Private Invective

Classified.

2006-03-20T22:03:00.000-08:00

Yes, of course I'm taking a break from writing a paper to write to the void. Hello, void! Are you boasting an extra special little bit of emptiness for me tonight? I'm going to drink tea and avoid thinking about how annoying my eyes have been lately, how the desklamp is making them ache and how my right lens just isn't cutting it anymore. How can my vision possibly get any worse than it already is? Is there such a thing as "more blind than blind?" Because if there is, I'm it.

The paper, if you were wondering, is about our whimsical paranoiac friend, Baudrillard, and our favorite grumpy grandpa, Adorno. Well, actually, it's more about their fanciful and rather accurate, if not simplistic and sinister, views of advertising and how such views might actually fit in to design history. The worst thing about this paper is that I'm actually enjoying the process of writing it--hell, even researching it got my mojo rising--but, as it's due in two days, I have absolutely no time to make it good. It will be a bad paper about something I love, and it's my own damn fault. Why can't I adjust to the quarter system? And why does everything I write have to be so fucking precious?

These inquiries will be filed directly underneath "Are you still attracted to me?" and "Where in sam hill did I put my shoes?" in my general running list of Important Questions. But there are otherincomprehensible phenomena afoot. Take, for instance, my morning task of holding down a five pound cat while it's owner syringed a wad of laced, nutritive goop into its feeding tube over the course of about fifteen minutes. That was only about twelve hours ago, yet it feels like one of those experiences that I recount years after the fact, marveling at how out of place such situations tend to be in my elegantly assembled narrative of personal history. Two alarmed humans, a feeding tube, a cat, a large red sock rolled over the cat's abdomen like a condom to keep the tube in place: this does not fit in well with my whole "I was born, I grew up, I consumed lots of cookies along the way" narrative of individual development. It doesn't even make a very good story, because to the generic outsider it just sounds distasteful and weird. But the image of the cat with the plastic tube sticking out of its side will haunt me until I replace it with some other unexpected mammalian cyborg, like an ox with a prosthetic limb or a bird with a colostomy bag hanging from its airborne belly.

Lions.

2006-02-26T17:49:00.000-08:00

Let's climb up on to those mountains and get eaten by lions; it will be a cold shot of irreversible tragedy, falling off our bikes as the claws sink in and crying in a language that the killers don't speak. If one of us survives we'll have to crawl home, maybe limbless, maybe dragging a corpse. After getting cleaned up, the ugly remainder is incinerated and certain words aren't spoken for months and years, though they stain the mind.

The event will become a garment, a closet full of garments, following the survivor everywhere. "A few years back, I rode my bike into the mountains and got attacked by lions. My friend was killed. Why did I survive?" Murder. Let's try to forget. These situations beg to be forgotten, but all we can do is adapt. The ice behind the forehead and ribs will be annexed by the bone, and that's how we'll live through it. We'll become mysterious, tragic and inspiring. So let's go, let's go into the mountains.

Arrangements.

2006-02-26T01:13:00.000-08:00

When I moved the furniture, all the pictures on the walls looked wrong. Rearrangement exposes inconsistencies, flaws.

I'm tempted to extend this event to other spheres, like work: a new job renders old patterns useless. At 8:20 I checked email, read the New York Times and finished my coffee. Now that I sleep until noon, that's out the window.

I could extend it to love: my habits become frivolous, my pleasures are reconfigured in twos. Then, if I have a new friend, two legs suddenly seem unstable. The picture is now too far to the right, throwing the whole room off balance. Where does that leave me?

Violet.

2006-01-05T21:29:00.000-08:00

The tiny comforts: violet-scented baby lotion, houseplants, wrinkled receipts, dog-eared pages, new pens. We can list these things in tandem, all of us. It's what we do; it's how we push through to the next morning when spooning a pillow isn't good enough. Tonight I told Michele that we should gather up all the graduate students we know and write down our departments on little pieces of paper, and then trade them. Each person has to write about someone else's field. I could write about cognitive science or literature, number theory or anthropology. We could all write pages and pages about unfamiliar things, and staple it all together like an elaborate private joke.

What we have here is the encyclopedia of the unknown, bound in creativity and ignorance. Number theory, sure: I know a thing or two about the NSA, about paranoid germination. The only number theorist I know is a rock climber who likes to be alone with his thoughts. The numbers are filigree, since a mind as fine as his needs something to occupy it. Then there are those moments when we shut down, all of us. We can't think any more. We have our little tricks, our creature comforts, that unwind us and then coil us back together. What do you remember yourself being? Where is your center? It finds itself. It has to.

I saw a schizophrenic's self portrait, drawn as a series of dotted lines; there was another, headless, with the internal organs spilling out into space. If I was so permeable, if I did not have the violet fragrances to seal my skin, I would disappear. I would become something else, not human. The hermetic self comprises that possession, since that is what I am to myself; my body is mine, my thoughts belong in the folds, and nothing escapes unless I let it, or unless it gets the better of me. I pour liquids into myself and feel more alive. When I read books, I am sucking letters into my eyes and they organize themselves into food: word sushi, sentence potatoes. This all makes me. There is a chemical process that turns a magazine into a forearm: that's biology, right? Something else I know nothing about.

Monday.

2005-11-14T00:44:00.000-08:00

This track is called "Monday," and I'm listening to it on Monday, and yeah, it's a little blue. Sometimes I hear a song like this and wish I could write an entire book like it. One song can only shift a few molecules here and there in any opus, though, while they manage to produce some fairly bizarre mental images in the process. This one, for instance: sitting in a puddle full of half-and-half in a New England backyard while someone dumps crunchy leaves on my head and my fingers freeze stiff. So that could be one sentence of one chapter.

I'm not a vegetarian, but I'm in a bit of a quandary regarding my fascination with taxidermy. I'm thinking of taking a class, but there's something strange about animals being 'specimens' when I don't actually think of them that way. I just don't think that stuffing something is on the same level as eating it, need-wise. Even wearing it is entirely unnecessary these days. So I suppose I'll start with a venison meal this weekend and work my way up to complete cognitive dissonance.

Skin is the quiet bearer of intimate subjectivity; I'm going crazy over how sensitive my skin is, and how impervious MJ's is, and how in some ways this leaves our interactions lost in translation. Accidental toenail-scratching under the sheets, fingers touching in transit, a breeze through our pubic hair leaves each of us in a different state, and there's no dependable way to meet in between. We should be able to switch patches of skin; I seem to remember something like that in a Star Trek movie.

Keys.

2005-10-26T22:26:00.000-07:00

My mind was blown at about 1:30 this afternoon when I realized that key distribution is unnecessary for decryption. In seminar, my professor alluded to this kind of thing as 'the onset of paranoia;' as in, "From this moment forth, nothing was the same." It kind of turns the whole theoretical lack/mirror/recognition/for-itself thing on its ear, doesn't it? I mean, I think there may very well be a moment in everyone's life, or possibly several moments, that marks the onset: the realization that there may or may not be a THEY to look the hell out for.

Here, let's try a little thought experiment, courtesy of Simon Singh. I call you up and say "red;" for those of you who harp on particulars, let's say it's Pantone Red 032. You take a cup of Red 032, and mix in a cup of some secret color of your own--let's say cornflower blue. Meanwhile, I have mixed in a cup of my own secret color: lemon yellow. Now we mail each other these samples.

Okay, even if someone wire-tapped our little "Red 032" conversation, and even if our mailed samples are intercepted and photographed, there's no way to un-red the paint in order to figure out what exact color values we used as our secret tones. The last step: I add my lemon yellow to your paint sample, and you add your cornflower blue to my paint sample. What do we have? The same exact color. And this color is our key, even though we've shared no sensitive information over phones or through the mail. No codebook or top-secret keyword necessary!

It was this kind of thinking that led to fun stuff like RSA encryption, which is also based on this idea of public keys. If we know that THEY are out there, watching us, then it follows (perhaps perversely) that privacy should have a public component. As soon as the middleman is subtracted, and secrecy is a self-made art, then we only have to trust ourselves. Perfect security, right?

(Well, theoretically.)

Bounce.

2005-10-20T23:16:00.000-07:00

I ordered a jawharp for three dollars and it hurts to play. Sometimes, if I get ahead of myself, the steel twanger crashes into my front teeth and I get that awful metal-mouth feeling.

Pain seems to indicate a learning curve when it comes to music. Playing bass gave me blisters, for instance. This isn't the kind of suffering that feeds creativity, but it does make me practice. That probably annoys my roommate. I can't imagine what I would do if twanging sounds emerged from her room every time she was annoyed with her boyfriend.

I think I'm playing it wrong. I pull the twanger back instead of flipping it forward. That sounds dirty, I know, but I mean it literally. I put it in my mouth and pull the twanger, so laugh all you want. The jawharp is that thing Snoopy played, also known as a jew's harp: though, as far as I'm concerned, only partial-Jews play them. Yes, the half-blood's plaintive cry is that of a stainless steel twanger behind a closed door. Everyone else who plays it is old, and from the UK.

Alcohol doesn't taste the way it used to. I really used to like it, and now it tastes like something I'd use to clean the tub. Is it true that we lose our sense of taste as we get older? This has been a tough year; I feel so mortal. The pounds don't drop off the way they used to, and the buttocks of men have lost their bounce. Luckily, I have my jawharp to depend on for evening whimsy.

Thursday.

2005-10-14T22:29:00.000-07:00

"He looked at me with his large but indecipherable face. 'You want a safe disguise, do you? You want a dress which will guarantee you harmless; a dress in which no one would ever look for a bomb?' I nodded. He suddenly lifted his lion's voice. 'Why, then, dress up as an anarchist, you fool!' -G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

It occurs to me that anything I write might be more interesting from a fictional point of view. Once, for instance, I kept a journal in the voice of a viral homunculus. Nothing was out of bounds; of course, I got bored easily. In fiction, one voice is easily infected or superceded by another as my focus shifts.

When I start to think like that, I lose track of my voice. It's safe to say that, as in fiction, new voices have superceded the old; it's a form of maturing. Also, I'm never quite honest. It's too easy to create phenomena or gags out of quotidian blatherings. I blame the language. English has too many words, and I intend to use them all at least once before I die. Beyond that, it's too easy to make a protagonist out of wary solipsism. If I'm doing all this traipsing, I might as well describe what I see.

Without MJ around, it's difficult to construct an axis of activities. I dropped him off at the airport this morning and then went back to my apartment, only to pass out again. Volume Two of my dreams was even more disturbing than the first. It's sad: my dreams have crossed the line, becoming officially way more interesting than my daily life. Well, let me rephrase that: my rich inner life has been multiplied since moving thousands of miles away for the purpose of reading thousands of pages of philosophical scribbles. And it's all philosophy, really, even when it tries to be history or art, or history of art. Anyway, my universe has inverted. My body traces the same simple paths every day, while my mind covers new terrain and establishes topographical cliche beyond my wildest northeastern nightmares. I apologize for the latter, but there's no other way to make these things clear.

Thus, on the dual subject of routine (in writing, in solitude), I'm promising myself not to worry about it too much. I create regimens and break them. Too much routine, and the exercise becomes boring and worthless. So I'll hide my fickle nature, right out in the open.

Sport.

2005-10-12T21:18:00.000-07:00

I bit into my Ritter Sport bar (milk chocolate, hazelnuts) a minute ago and was suddenly reminded of the last two Sport bars I ate, the first while charging down the street with Alicia and the second, several months later, while alone in my apartment. Operative: the first. Alicia and I were giddy, having just emerged from the sweaty European fray of Bulgarian Bar, and starving, having consumed nothing but alcohol since five; at the end of our wallets, a man in the bar had bought us a bottle of red and expected nothing in return. We still felt like whores, but drank in the spirit of the thing. Leaving the place, we stopped at a corner shop and swirled the drain of the chocolate display, which featured every possible combination of Ritter; "I love German candy," Alicia cooed, because she had lived there as a child. We shared it on the walk back to her apartment, letting it kill the dead flavor on our tongues, and I think the sweetness let the night live longer.

If flavor is actually scent, then I believe the science on memory. It's primal. Speaking of which, I move to slice that word and its corresponding scene from my graduate work, now and forever. I am so sick of Freud. Have we harped on him enough in theoryland, folks? This is the guy who cried trauma whenever there wasn't a penis nearby, and then cried double-trauma when the penis belonged to someone's dad. (No, I am not oversimplifying. Read and tell me I'm wrong.) Here I thought we'd moved past all this, that grad school would be about pushing forward, but we're still on Dr. Freud's wild ride, going round in circles.

There's no friendly competition to be had in the tethered logic of psychoanalysis, even if Derrida's little cryptograms endow it with a certain mystique. When it comes down to it, I like to think that I'm doing this in some service to the people I love: if I decipher the visual regime, I can save them from it or at least make it a bit less harrowing. In other words, my education is predestined as payment for their kindnesses and endless indulgence, and I shouldn't be retracing steps forever. After all, I have work to do.

18,000.

2005-10-11T11:31:00.000-07:00

"They also found the right arm of the 18,000-year old female announced last year, as well as fragments of other skeletons."

Let me just say that if I was 18,000 years old, and some scientist disturbed my happy little cave existence, I'd be pissed. How would you feel if you made it that far and some hikers in lab coats came to your door peddling Botox and foil-wrapped foodstuffs? Damn straight they found my right arm: with a nice little bird perched on the end of it.

Apparently the university wants to give me money for walking. Brilliant. I think it should be a nationwide government program. A few days ago I was reading Dear Abby (yes, I just admitted that) and the usual cranky suspects were twisting their pantaloons over a mother who requested five bucks a week from Little Miss I-work-half-a-mile-from-home-but-need-to-be-driven. This may be the only time I've sided with grandpa on transportation protocol. Tell the bitch to walk! She can keep her five dollars and feel rich, and mom can have those extra minutes to imagine a happy, daughter-free existence.

Look, I'll be the first to confess it; sometimes, without warning, I will look at my gentleman friend and think that squeezing out a puppy or two with him wouldn't be half bad. Luckily, I have discovered a cure for this temporary insanity: a trip to Target. After thirty seconds of ear-splitting, proto-consumer howls, my uterus is closed for business. So, too, after a few installments of Dear Abby. So why overpopulation? Am I the only person who experiences the Target-Abby Effect?

The secret of living to 18,000: no newspapers, no needles, and no goddamn kids.

Vibrance.

2005-10-10T15:34:00.000-07:00

I only recently figured out that vibrating razors are the answer to the Texas (Alabama, where else?) sex toy ban. And damn, do they get the job done. Not only are my legs smooth as a porn star's everything, but I'm feeling like a real outlaw with this thing right out in the open. Sure: that thing plugged in by my bed relieves "neck" tension, and the battery-powered pink thing is my "razor." Oh, the lies we tell.

The past seven days have been a bruised valentine to your buddy and mine, Jacques Lacan. This morning, I attempted to sort through the gaze while getting a pedicure; both experiences may give me an infection, but I really can't complain. In fact, I may have already built up antibodies to the former. Now I have patina-green toenails, tough as brass; now I remember what the fucking gaze did to me in my undergraduate years. Pretty soon after my first semester, I was suffering from phallic-ghost paranoia; and look, anyone who knows me will tell you that I can conjure these psychoanalytic demons without Freud's drug of choice.

Anamorphosis: the art of seeing penises from unconventional angles. Yes, we have the devil's dandruff to thank for this; now I know why I've been having all those weird dreams about staying up all night. I do not "lack" anything, okay? I just have this problem with my brain: it actually absorbs psychoanalysis, like a sponge. It is a multiplicity of holes, just like any human surface area. I mean, this reduction to one hole is a little simplistic, don't you think? There is never just one: it has cronies, doppelgangers, pets.