seen before. He wore baggy, dusty overalls and a faded plaid shirt, and he had a big mop of straw-colored hair. The man sat hunched over with his face in his hands, and he seemed to be crying. Johnny stood dead still. The bunch of pieweed stalks fell from his numb fingers, and he took a couple of shuffling steps forward. And then, as Johnny watched, the man stood up. He took his hands away from his face and he stumbled. Johnny gasped in terror- the man had no eyes. Streaks of blood ran down from empty black sockets.

‘They took my eyes,’ the man moaned. ‘They took my eyes.’

Johnny opened and closed his mouth, and made little whimpering noises. He shut his eyes tight to block out this horrible vision, and when he opened them again a second later, the man was gone.”

Granted, that’s the kind of scene that, when I read it over now, makes me giggle, but when I was a kid, I thought that was pretty scary stuff.

More info on John Bellairs and his work can be found here:

http://www.bellairsia.com/




Songs

“Aqualung” by Jethro Tull

Growing up, I would often listen to the same music that my parents listened to. They mostly listened to progressive rock, bands like Yes and King Crimson and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. My dad liked Jethro Tull as well, especially their album Aqualung. I hated the song “Aqualung,” though. For some reason, I misheard the lyric “feeling like a dead duck—spitting out pieces of his broken luck” as “spitting out pieces of his broken lung,” the visual image of which so disgusted me that, upon hearing it on the radio of my parent’s car one day as we drove to some parade, I went into a state of almost borderline hysterics as I demanded they switch to a different station before that lyric came up, even though they insisted I had misheard the lyric. I also found the artwork that accompanied the Aqualung album to be quite creepy and disgusting as well. Bottom line, I hated Aqualung: the song, the album, even the fucking artwork.








TV shows

Mummenschanz on the Muppet Show (1976)

I don’t think I need to comment much on this one. Let’s just say that while I loved The Muppet Show when I was little, the Mummenschanz characters would often manifest in my nightmares. How the audience could be laughing at this surrealistic nightmare, I have no idea!








Movies

Luke’s vision in Empire Strikes Back

When I was a child, I was really obsessed with the Star Wars films (in fact, the first film I ever saw in theaters was Return of the Jedi, all the way back in 1983). I had all the toys and books and everything. However, there was one scene in the second film, where Luke Skywalker has a nightmarish vision involving himself battling Darth Vader, that always scared the hell out of me.




watch it here





Video/Computer Games

Alien (Commodore 64)

This old computer game, first released for the Commodore 64 in 1984, was, of course, based on the classic Ridley Scott film. The game was designed and programmed by Paul Clansey, who also did the awesome music heard playing at the title screen (this was back in the days when all it took was one person to crank out a video or computer game). It’s mostly a menu-based game that is surprisingly faithful to the film and, through the use of subtle sound effects, really captures the tension and paranoia of the movie in question. All the characters who appear in the film appear in the game, as does the ship where the main action takes place… All that’s missing is the face hugger and the bursting chest (one presumes this happens off-stage, right before the game begins). The graphics are kind of dull and basic and the interface is a little clunky, but all-in-all, I’d say they made a good effort. I played this game A LOT when I was a kid, even though it scared the hell out of me. One thing that interests me about the game was how, in place of a soundtrack, all the game consists of in terms of sound is a steady beating sound as the clock ticks down (which I guess also stands in for the character’s heartbeat) and an annoying metallic hiss every 7-8 seconds. Every now and then you’ll hear a metallic scrapping sound which indicates the Alien is moving around the ship’s duct system (or maybe moving into the next room). This heightens the game’s creepiness and paranoia. The main goal of the game, like the film, is to destroy the Alien. There are a few ways to do this. One, you can use weapons on him and try to beat him in hand to hand combat, though I’ve never been able to do this (the weapons, most of which include laser pistols, harpoon guns, and incinerators, are very hard to come by)… The most I’ve ever been able to do is wound him, and when that happens his acidic blood damages the room he’s in. I have no idea what happens it the acid damages too much of the ship, and frankly, I don’t want to know. Another option is to entice him to enter an airlock, then shoot him into outer space, but odds are against that he’ll fall for this. The easiest way (and I mean the word “easy” in its most ironic sense) is to capture the cat Jones, set the ship to auto self-destruct, then get at least three crew members into the “Narcissus” escape pod to win. But try as hard as I could, I was never able to beat this game. One thing that added to the paranoia factor is that you can never actually see the Alien on the game’s map until it attacks you: then the game jarringly switches to a screen of the Alien itself.






Ikari Warrios 2: Victory Road intro (NES)

Ikari Warriors 2: Victory Road is a shoot-‘em-up action video game released for the Nintendo Entertainment System in April of 1988. My family never actually owned this game, but we did rent it once, and for some reason my brothers and I found the game’s intro scene to be terrifying. First off, it’s kind of creepy (to say nothing of irritating) how the text slowly appears on the screen one letter at the time, and when you get to the grand appearance of Zada at the 2:51 mark (he looks a bit like a Satanic Yoda), well…






The Ending to Monster Party (NES)

Monster Party is a fairly obscure game released for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1989, though over the years it has built up something of a cult following. It’s basically about a boy named Mark who meets a gargoyle-like creature named Bert. Bert is from the “Dark World,” and this home of his has been attacked by monsters. It’s essentially your basic platformer game, just with a somewhat quirky and macabre sense of humor (as some of the bosses you fight in the game are quite outlandish). But the ending is pretty, well… see for yourself:






The Town of Yomi in Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest (NES)

Towards the end of Castlevania II, right before you reach Dracula’s Castle, there’s a town you have to go through called Yomi. What makes this town different than the game’s other towns is that it’s completely abandoned, utterly devoid of life, save for one crazy old woman hiding in her house who, when you speak with her, simply says “Let’s Live Here Together.”



The Death Scenes of Uninvited (NES)

All I have to say to this is: AAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!






Shadow’s Dream in Final Fantasy VI (SNES)

When I was in high school, my favorite video game of all-time was Final Fantasy VI for the Super NES, though back then, when it was first released in the West, it was known as Final Fantasy III. One of my younger brothers and I were so obsessed with the game that we each created a trilogy of novels based on it (this was around 1995 or so). Like most of these Japanese role playing games, your party can sleep at inns to replenish lost health. Usually when you sleep at an inn in the game, you’ll see your party each climb onto a bed. The screen goes black, you hear a nice little sound effect, then the game fades back into the view of the inn as the party gets out of bed and you can control them again.

That’s what’s supposed to happen, anyway. However, if one of the characters you can play as in the game, Shadow the Ninja, is in your party, and you go to sleep at an inn, there’s always a chance that one of 4 different dream scenes will appear, these dreams being flashbacks into Shadow’s life, before he became a ninja. What made this so scary to me at the time was that I didn’t know about this: the strategy guide I owned for the game made no mention of it. So when I saw his first dream for the first time, it came as a real shock to me: not helping matters is that in this first dream scene, an incredibly loud and abrasive droning/air-siren-like sound effect plays in the background, adding to the “jump out of your seat” effect. I can at least take solace in one thought: quite a few other people who played the game when it first came out freaked out at that first dream scene as well!







* * * *

To make this fairly short day of mine a bit longer, here are a few more recent things that have creeped me out over the last few months:

Squidward’s Suicide:
http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/Squidward's_Suicide

Pokemon’s Lavender Town Syndrome:
http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/Lavender_Town_Syndrome

Yume Nikki: Uboa (shit gets real at the 7:39 mark):




Well, I think that’s enough horror for one day!





*

p.s. Hey. We're really gifted here this weekend with one of Sypha's always amazing guest-posts, and you have the weekend to luxuriate in it. Please do, and let him know it feels, okay? Thank you ever so kindly, James. ** Rewritedept, Hey. No, I was actually quite fucked up and uncool when I was young. I got a little cooler when I hit my teen years and got the whole writer/artist thing going on and could hide behind myself that, but fucked up? You bet. Friendships like the one I have with my friend come along extremely rarely in one's life, so I think I just got incredibly lucky. Feel free to make a great friend too and then keep it to yourself. I don't know how you can convey something like that anyway. Maybe in poems or something. Oh, I never thought about how my allergy thing would prevent me from getting a tattoo, but you might be right. I've just never been attracted to getting one for a second. No interest ever, I don't know why. I'm actually 9 hours ahead in time, or at least from LA. Next week sometime for Skype maybe? Let's check back in about that early in the week. This weekend is too uncertain and busy for me. I'm not sure what my schedule is going to be post-weekend quite yet, but I will soon.  Great weekend to you!  ** Misanthrope, Committing yourself to getting your novel finished sounds like a pretty inarguable plan to me. Easier said than done, of course. Witness my inability of late. Martin Amis has a new book? Did not know that. Hunh. ** Alan, Hi, Alan! Well, I think I know where the novel's track might be, but I'm not sure I'm back on it. Hard to tell. I've read McGuane's first four novels. No, wait, first five. 'Bushwhacked' is my clear favorite, but, yeah, 'Ninety-Two in the Shade' would probably be my #2. I would read one of those two first, if I were you. Great to see you! ** Dynomoose, Wow, more great tips/links! Thank you! You're making my brain spark like crazy, and you're probably giving me blog post idea or three to boot. Thank you!  I would start with the McGuane book that I spotlit yesterday, no surprise. Did you find her glasses? Yikes! ** David Ehrenstein, MGuane's 'Ninety-Two ...' film is quite nice, and, yes, quite obscure now, strangely. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Ah, a Nico moment. I know those, or know my version. They can be strangely cathartic. The last Zazou, oh, sad, but it going out with a bang seems like a fairly safe guarantee. Yeah, photos would be nice. I hope you got blissed. ** Steevee, My guess is that, like the great majority of erotica or sex based sites from that part of the world, at least in my experience, it was set up, made to appear as though there was a lot of alluring content and then never touched from the inside again, and just left there forever to earn whomsoever thought it up a little money from innocents who pay the entrance fee. Thanks for the link to the article. I'll read it in a bit. I haven't heard any of the new Nick Cave album, no. I will, although I'm not a huge Nick Cave fan, or I mean not such a fan/follower of the post-Blixa Bargeld Bad Seeds stuff. But I'll have a listen, for sure. ** Cobaltfram, Hi, John. I saw your email, and I'll open it today. Cool, sounds very intriguing. Oh, I see, about the translators. Shows you how rarely if ever that I read Russian lit these days. What's the Billfold article? Have a crazy great, birthday-enhanced weekend, man. ** L@rstonovich, Hey, man. I think you'd like McGuane. Stick to the early novels, the first few. His later books, while still pretty good at times, really and deliberately changed because he kind of turned on the sparkly, jumpy style that he was initially known for. ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hi, Jeff. Yeah, the first few are definitely the best, or, well, the most electrically and excitingly written. He kind of renounced that style around the time of his fifth novel, 'Panama', which is still quite good, and the best of the later work, I think, but I do think his earliest books are by far his most original. With Shoes, it depends on how much of a leap you want to make. They're pretty great if you're into the power pop form, and possibly the best of that era's/genre's bands. I would say get the compilation album '35 Years - The Definitive Shoes Collection 1977 - 2012', if you want an overview. Otherwise, I'd either get 'Black Vinyl Shoes', their first, low-tech album which kind of helped set the power pop template, or 'Present Tense', their first big label record, which is fantastic. Yeah, real sad about Kevin Ayers. I like the second Soft Machine album, sure, but I don't think it's anywhere as great as the first album. But if you like them, yeah, you should get it. Right, about the Sorrentino novel. Dazzling is the word. It's his best, I think, maybe. ** Un Cœur Blanc, That sample is so mysterious and beautiful! Thank you for telling me what it is. I'll investigate. I'm very happy to talk with you alway,s whatever is on your mind. I'm glad that all is going so well. Have a very well weekend. ** Sypha, The man of the 48 hours himself! Thank you, James. Such a beautiful, rich post! Ugh, on your post-endoscopy state, and I hope the post-smitten folks here will at least give you a nice distraction as you rescale health's heights. ** Bill, It's a goodie, that novel. Really fun. I would imagine that the new Chabon is not my thing. He has never been my thing, much less at that kind of excessive length. Hope the weekend of gig prepping goes insanely well. What are the gigs, if you can say and want to? ** Postitbreakup, I'm sorry Josh. Love is so hard, and it rarely works both ways. Ugh. Hugs, man. ** Right. Please spend the weekend prioritizing Sypha's childhood terrors over your own or commiserating with him or, gee, however you want to deal with the presentation obviously. May total enjoyment of some sort be yours, and I'll see you on Monday.

*

p.s. Hey. ** Misanthrope, Hm, interesting: the Amis. Ah, what's a few more months between a writer and his writing, you know? It's all about knuckling down and keeping the muse on board. Awesome re: the successful background check, man. And fuck knows what's up the sequestration. I can't make heads or tails of what's actually going on. The spin and self-defending and general bullshit output is too dense. Fingers crossed. ** Pilgarlic, Hi, buddy. Really nice fear talk. I had no clue about that Zevon/ McGuane tune until Youtube slipped its existence into view. Cool, man. ** Cobaltfram, Hi, John. Hope your birthday put the 'b' back in birthday. 'B' for ... bender maybe? Email did contain a very nice boost, and, yeah, I'm trying to stay comfortable on my pins and needles re: that. Ah, re: the werewolf novel, right, sounds like good article fodder. George is the ace in our hole. ** Chris Dankland, Hi, Chris. 'Ecco the scary Dolphin', wow. That's an interesting fear. Oh, you mean those child actor resume photos? Yeah, I really was 14. I shot up to 6' really fast, really young. That made my back a permanently tricky thing 'cos the speed of the growth made my spine weird, not to look at, but in its invisible detailing apparently. And it did not doing me any favors in the school/social life department, let me tell you. If there's a cruel taunt involving being tall, I've heard it. Grasshopper mice, nice. Did not know a thing about them before. I get their insinuating addiction at first look. Bon day! ** Kiddiepunk, Hi! I think you're heading over today to do some photo-ing, no? Not sure if I'll see you, though. But tomorrow night, if that still works, sounds cool. Snow, man! Actual motherfucking snow! ** Sypha, Thank you ever so much again for the splendidness! And for being such a gracious guest-host! ** David Ehrenstein, Toads are spooky. ** Kyler, Hi, Kyler. I almost feel like I missed out on even more internal complicatedness by never having been religious or tempted thererby or whatever. ** 5STRINGS, Burned? No good. At least you still have your sense of humor. Weird about the first gay love reappearance. Must mean that something mystical was/is going on, but fuck knows what. I'm confused about how to write a novel every time I start or even think about starting one, if that's any comfort. I don't know what my least favorite song is. Maybe 'Lady in Red'. Or almost any Elton John song. That was a lot of fear. I would probably be able to write out a laundry list of fears if I wasn't too scared to go there. Astronaut space walks are, I think, my greatest fear. ** James, Hi, James. Thank you again for the you-know-what that you passed to me through the email channel. 'Klute' sure, I saw it, but maybe not since the period when it was first released and in theaters. It would be interesting to see again. Another film from that period in which she's great, and which is a really fantastic film in and of itself, is 'They Shoot Horses Don't They'. I recommend it. Much love to you too. ** Dynomoose, Oh, phew -- or is that 'whew'; I always get those two words mixed up -- about the glasses. Yeah, I know what you mean about the positive, counteracting effect of scientific and technological progress. That's interesting, isn't it? I'll go jump all over that nano material in a minute. You're working wonders, pal. ** Steevee, They want a bald-faced statement? Yuck. Hope not. I didn't know about the fuss around the Harpers piece until somebody posted about it on Facebook yesterday evening my time. Absurd. Of course I've been subjected to the accusation that I'm indulging in serial killer chic, especially re: 'Frisk'. People can become so subjective and overly self-involved or something when they're confronted with an explicit depiction of violence or sex, and it's a hard thing to work with. At the same time, I think that if you rob something that is explicit of that quality, you shortchange both the subject and the reader. And yourself, the artist too. The challenge is very challenging, yeah. ** Paradigm, Hi, Scott! Yes, I did get everything sorted out with the Day, thank you so much! I've got it set to lunch here on this coming Saturday, the 2nd. Re: my novel, I think I'm stuck doing the writer equivalent of moving dust around a room right now, but what can you do. That chapbook you're thinking of doing sounds beautiful. I'm very intrigued. I hope you do that. Yeah, sounds fascinating! ** JoeM, Hi, Joe! Heard or rather read that about your cardinal guy, ha ha. ** Bollo, My weekend was really nice, yeah, thank you. And it's snowing for real this morning, so it has also left the door to niceness open when it left. ** Bill, Wow, that gig is tonight! Break every leg. Turn yourself and your audience members into Oscar Pistorius without the girlfriend murdering part. Everyone, if you're in reach of Mills College in Oakland tonight, I very strongly suggest you go see the great Bill Hsu aka d.l. Bill play 'electronics and real-time animation in an acoustic improvisational context. Hse will be joined by saxophonist James Fei and percussionist Gino Robair.' Here's the scoop. I don't know if it was an accident -- probably? -- but I love that they referred to you as 'Hse' Hse's a cool guy. ** Billy Lloyd, Welcome back from Oxford. Sounds really nice. I don't know Creationary. I'll google it. You're already a Moaz convert! Dude, so good, right? I might even head over to one of the two outlets in Paris today if the snowing lets up just a little. You don't like editing? I don't know why I do so much because, yeah, it is a kind of living hell. ** Un Cœur Blanc, Hi! Yes, that makes total sense to me. Nice about your warmth. We got a lot colder here, but the cold softened the blow by bringing along a decent snowfall, so I'm more pro than against as of this moment. Fantastic, it certainly is! You know I think moving to LA is a great, positive idea, at least in theory, and I would certainly be honored to be interviewed by you, there or anywhere. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Nice pix. Everyone, say goodbye to the mighty little Club Zazou by peering into its bowels on the last night of its life here. ** Ken Baumann, Ken! Thank you for liking my current goodness. Oh, that's okay, no prob at all, on the ARCs. Final form will way more than suffice. Maximize pride ... huh, that's a good angle, isn't it? Pride has this undeserved dirty word status. Yeah, nice one, Ken. Oh, wow, the Oscars. I read the news wrap up this morning and could not have felt less surprised or have felt anything at all, actually. Great guacamole, or, god, any guacamole at this point in the dead of a Parisian winter, ... *mouth sounds*. Actually, never mind, there's this newish Mexican restaurant near the Recollets that has very good if insufficiently spicy guac, called El Guacamole, in fact, where I will 'drag' you and A. during your next dip into the big P. ** Rewritedept, Holy crap! Your house burned down? Wha ... why, how? Jesus. I hope your computer coughs up its holdings and belongings, of course. Man, that's intense. I'm glad you weren't there, at least. My weekend was a lottery winner by comparison, thank you for asking. Let me know what's going on and what the latest is and everything. ** Okay. I've got a whole lot of envelopes for you today. No, no need to thank me, but thank you for offering. See you tomorrow.

Lizz Brady is an artist based in the UK who manages to obsessively work with whatever materials come her way. Recently she has been developing a stockpile of drawings and text with perhaps the intention that eventually she will begin to be displaced and live within her flat with every surface covered in the taped-up scrawls from drawings, photos, and journals. Themes Brady explores are materiality, perception, mental health, fractured narratives, and obsession.





The Map.

I’m standing on a life-sized map, the road was soft, torn slightly at the edges, the trees are triangular and the route through the street was painted red. I bent over and smoothed the creases to see where I was, ‘Ambleside.’ I took a photo of myself next to the light blue pond, my face had traces of Africa, sitting comfortably below Europe and if I screwed up my face, America was much closer to the UK. I looked back to the floor and noticed that a thick yellow marker had been drawn in front of me, leading into the woodland. I was quite wary of following it, but the trees seemed encouraging, the branches twisting into hands, knobbly knuckles and wrinkled fingers, beckoning me to join them. The rustle of the leaves whispered, reassuring me. I glanced over my shoulder and started to walk towards the forest, the trees still whispering and signalling to me. I reached the edge of the woodland and looked within; I could hardly see anything due to how dark it was. The only thing visible was the branches of the closest trees and further than that was just a black mass. There was no footpath anymore so I looked for a way to enter, with no avail, I moved some of the lower braches and crawled through but stopped suddenly when I heard a loud crack. I stood and craned my neck to see over the leaves which blocked my view. The sounds were getting louder and more vicious; I could hear screams now, the cracking becoming faster and more brutal. The forest was being crumpled, trees were being snapped like lollypop sticks, they were crying out as they fell and broke into pieces. The map, it was being folded in half, back to its original state, and the world was being destroyed. I ran as fast as I could away from the folding landscape, I ran and I ran but of course, I couldn’t get away. I stopped and looked at the sky as it darkened and I saw the edge of the map as it crushed down on me.







Bridge (excerpt).

He grimaced as he thought about the people who have come and gone from his life, the ones who wanted to help but obviously couldn’t, the ones who didn’t give a shit and just wanted the sex or the drugs that he happily gave away for free. The ones who wanted to change him, make him see the world the way they did, ‘the better way,’ as he had so often been told. The ones he had loved, with all his soul, heart and body, the one who had poured water on everything he believed, that tiny spark that was once there, it once burned bright, apprehensively waiting for more logs to be added, to turn it all into a roaring fire, intense heat, and extreme light. No one could have looked away, not one person, they would all stare as he walked down the street, a fiery mass of excitement, belief, determination and courage. But she put it out as quickly as she discovered it was there.









Deer.

He stood in front of the light bulb and gazed at his shadow that lay flat on the wall in front of him. He tilted his head to the right, and then to the left, keeping his eyes on the shadow which followed his movements. He put his finger to the wall, and traced the contours of his body, turning slightly to deform the shapes. He slowly raised one arm above his head and made the shadow imitate a deer’s antler; he brought his other arm up and made another antler appear on the wall. He smiled; keeping his arms raised and used his eyes to trace an imaginary line over the silhouettes. He closed his eyes and dreamt that he was galloping through the woodland, breathing in the evening air heavily through his nostrils, chasing the other deer, throwing his glorious head back and demanding the attention he deserved. He opened his eyes and let his arms fall back to his sides, looking back at his shadow, which was now just another faceless form.




20:40


 Me: 

This is good, keep with it.



 20:49


 Lizz: Cheers I hope you mean it and not just being nice!!!






20:59


 Me: 

haha no, although i feel a bit like ass. please tell me I'm not getting sick again! 






21:36


 Lizz: Oh god. You need a new immune system!!! X


21:38 Lizz: You get it alright? Xxx






18:35


 Me: 

No let me look at my computer cuz my phone is being weird today






18:40


 Me: 

Yeah very cool, sorry wouldn't display on my phone for some reason! 



keep with it!






18:44


 Lizz: 

It's ok you need a new phone!! 



Thanks I will do, guna fill the wall!!






18:45


 Me: 

good plan!






18:53


 Lizz: As I'm going along with it, I'm starting to think its like my life, using my drawing and photographs from life etc. and writing from my journals...


http://itslizz88.tumblr.com



Brady and Coleman:

Me: For the last couple of years Lizz Brady was one half of artist team Brady and Coleman (roughly until late 2012). Over several months last year I watched as the collaborative duo divided a historic medieval warehouse into a warren of interconnecting passageways, uneven flooring, and doors leading into themselves, whilst filming each viewer as they attempted to progress through the tangle of structures. Over the course of the installation they managed to evoke a sort of a Winchester Mystery House approach, perhaps Big Edie and Little Edie at Grey Gardens indulging in a bit of DIY, with even a hint of Saw.





The collaborative practice of Brady and Coleman explores how individuals react differently to the same situation.

By combining psychological and architectural structures, Brady and Coleman specifically design separate installations to challenge the individual’s own perception and reaction to a superficial experience.

http://www.bradyandcoleman.com



'Identity Unknown' 2012















Video and Digital Projector.







'Threes a Crowd' 2011. Creating a fictional world within a realistic environment.

The differing thought processes of both artists are emphasised by the contrasting views of reality and the ability to distinguish between the real and a fictional world. These opposing views create a tension within the artist collaboration which ultimately has an effect upon both the success and the destructive nature of the developing partnership as it unfolds.








http://www.lizzbrady.com/




*

p.s. Hey. Visual/multimedia artist and d.l. Scunnard has an artist whom he would like to introduce you to today. Having already spent time with Lizz Brady's work while assembling this post, I'm already sold, and I hope/suspect you might be too. Please find out if you are at as much length as you have to spare today, thank you, and my sincerest props and gratitude to Scunnard for making my blog the launching pad. ** Misanthrope, I will and do hope for the most reasonable heads amongst your job's higher ups, whatever happens. If you're sufficiently knuckled down, the months will be like rabbits, and your novel will behave like a magician's hat. ** James, Thanks, man, and ha ha. Monday was a few degrees less than awesome, but today might make up for it, we'll see. May your Tuesday eschew disappointment. ** David Ehrenstein, I didn't even bother watching online clips from this year's Oscars. That might be a first. Your French embassy-laden shebang sounds like it was a bunch of fun. I found that Voice review of the last RP film very unconvincing, but we will see. ** Grant maierhofer, Hi, Grant! I read your Mishima piece yesterday, and it's really, really excellent. Everyone, you owe it to yourself to go over to HTMLGIANT and read Grant's very smart, interesting review/think piece on the just-published bio of Yukio Mishima. Seriously, click this. Thank you kindly about my envelope stack, sir. And for the chapbook(s) that are winging their way to me. I'm heady with excitement to read it. As must be others around here, so let me redouble your generous offer. Everyone, before the p.s. leaves the writer and d.l. Grant for the day, his newly published and hotly anticipated chapbook could be yours for the non-price of a simple email. Here he is, and I urge you to accept his no-brainer offer: 'i've just printed the last 100 issues of POOR ME I HATE ME PUNISH ME COME TO MY FUNERAL. anybody on here who'd like one -- basically a collaborative chapbook between myself and the artist KIL; experimental poetry, imagery, etc. (i will mail you them for free) -- email me at maierhofer dot grant at gmail dot com for copies.' Do it, dudes! I hope your Monday was really, really not terrible. ** Rewritedept, Hi, Chris. Oh, man, I don't even know what to say. I guess try to see it as a cathartic thing, a forced but somehow meaningful de-cluttering of your path ahead, or something like that. I don't know. You know it'll be okay in the long run, and try to remember that, and hugs from here, and, yeah, fuck, hang in there. ** Ken Baumann, Ken! Right, action-specific pride. Localized and then supercharged pride. I can't see a downside to that. The problem with Parisian Mexican food, in my experience to date is that, one, while it looks and feels right or almost right, and while it fills the hole of Mexican food-related need, it's a bit too bland, and even the hot sauces they provide to increase the food's taste ante are way too unhot. Basically, you need to get yourself a decent bottle of hot sauce and bring it along in your pocket. The other thing that I personally am not so into is that they seem to think cactus isa standard ingredient of Mexican food, and they automatically include it in most of the dishes, and that gets a little old. Other than that, they're slowly figuring it out. Yours, me. ** Bill, How did it go? Did you mesh your sniffling into the spectacle in an intriguing way? Hope. ** Billy Lloyd, Pictionary with Lego, okay, yes, I want said game. They must sell it here. Will look. Pizza Hut in Paris, ha ha, oh, man, next time you come I will lead you not only to the two Moaz joints but also to at least a handful of good, inexpensive eateries, including pizza places with actually edible-plus-pleasureable pizza, if you like. Ooh, new song snippet, hold on. Wow, that's really beautiful, Mr. Lloyd. In fact, I'm going to imbed that thing down below to give everyone here an easy way to find that out for themselves. Everyone, do you see that imbedded Soundcloud widget thing down at the bottom of the p.s.? It contains a 1:47 snippet of a new song-in-progress by the brilliant music artist and d.l. Billy Lloyd, and it's very beautiful, and please go hear it for the benefit of your day if not much, much more. Whoa, about the BBC thing. That's, like, big, isn't it? Congrats! Sweet! ** Pilgarlic, Hi, man. My issue with Bercy is that it's too gigantic. It's an indoor sports stadium where they hold the biggest, most popular concerts. A la, say, The Staples Center in LA. The size and acoustics are the problem, but I'm probably going to hit that concert anyway. ** _Black_Acrylic, Soon envelopes will be as much of a specialty item as LP covers, I guess. Sad. Much more romantic than an email, yeah, I agree. You get something from the beloved that has his/her DNA, fingerprints, handwriting, and usually even saliva on it. Emails can't compete with that no matter how stuffed they are with attachments. ** Cobaltfram, Cool, very, very cool, re: the success and possible boding well, man. Quiet birthdays are okay and sane or something. My novel is at war with me, or I'm at war with it. It's going to need radical work if it's going to be close to what I had wanted it to be and/or if it's going to become what it would need to be to warrant existence. I'm mostly trying to be a lot less protective of it and weighing possible radical moves, including one that would change it into a very different thing. So, I'm fiddling, chopping, and letting my ambitions run wild re: it as best I can. Thank you for asking. ** 5STRINGS, Wild life there, dude. Maybe some caution is in order. I don't know. Elton John makes my skin crawl, not to mention my ears. Growing up with his product everywhere on the radio was hell. Oh, personal, emotional fears. I've got a lot of those. They would require many long, complicated sentences to characterize, so I think I'll save that for my inner voice or whatever. ** Steevee, Sounds like a smart plan to me. ** Sypha, I thought you might dig the 'Death Note' bit, cool. And I wish for you to feel better with all the wishing power within me, my friend. ** Postitbreakup, Hm, interesting, about the new job. That indoctrination technique sounds kind of ingenious in a way. I don't know. So far so, good, basically, and here's hoping the grind works for you. It can, I think. ** Paradigm, Hi, Scott. I've moved from dust relocating to wondering if I should get rid of most of the furnishings. Progress, maybe. Figuring out whether something you've written is poignant is really tough. You have to maintain some kind of faith in your impulse or something. I hope you suss out the imagery construction. For me, that would be the hardest part, I think, but my instincts re: devising visuals are pretty limited. Curious to hear how the Cat Power show is. I haven't seen her live since her shows were minor nervous breakdowns with musical soundtracks, which were fascinating. But now I think she's all pro and showman-like on stage, isn't she? The new Nick Cave didn't do much for me, but, like I said, I'm only a sporadic, non-diehard fan. Thank re: the post, and the best of the best with your images. ** Bollo, Hi, J. The snow was cool. It has vamoosed now, which is strangely okay too. Those books do look very intriguing, yes. Hm, bookmarked. Thanks about my stack, buddy. Have a day full of mastery. ** Done. Please see what Lizz Brady is all about, thank you, and maybe tell Scunnard what you think, if you don't mind. Would be cool. See you tomorrow.

___________________

followyou, 19
single Gay disabled teen alcoholic from newcastle. so yeh like i'm 19.

i let slip to my master that i wanted to be used for money. so he sent me on here to make it happen.

anybody accepted, make me an offer and describe how your going to use me.

the only thing i ask is that i look the same after a session. i dont mind left over marks and injuries as long as they're in a private place on my body (so no one can see them by walking past me on the street). but dont worry you dont have to be gentle. im already in a wheelchair. :(

so yeh thats me.





__________________

Robot, 24
since I'm 12 y/o Many men like to naked me, rape me and punch my skinny belly some men like to electric shock in my nipple and my navel too. untill Now I'm 24 many men still like to punch in my belly and sm my body Are you like? Do you like to punch my belly?







__________________

CiteMe, 19
I am barely out of high school and I met a German soldier last year that introduced me to rubber. I'm just curious bc regular sex just isn't as good.

I like to feel inferior, which often happens around other men as I'm small for a man, and sometimes due to my race.

As if that weren't enough, you will need to fuck me hard as I'm not sure if I'm gay or straight!!!!







_____________________

prettymouth, 18
I'm an 18 year old Australian who can be perfectly described as "facetious". I will not be in London ever so Im NOT looking for a boyfriend just no strings fun ok. No problem with a fuck buddy as long as you know it will end eventually. I WILL NOT STAY INTEREST IN YOU NO MATTER WHO YOU ARE. If you're not interest, don't be such a prick about it.

Try to get brightonscott to commit to a meeting, he is full of shit.





___________________

StubbleLover, 23
born as a slave,, always a slave in life time.. i pray the good lord give me a white master to control me well..and fuck me hard with no mercy in my life..... and no control on what I made to do or what is done to me..will be happy...






__________________

iWorkHard, 24
You may think that I have no shame, but the truth is, I feel nothing but shame about the depraved things I do, and that shame turns me on because I am a worthless faggot who doesnt even deserve to be treated like a man, because you are what a man is supposed to be and I was put on this earth to entertain you with my sick twisted need to glorify you by showing you just how little respect I deserve as a human being, therefore I willingly lower myself beyond any level of respect and dignity for a man's entertainment

So if you want to see a pathetic excuse of a man take his rightful place at the bottom of the evolutionary cycle, lets set it up and you can sit back, relax, and watch this sick piece of shit transform himself from a person into a worthless, simpering pile of crap, with no value for anything except sinking as low as he can go for your enjoyment.

Only you can save me from my warped existence, and the only way to do that is to give me a direct shot of the testosterone I so completely lack so that I may pretend to be a real man for a second and forget that I am nothing but a pitiful imitation of the real thing. I will do anything to get that dose of testosterone from your awesome, almighty cock into my body.

If you have no experience taking ownership of a sleazy cockworshipping fagcunt filth like me, don't worry. I have lots of experience in guiding a Superior Male to where he belongs: on top of the world using me as his lowly seat to boost Him up.






__________________

GiveYouMyself, 22
Lets play army, I lay down and you blow the hell out of me.

Looking for violent men, who want to tase a bit of the crazy electrical.

Nice shoes. Wanna kick my brains out?







__________________

a_slaves_wish, 24
Lookong to have my body modified.
First change - to be dickless; (as soon as possible).
Have only a 4" dick, it's useless.
Second change - to be permanently blinded.
I have pretty blue eyes so you'll need to be heartless and cold.
Final step - anything Master decides that is right for me.
(Im thinking it starts with a d and eands with an h but its up to you).
What the Top says, goes, and that's the end of it.





______________

bttmpozcumdump, 21
I'm HIV + on meds... Looking for a skinhead






_______________

therapy, 22
My name is Jack, I come from Canterbury in Kent, I have been receiving corporal punishment since I was 17. I have experience of hand, belt, gymshoe, paddle and brush, Strap, tawse, cane and Birch, I have also had my back lashed.

I am a friendly guy with attitude and cheeky and cocky however im always polite to dom guys as I have no desire to make matters even more serious.

I need to receive very real punishment, they are theraputic, how its given, what is used etc is up to you, just do it for real, i dont want to play games pretending to be something im not ie a schoolboy. i get this for real as i deserve it.

im not saying a fuck is out of the question but not until I have had a real thrashing.

I have discovered sending a no thankyou message just gets me a lot of abuse or excuses so From now on if you dont receive a response from me sending a further 12000000000000 messages only confirms what i suspected to start with that your a headcase.







_________________

Baba_for_Dada, 21
21yo (or 6 month old as I like to act as in baby years) Teen Baby.

Looking for a nursery and a daddy.

When im a baby I enjoy all sorts of things from being bathed to changed to watching cartoons to being bounced on a knee, love being read a bedtime story and I love to crawl around like baby all time.

When I'm not a baby I enjoy riding my motorbike.






__________________

no1AssInRO, 22
** Want to lock me? Here goes. **

To see what might be in store for me I played Bingo on the LockedMEN site and drew 5 weeks. Ouch.

If you were to play Bingo for me, drew the max 9 weeks, added two weeks, then you should ignore even the most pitiful begging. Indefinitely isn't for me though.

I love my mom. She's the only girl that I'm committed to. I'll do my very best just to make her happy up to the extent of taking a bullet for my lady. But sad to say we've lost her.. I'm a dreamer.

When going through a bad time, remember that there is One in heaven who loves you and cares for you and someone on earth who cares about you - that's me!






___________________

apiginside, 19
I've owned this bitch for a while now and Im looking for someone who can help break it into the next level.
basically i need to get it to the point where it doesn't have a raw cock out of its cumholes for more than a min or two for the rest of its life.
Hole can also be used as urinal of course.





___________________

SAVE_SAM_SLAVE, 21
AT TIMES I CAN BE SO ROMANTIC,
SO INTERESTING, SO TALKATIVE,
AT OTHERS SO QUIET,EVEN SO BORING......
SO DREAMY,SO THOUGHTFUL AT TIMES,
SO PLAIN AT OTHERS...........
SO PRACTICAL SOMETIMES,
SO VERY EMOTIONAL SOMETIMES.......
SO WEAK,SO HELPLESS,SO FRUSTRATED AT TIMES.........
AT TIMES I FEEL I CAN DO ALL AND ANY SORT OF THINGS AND EVEN DO REALLY,
AT OTHERS I CAN BE SO UNLIVELY AND EVEN FEEL I CANT DO ANYTHING AT ALL........
SO AGREEABLE AT TIMES,
SO REBELLING AT OTHERS.........
SO UNUSUALLY ANGRY SOMETIMES,
AT OTHERS VERY CALM AT TIMES IN EVEN THE MOST DIFFICULT CONDITIONS..

IM CRAZY MAN NAME SAM..........
THROUGH MY BLOOD YOU CAN SEE WHO I TRULY AM.






__________________

holes4poles, 23
Welcome everybody. I a firefighter and I love to skatee. I fun if I have Master. I am will glad to know everybody, touch my habit before , and you will feel that , , I have been a slave with you. want to have a person who hate me TRUE . Nice to talk with you......







__________________

Stuff, 20
I have a hipofilii: P;) I never had anything with a horse, but it excites me to their appearance, their nature. I could love a horse more than a man. Just after the body over the horse and I'm fired up and I cuddled him and stroking him and ...: P (if you help me get a loan on a stallion, I would like;))
Please, I'm on the boys: DD






__________________

SEXCALIBUR, 23
i drink liters of cum
i drink liters of piss
i drink your saliva and mucus from the nose
i clean your smegma dick
i eat your scat and drink your enemas

yes bb sex
yes fist my asshole
yes i drink vomit
yes animalsex (bj dog dick -horse dick cumeating)
yes sex with children
yes record me with no mask

also,
i read kinky and non-kinky things
i am an above-average writer
i understand how to use a semi-colon
i brew my own wine and beer
i am super-excited that varsity jackets are a fad
i am not going to "see what's in the basement," thank you
i can eat with chopsticks

if you are asian emoboy master is a plus

TRY NOT LIE





_________________

SippingSlave, 19
boy 20 y o almost, drinks amateur, looks for a older experienced drinking pal, to clink with and explore together the depth of the drunkenness, small or big, sexe is possible but not mandatory, oversexed men, no





_________________

KnapSack, 19
I'd be cool to find a guy into masculinization and adrealine outdoors but into whorifying little (5'3), deaf (I speak American Sign Language) me indoors. I am only able to be attracted to this sort of relationship with men that are much, much, much larger than me. 6'4 to 6'8 would be perfect but 7'0 or more would be excellent as well. Ideally you are a very large dicked permabonered white alpha into raw dogging with hairy pits and a deep voice and a sailor's mouth (I can't hear words but I can feel the vibrations). My favourite color is Blue.





__________________

ElementalChild, 20
Water...
Earth...
Fire...
Air...

First you bend water. You clean my body as much as you can. You sanitize my parts.
You make me almost squeaky-clean.
Water soothes and cleans.

Then, you bend earth. You bend me.
You manipulate the hardest part/s of my body to your satisfaction.

While at it, you bend fire. I inhale fire, you exhale fire. We feel fire.
Every thing burns. Your passion. My body. Your hormones. Our breath.
Finally comes the eruption.

Finally you bend air. You recover whatever's lost in me.
You replenish my energy for whatever's next.
You start anew.

-----------------------------------------------------
AFRAID? Don't be. I just got tested recently. I'm HIV negative. You're safe with me.
-----------------------------------------------------

==========================
Information Overload
==========================







*

p.s. Hey. ** Misanthrope, Hi, G. Dude, your job's swallowing up of your time and energy must be so hard to negotiate. I can't even imagine doing that and trying to write a novel. It took me years to figure out how to write a novel and do the blog at the same time, and that's only a full-time job in my head. Did not know the Rock was fully back in the WWE, much less champion, or that Lesnar or Triple H were back too. Weird. I'm not sure what to think about that. I guess it's cool, but, I don't know, hm, no, I guess it's cool. ** Lizz Brady, Hey! How awesome of you to come in here and say hello and talk to the folks, etc. I love your work, and I'm so grateful to have gotten the intro courtesy of JP-K. I hope it's a launching pad too. And, yes, obviously, it would be a great and happy thing to have you around here anytime. All respect to you! ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, D. I can believe it's unreleasable, but I guess I'm not yet convinced that culling the footage into something was a bad idea. But I guess I'm imagining it more as a document and keepsake than as a legit film. I don't know. Curious to find out. Nice to see Bowie and Tilda together, but I think that video itself is really dumb. ** Empty Frame, Good to see you, pal! That does sound like an intense day in the studio. Someone could edit an awesome documentary out of the surveillance footage, had any cameras been on board. My novel is treating me the same way, but any footage would be useless unless one has a thing for the minutiae of a frowning and cringing face. Yes, you are indeed correct that an envelope is a key and meta-element of 'TMS'. Your memory is on the very right track. Well, may I wish you a happier today in the studio today? I wish myself that, and I thought dragging your work on board couldn't hurt. ** MANCY, Hey, big man! ** Scunnard, Thank you ever so kindly and much more for the intervention. You good? How was your day? ** Steevee, Cool. I'll go read that, yes, post-this. Everyone, take this golden opportunity to go read the always enlightening brain-spillage of Mr. Steve 'Steevee' Erickson, in this case re: the Criterion Collection's culling and release of the key and influential works of French film director Jean Rouch. Tempted? Naturally, right? So easy. Press this. I've always preferred Amis's non-fiction to his fiction for some reason, but I did quite like his first few novels, at least. He's a heck of a sentence constructor. ** Cobaltfram, Hi, John. Uh, well, I'm not skinny-skinny, but I guess it's because of my combo of being an almost lifelong vegetarian and my attitude of mostly seeing food as fuel and the fact that I hardly ever eat much of anything during the day maybe. No, I don't have a completed draft of my novel at all. I have maybe 2/3 to 3/4 of a huge mess of a first draft, of which I think I'll be lucky if 25% is useable. I'm thinking very seriously of extracting the things that work and that I like and trying to write a different novel than I had originally intended, possibly employing the surviving pieces, and in which my relationship with George would become a background for and contrast to something I'm not ready to talk about right now because it's too early, and I'm still feeling lost and trying to figure out a way not to be. Or something. I'd love details on the rounds if you want to email them to me, yes. ** Chilly Jay Chill, Thank you about the envelope thing. No, the Oscars timing thing is completely a coincidence. It was supposed to show up two weeks ago, but then Blogger mysteriously deleted it, and I had to rebuild the thing almost from scratch. I know of Terry Fox's work, yeah. I saw him perform a few times, and I followed his work, and I think I met him a few times. Very curious work that I would really like to revisit, now that you bring him up. I was never fully sure about his stuff, although I liked things about it very much. And I think you saying that it was kind of context-less might be why I never quite got it at the time maybe. Anyway, you've got me on a hunt, so thank you. Thanks re: the novel. As I way saying to Cobaltfram, I think I might have to gut it and start over on a different but related track, we'll see. ** Frank Jaffe, Frank!!! Wow, were you writing that from the guts of my own and beloved LA home? Trippy to imagine you typing that on one of our couches or the patio or something. So, LA seems like a happy ending? Or an ending for now? That, you know, makes me happy. How is the apartment hunt going? Is it really tough to find the right place? Or not? Skylight rules, and, yeah, I noticed that it ruled more even than before the last time I was there. Ah, sigh, Mexico City, slurp, sigh. Okay, if I hear of any LA job openings, I will of course report to you immediately. I mean, you never know. And LA fun tips ... I'll put my mind to it, although Joel probably has the same set of loves and tips as I do. But I will. Thank you so much for everything, and give my warmest howdy and hugs to Luke and Matt! ** Billy Lloyd, Hi, maestro. Paris has grown friendlier and friendlier to vegetarians in recents years, but vegan is still pretty foreign to them. The vegetarian places, of which there are increasingly many, usually have vegans in mind in parts of their menu. There's this great restaurant Soya that's half-vegan, half-vegetarian. I'll find you appropriate places when the time comes. Oh, d.l. stands for 'distinguished local'. Not for Dennis lovers, yikes, no, God, no, ha ha. Wrote-ish is good, wrote-ish is enough. Wrote-ish is a nice idea and word. A musical! Fantastic! What can you say about it, if anything? Nice! What am I doing at the moment? Trying to figure out how to not entirely throw my novel-in-progress away. Working on a public art project with a visual artist friend that I can't talk about really yet. Going to see Iceage on Monday. Taking two out of town trips next week, which is cool -- a quick-ish trip to Bruges to see/supervise a performance of 'Kindertotenlieder', one of Gisele Vienne's and my theater pieces, and my favorite of our theater pieces, and going to Switzerland next weekend -- both with my great friend Zac, so I'm very excited about that. So, I'm doing very all right for the most part. Day of excellence to you!  ** Chris Cochrane, Hi, C. Oh, man. I'm sorry about the depression struggling. Yeah, ugh, body chemistry is such a bitch sometimes. At least there seems to be a fair amount of good IRL stuff going on, and no doubt it will tip the balance, right? It always does, I think, albeit in its sometimes own 'sweet' time. I'm mostly doing and feeling very good these days, thank you! ** Bill, Hi, Bill. Great that the gig went well. Was it documented or recorded or anything? Hopefully it was worth the sinus meltdown and the bleggy day after. You perkier today? ** Rewritedept, Oh, a space heater. Man, those things are dangerous. They seem like total pyromaniacs. I'm obviously so sorry to hear that the damage was worse than feared. And, yet, *sigh of relief*, the flash drive. Get through the transitional days this week, man, I hope the new, temporary house has some kind of mansion vibe. So, what are you planning to spend your birthday doing? Specialness would seem to be in order. My novel's on the autopsy table and maybe on the transplant list. Have as good a day as possible. Love from me. ** Okay. Due to the brevity of February, it probably feels like you're getting your monthly slave allotment early, but you aren't, if I'm going to be technical about it. And, with that rather superfluous idea and sentence, I will see you tomorrow.

Spy Gear Gadgets
Spyville
Brick House Security
Spy Gadget Gear
Gadgets and Gear
PI Gear
Eyetek Surveillance
Spycatcher of Knightsbridge
Spy Nuts
U-Spy Store
eSales China
Spy Gear
Spytec
Eye Spy Supply
Spy Emporium
Spy-Tronix
Advanced Intelligence Spy Shop







Spy Rock:'Britain was behind a plot to spy on Russians with a device hidden in a fake rock. Russia made the allegations in January 2006, but they were not publicly accepted by the UK before now. Jonathan Powell, then prime minister Tony Blair's chief of staff, told a BBC documentary: "The spy rock was embarrassing. They had us bang to rights. Clearly they had known about it for some time and had been saving it up for a political purpose." Embassy officials then allegedly downloaded classified data from the transmitter using palm-top computers.'-- The Mirror






The Benchmark 1100 Pen:'The Benchmark 1100 Pen by Benchmade has a kubotan-style pointed weapon made of either anodized aluminum or stainless steel hidden within its body, while the Uzi tactical pen hides a ‘DNA Catcher’ in its crown, which not only injures attackers but takes a sample of their blood. Both pens also function as glass breakers.'-- benchmade.com






White Noise Generator:'The white noise generator negates the effect of most secret listening devices, such as concealed microphones buried in walls, transmitters concealed in AC outlets and laser/microwave reflection from windows. This gadget produces a security blanket of generated noise, which completely obscures your dialogue with ‘unfilterable’ sound.'-- DRB






Envelope X-Ray Spray:'This highly effective spray can turn opaque paper temporarily translucent, allowing you to view the contents of an envelope without ever actually opening it. Thirty seconds later, the envelope will return to it’s original state, leaving no marks, discoloring or indeed any other indications that it may have been tampered with.'-- rucop.com






Code in a Compact:'A female agent could powder her nose while sneaking a surreptitious peak at code hidden in the mirror of this handy dual-use compact. When tipped at a certain angle, the code was visible in the mirror.'-- Espionagers.com






Spy Tissue Box:'A perfectly normal looking black gloss tissue box which secretly holds a low light CCTV camera and a digital video recorder. There is no pinhole lens used in this item - the camera actually films through the tissue box and records onto SD memory card. Offers very low light recording, motion detection and pre-scheduled recording, superb colour picture and sound and a long lasting (8 hour) re-chargeable battery. All recordings are time and date stamped.'-- GadgetsFirst






Tree Stump Bug:'This tree stump bug used solar power to function continuously in a wooded area near Moscow during the early 1970s. The bug intercepted communications signals coming from a Soviet air base in the area and them beamed them to a satellite, which then sent the signals to a site in the United States. Solar power meant that no risky battery changes were needed.'-- Izismile.com






Sonic Nausea: Mind Molester:'This small electronic device generates ultra-high frequency sound waves, which can make anyone in the immediate area very queasy, as well as induce headaches, sweating, loss of balance, nausea, or even vomiting. There is a larger version on the market, which can be used to disrupt large gatherings and disperse crowds.'-- technabob.com






The Laser Spy System:'The Laser Spy System is considered by many to be the Holy Grail of high tech spy devices because it can give the user the ability to listen in on conversations that take place in a distant building without having to install a bug or transmitter at the location. The Laser Spy System was said to be invented in the Soviet Union by Leon Theremin in the late 1940s. Using a non-laser based infrared light source, Theremin's system could detect sound from a nearby window by picking up the faint vibrations on the glass surface. The KGB later used this device to spy on the British, French and US embassies in Moscow. It is also interesting to note that Leon Theremin invented the world's first electronic instrument, a wand operated synthesizer named "The Theremin" after him.'-- Lucid Science

How to build one






Spy Flies:'Robotic-looking dragonflies and other insects have been spotted at political events and protests in Washington and New York, hovering over antiwar rallies. While no government agency admitted to deploying the robots, the technology has been in the works for decades and some entities have admitted that they’re currently trying to perfect it. Because replicating the flying motions of a live insect tends to be inefficient, researchers may soon turn to flying cyborg insects like the beetles and roaches instead.'-- SAEBA






Defendius Door Chain:'Defendius door chain guard helps you protect your home against unauthorized entry. The chain is long enough to reach the far end of the maze.'-- Art Ledbedev Studio






Fairbairn-Sykes Fighting Knife:'Introduced in 1941, the knife is named after its British designers, Captains W.E. Fairbairn and E.A. Sykes. Here pictured with its sheath (at left), the weapon was crafted to strike at the most vulnerable parts of an opponent’s body.'-- CIA Gadgets






Button Camera:'Using an unbeatable 550Tvl, CCD camera that comes complete with 3 complete sets of different sized buttons, and screws to hide the pinhole camera. Supplied with the impressive DV5 remotely controlled colour digital video recorder/monitor so small that it will fit into a cigarette pack. The rechargeable battery will run for approximately 60 minutes.'-- TalkTalk






Dissolving Paper:'Imagine writing a note or a class handout with the instructions, "Place In Water After Reading." To their surprise the paper will dissolve in the water! This is real paper that can be written on and used in most copiers and printers. The secret lies in the fact that the paper is made of Sodium Carboxyl Methyl Cellulose (no, really, we didn't make that up.) It dissolves in cold water, hot water, steam, and most aqueous solutions.'-- sciencestore.org






Lipstick Pistol:'Also known as ‘the kiss of death’, the single shot 4.5mm lipstick pistol was used by the KGB during the Cold War. Lipstick was one of many options for concealing single shot firearms. Torches, pens, tobacco pipes and cigarette packets were also used.' -- Spies






Project Acoustic Kitty:'The C.I.A. seriously considered using cats to act as living recording devices and training them to hang out and collect valuable information via a transmitter implanted in their skull! The plan, called Project Acoustic Kitty, was actually researched and nearly deployed over the course of five years, and at the cost of $20 million. As a matter of fact, one of the cats was wired and released near the Soviet Embassy, but managed to only get two steps out into the street before being hit and killed by a van. After that, the plans for the project were scrapped.'-- G4TV






Spy Desk Clock:'This great little unit has a motion detecting sensor that will make the camera activate and record as soon as it detects movement within a 4 metre radius. Once this recording is completed it is immediately ready to detect and record any further movement. It also comes with a mini remote control unit for "One touch" video recording. Alternatively the unit can be set to record sound only. It will record up to 12 hours of video or 25 hours of sound only.'-- TechTalk






The Assassination Umbrella:'This umbrella is equipped with a pellet of toxic ricin that will infect and kill its target over the course of a few days. Its last known use was on a Bulgarian defector and BBc reporter Georgi Markov in London, 1978.'-- collaged






Spy Air Freshener:'A covert 3G colour camera and microphone are discretely built into this common domestic air freshener, allowing the user to receive both crisp picture, excellent sound and flowery fresh smell from anywhere in the world.'-- TalkTalk






Dog Doo Transmitter:'Boghardt, the International Spy Museum's historian, says this "turd" has a hollowed-out space inside, ideal for holding a message so that case officers and sources could communicate without raising suspicion. Doo tends to be left alone, which is why beacons disguised as tiger excrement were used to mark targets in Vietnam, Boghardt says. One of the risks is obviously that such a device would be thrown away or discovered by someone accidentally.'-- Izismile.com






The Martini Olive Bug: 'Scientist Hal Lipset specialized in inserting audio devices into seriously inappropriate places. He specialized in secret, high-tech gadgetry, most famously his waterproof Martini Olive Bug, almost always concealed as something mundane, and even operated out of a covert laboratory hidden behind a false storefront.'-- Cracked






Peephole Reverser:'We install peepholes in our doors to protect ourselves, allowing us to identify anyone at the door before we open it to them. But those same peepholes can easily be used against us. A simple gadget called a peephole reverser, also known as a tactical door viewer, was developed by law enforcement, giving them a look at activity inside a dwelling without alerting anyone inside.'-- spygadgets.com






Shotgun Flashlight:'ARES Defense Systems has developed a Mag-Lite that doubles as a .410 gauge shotgun. A grenade-style pin removes the safety, and the flashlight fires a .410 shotgun round out the back when a button is pressed. A Mini-Mag size fires a .380 round.'-- techeblog






The Trees Have Eyes: 'Is that a maple seed spinning down toward the ground – or a covert micro-camera designed by Lockheed Martin? The defense contractor is developing a tiny camera based on the seed, which will have two tiny jet boosters to help steer it and keep it in the air. Lockheed plans to disperse them over war zones to monitor conditions, find survivors in disaster areas and even detect chemical and biological weapons.'-- SAEBA







Bread & Iceberg Lettuce Safes:'Bread Safe is made to look like the actual product, but it's a container safe. Without so much as a seam. The bottom snaps off to reveal a secret hiding place. Place the realistic head of Iceberg Lettuce in your refrigerator in the vegetable compartment with your most valuable small items inside for safe-keeping. Research shows that a burglar spends an average of 8 minutes in the victim's home. Put the odds in your favor...hide your valuables in plain sight. The diversion safes are a unique home-security product.'-- BBB






Cigarette Case Gun: 'Soviet agent Nicolai Khokhlov defected to the Americans in 1954 after aborting an attempt to assassinate an anti-Communist leader in Franfurt, the world got a peek at the would-be assassin’s equipment. Among the top secret items was a gold cigarette case that concealed an electrically operated gun capable of firing cyanide-tipped bullets.'-- Spygadgets.com






Suicide Pin:'If a CIA operative were caught, he could choose capture or death by this pin. When twisted the right way, the silver dollar would unleash a pin coated in saxitoxin, Its user would die in seconds from the poison.' -- collaged




*

p.s. Hey. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. You probably know this already, but if you're heading to the Stedlijk from Amsterdam Central (train) Station, and if you're planning on getting there by tram, take either Tram 16 or 24 and get off at the Museumplein stop, and you'll be right there. Sure, write me when you get back and we'll set it up. Next week is a bit crazed for me since I'll be out of town on Tuesday, Wednesday and then on Friday through the weekend, but I should be online, if pretty off and on. ** Misanthrope, It wasn't just you. Something in the post's code fucked up the blog's appearance for some reason, but I happened to catch your comment early and managed to remove the offending code bit. No doubt about the dumps imposed upon you by the car shit. Having grown up in LA where cars are like the shoes on one's feet, life was always being turned on its ugly head by auto misbehavior. Oh, so they basically let Undertaker have a final triumphant win and then retired him while on top? I guess better that than when, say, they brought back Hogan and tried to let him have a few completely unbelievable looking wins before getting rid of him again asap. I can't really see Undertaker coming back as a manager or announcer. Who knows with the WWE, though. ** Lizz Brady, Hi, Lizz! I've been trying and failing at the moment to write a new novel, but something will come of it. It was going to be about my real life friendship with the real life George Miles, who's been my work's great muse, but it didn't work. I think I know what it's going to be about if my new strategy works, but it's a bit too early to say what that is yet. Thank you a lot about 'My Loose Thread'. That's one of my two favorite novels of mine.  That's interesting, I did feel some kind of kinship with the writing of yours that I've seen. Yeah, it's tricky and important to finesse the right relationship between the personal and the secretive. My failure to get that right is a big reason why my George novel is so fucked up. Exactly, about everyone's different perceptions. It's so hard and interesting to try work with that and calculate a particular writing effect given what a crapshoot that reaction is. Anyway, yeah, thank you for the kind words. They mean a lot coming from you. ** 5STRINGS, Slaves just give complicated front. They're not meat. They just play meat on certain websites. The way to their hearts is through their hearts. The rest is dream. Dark new stack, man. Everyone, She's Only 17 by 5STRINGS. ** David Ehrenstein, Ha ha, Lagerfeld, good one, ha ha. Jonathan Rosenbaum is 70? Wow. I'll go watch at least part of that video later. Very intriguing. Thank you! ** Will C., Hey there, Will! It's really nice to see you! Things have been pretty okay to great here for the most part. That 3/4 through the novella news is great news! Hate the stalls, right? But they're part of the deal, and they have their distancing plus side, and if you're that far along, it'll be fine, man, if you're worried. Still on the job hunt? Man, it's tough. Anyway, I'd love to hear more of how you're doing, etc., if you feel like it, and all the very best to you in any case. ** John Veldhoen, John! Well, I'm so grateful that you came back at all. Evan Dara ... I don't know who that is, but I will go find out as soon as I finish this thing. I don't know, your reading sounds like momentous stuff. Man, that's so kind of you to say about what I do. I don't know what it's like to be me. I think I'm just a weird combination of obsessive and optimistic and dutiful or something, and, otherwise, I'm just nothing and lucky. Just know, and you do, that whenever you want to be around, I'll feel enlightened. I mean that, man. Love from me from here on out. ** Scunnard, I think I know what you mean in a way due to my disappearing into blog post making maybe. Yeah, connections. I feel kind of weird in that way too 'cos I don't really have any art connections here in Paris that I know of. I thought the Pompidou gig would open doors, but nah, unless the doors are in places I don't know. Anyway, I'll think. Give me more info on that show, if you feel like it. I'm interested, duh. ** Statictick, Cherishing disagreements is a good way to go. For instance, Tin Machine is my all-time least favorite Bowie thing, so let's cherish that together. Excellent about the Lamictal smoothness. May that continue to drift, and, yeah, tell me about the scary 'lost time' thing, if you feel like. Yikes, man. My appreciation in advance too. ** Schlix, Hi, Uli! How are you, man? It's really good to see you! ** James, Hi. I'm not a big Thom Yorke/ Radiohead fan, so I don't think I'll be springing for that Atoms thing. Well, I might be able to salvage some of the George novel. Not sure at all about that yet. I envy your spate of motherfucking editing. That sounds like clover to me. I hated dialogue for a long time, but then I got really into it for a while, say in 'MLT' and 'The Sluts', and then I turned on it, and now I'm kind of back into it again. I think dialogue is a really flexible thing to work with, and it has all this space and time illusion in it, which is really useful if you want to fuck with tempo and with creating potent gaps in the prose/ narrative, and it's a great hiding place because it goes down with readers so smoothly, and it's a good method by which to escape or give the impression of escaping the oppressive ego of the writer, and ... I don't know, I guess I'm kind of very interested in what dialogue can do that moment. Love to you too! ** Cobaltfram, Hi, John. The waiting game, yes, expect a lot of that until the stars align. My novel is not in decent shape, man, ha ha. I don't know where you got that impression, but, no. I have hopes at the moment, but the novel's relationship to those hopes is very tangential at best. I'm not sure if the neo-memoir thing will remain or not. Honestly, I'm not so very interested in that form, and the memoir aspect, and my inability to ace/reinvent it in an acceptable way, has ultimately been the fatal blow, so I don't know if I'll keep scaling that cliff or not. Maybe. 'Close to the Knives' is a very great book, in my opinion. I blurbed it originally, but I don't know if my blurb has survived the many following editions. It's a great book. I know what 'The Tale of Genji' is, yes, but I don't think I've read it. I think it's supposed to be incredibly great, I understand. Well, if I don't see you 'til Monday, I obviously hope that Austin is your own personal Oz. ** Chris Dankland, Hi, Chris. Nice of you to say hello. No snow here anymore, but it's pretty cold, and the sky looks gray enough to be hoarding snow, so we will see. March, I know, weird. Rent's due again, ugh. Man, that school stuff ... Reading that makes me so angry. It's one of the clearest, most savage examples of how America is so incredibly fucked up and without moral compass and disrespectful/abusive of the young and broadly self-defeating. That's really just so painful but good to hear. I've never seen 'The Wire'. It's weird, but I haven't. It started just before I 'moved' over here, and it was on a cable channel in France that I don't have here, and it was dubbed into French, so I basically missed it. Oh, great that you and Cobaltfram are meeting up! I hope that and your getaway to Austin in general go really well, and I know they will. All the best and a fantastic weekend to you too! ** Bollo, Hi, J. Thanks for having me. Or for having here, I mean. I owe you, buddy. ** Okay. Spy gear. That's your visual, etc. for the day. Enjoy, I hope, of course, and I will see you tomorrow.