Dear Readers,This is my first letter to you, so I'll try to keep it brief. I want to make this an opportunity for us to get to know each other a little better. I hope we can make a connection that will be made again and again and again--that you will join the WORD family, and join us as we extend our familial WORD arms out to the family of the world. We're real human beings on a virtual space station, sending out signals to people just like you.
So, where to start? At the beginning, I guess. I was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I think ethnicity is important but I'll skip that for now. It's too complicated and potentially touchy. You know how people are about that stuff. So I'll begin with some descriptive information about my parents, as a way of introducing both me and WORD.
My mom is short. She was 5'1" when I was a kid, but due to osteoporosis, she's only 5' now. She works out a lot on the weight machines in her apartment complex, because the doctors say weight-bearing exercise helps increase bone mass, which is what is lost as osteoporosis progresses. That's why you get shorter over time when you have it. She also takes calcium supplements, which I think you are supposed to combine with something else ... Vitamin D, maybe? ... in order to make them more potent. She has gray hair. So does my dad. Do you find it strange to imagine your parents having sex? I know that is the cliche but I have no problem with it whatsoever. I can easily imagine them doing it, especially when they were young. They were good-looking people, and they were in love. I remember seeing a photograph of my parents on their honeymoon. They were riding burros in the southwestern US. The colors were so bright, it was like a Technicolor movie. Only it didn't move.
We lived in the suburbs by a lake. Lake Minnetonka. I remember riding in our red speedboat with my father. I was scared when we whipped through the water, banking the curves. I thought we were going to tip over, but we never did. I can still see my father's drink in the steel drink holder, and hear the ice cubes rattling in the cup while the green lake water splashed below. I learned to swim at a very young age because of living next to that lake. I'm listening to the radio right now. Do you think that's dumb? Sometimes I wonder if it's self-destructive, because the radio here in New York City is so lousy. You'd think it would be really good and hip and have a lot of variety but noooooooo, everything has to suck in New York. I hate the song that's on right now. It's some western-type dude ballading his stupid heart out. Actually it's really pissing me off but I won't change the station because I'm too lazy. Wait, maybe I will. Hold on.
It's James Brown now, on the oldies station. I hate that station when they play those syrupy and/or cutesy '50s hits from the days when all guys, as decreed by Eisenhower, had to get their balls cut off in order to be pop singers. Did you know that? Probably not, but it seems kind of obvious when you listen to those songs, doesn't it? There's a lot you can learn by simply paying attention.
I always make a big deal about the boat because it's my first memory. My second memory combines a dream and a real occurrence. The dream part is that I dreamt I could fly. What do you think that means, when you dream you can fly? I used to think it meant you were a special spiritual being. For a few years, I asked everyone I knew: "Do you now or did you ever dream of flying?" The alcoholics among my respondents said that they dreamed of falling, not flying. After a while, I began to worry that maybe my flying dreams were merely an escape. That maybe they didn't make me special at all, just a pathetic, fantasy-addicted baby. The second part of the memory is that I stood on the stone wall in our back yard and jumped off. Guess what? I couldn't fly. I landed with a thud. So that was kind of a bummer. But I learned an important lesson very young. I can't exactly say what it was. I hate people who analyze things too much.
We lived in that suburb right on the lakeshore and then we moved to another suburb where we didn't have lakeshore. But we did have a farm right next door, with cows and horses and everything. It was a veal farm, believe it or not. Every fall, the mom cows would go mooing all over the farm, searching for their little babies who had been taken away from them. I didn't care. I liked veal then and I still like it now. Moo!
I don't want to talk about WORD. I don't care what anyone says anyway. I defy anybody to do any better. What are you going to read, Pathfinder, for god's sake? Give me a break.
Did you have dandelions on your lawn when you were a kid? We did. I liked them when they were yellow and blooming. But I also liked them later, when they looked like magic wands. You could puff the fuzzy seeds off their little perches and they'd float off like tiny, feathery parachutes. But we had to get rid of them because they were "weeds." I always found the concept of "weeds" somewhat problematic. What is so great about plain old lawn grass? I thought the crabgrass looked kind of neat. I loved the dandelions, and their leaves, too. They were lovely in a spiky kind of way. And then we learned from Euell Gibbons that they were not only edible, but actually good for you. They have a lot of Vitamin C. But it didn't matter what I thought. I was just a little kid, so I had to do what my parents wanted me to do and that was weed. I spent a lot of hours weeding the lawn. That is certainly one thing I do not mind about NYC. No weeding. Sure, you breathe polluted air all day long and you have to worry about crime and stuff, but there is no weeding--or shoveling snow, for that matter, and being from Minnesota, that means something.
One thing I liked about weeding was this weeding tool we had. It was a long iron implement with a forked tip--not forked like a fork you eat with, but forked like a path. It made a little "v." Oh, here's a good way to describe it (Marvin Gaye just came on the radio--"You Are So Wonderful"--bet he didn't think his dad was so wonderful when he shot him!), hold your hand out flat, palms facing down. Now make a "v" with your hand by separating your third and fourth fingers from each other but holding all the others tightly together. Now imagine that your hand is iron, and that the insides of the "v" are a little sharp. What you'd do was get next to a big dandelion plant, and you'd stick that tool into the ground right next to it and sink it into the earth all the way down, as far as it would go, at a slight angle. Then at the last minute, just before it was all the way down (this was the fun part), you'd push it toward the dandelion and slice it right across the root. The point was to kill the dandelion forever, not just pluck off the blossom. It was quite effective. More effective than poison, even, but it wasn't as dangerous as poison when you had kids around. The poison thrilled me, though. I loved the fact that you could spread it around one night, and by the next day the dandelions would already be dying. It was like a magic power my dad had, to make beautiful things die all of a sudden, all at once. I remember we kept the jars of that weedkiller around in the garage for years afterward, in a rusty old cabinet. You could learn the whole history of suburban lawns by taking a tour of that cabinet.
Do you smoke? I quit for three years and thought I would never smoke again. I was completely convinced I had it licked. But here I am, smoking again, a brand I don't even like--some low tar piece of shit brand. I hate low tar cigarettes. I think they're even more cancer-causing than regular cigarettes. You can taste the toxins in them. But here I am, chewing on a purple Sweet-Tart (I just spit it out to see what color it was) and smoking Merit Ultra Lights (stolen from someone else's desk).
I used to love school. I looked forward every day to marching down the driveway and waiting for that orange bus to come down the country road we lived on. Another early memory is being one of the first kids on the bus, and listening to "King of the Road" with the 18-year-old, acne-faced bus driver. To me, this was the height of glamour and adventure. I was on my own, winging it, free as a bird, hitting the road in that school bus. My parents were already a distant memory.
WORD is kind of a cool magazine, don't you think?
Phonetics really "took" with me in first grade. I'm kind of glossing over kindergarten because I wasn't the biggest genius in my kindergarten class. I failed at many of the basic things of kindergarten. Oh, right, I said we were "real" here, so I'd better confess all. First grade will have to wait. My kindergarten failures included:
1) Failure to learn how to tie my shoes. This deficiency still causes me anxiety, albeit of a relatively low level.
2) Failure to learn to tell time. I eventually learned, and the reason I now wear a digital watch has nothing to do with not being able to read a regular clock or watch, which I can now do without any problem. I just like these features:
3) Failure to learn how to make or discern patterns. I remember one especially perplexing day when we had to string beads together in patterns and I kept going back and back to the teacher with my string of beads, convinced each time that I had finally done it, only to be told No, that is not a pattern (maybe my patterns were too complicated for her?).
4) Failure to remember the words of songs.
5) Failure to learn how to color correctly. This was a double failure: I could neither color within the lines, nor figure out how to color flesh tones. I remember one day I was coloring along with the rest of the class, combining all these colors to try to make flesh tone. The result looked hideous and when I finally looked at how my classmates had done it, I saw that they had just left the people's skin white. Well, this struck me in several ways. First, I thought it was ridiculous that this was the convention, because people's skin just didn't look like that, not even white people's. Second, it broke the continuity of the crayon-covered surface. The illusion was shattered, as you had color everywhere and then all of a sudden paper with no color where there was supposed to be a person's skin. But thirdly, I felt stupid for not having realized that this was the convention, and I wondered how it was that the other kids always seemed to know these things, these unwritten rules of protocol, which, even though I thought they were dumb, were just the way things were and why was it that I didn't know?
But I liked kindergarten anyway. I had fun. My friend Anne and I would go to her house and bake things with a light bulb in her EZ-Bake oven, and then spin her Mad Magazine record which was all burping noises. Anne later became a champion horsewoman. She rode in the Olympics. One night there was a stable fire and her two horses burned to death.
There's so much to tell!
On to first grade. First grade was great. In a welcome change from kindergarten, I was the class genius because, as I mentioned, I caught on to phonetics so well. Everything in first grade was easy, except for math. I never did like math except for Geometry which wasn't until 10th grade or so. Don't ask me why I liked it, but I did. Trigonometry too. I liked sines and cosines. I liked what they did. I studied them two different years. I thought they were wonderful but I knew they'd be even better if I could study them (and Calculus) with animated computer diagrams of the formulas. See, even then I had computermania. And now here I am, in cyberspace! It was like, foreshadowing.
So, first grade was a snap. Reading was tres easy for me. I raced through those Dick and Janes, pausing only to wish that I had a cat named Puff and my name was Sally. Or at least Jane. Jane would do. Actually come to think of it, Jane was my first choice. Sally was too femmy and wimpy.
First grade is boring to me now.
My first crush wasn't until second grade, when I fell in love with this guy who shall remain nameless. Stephen Adams, are you out there? I was madly in love with you in second and third grade. Though by third grade I had another crush, this beautiful boy I used to go swimming with, Jeff Meehan. I was far more in love with Jeff Meehan than I had ever been with Stephen Adams, and that is saying a lot, because I adored Stephen Adams with every fiber of my second grade being. But Stephen Adams was puppy love compared to Jeff Meehan.
In second grade we learned cursive writing and I was never all that great at it. My eye-hand coordination is not the best, although once when I went pistol shooting I hit the bull's-eye 14 out of 15 times, and the 15th time was awfully close. And this was only my first time! So maybe it's just that I have little aptitude for cursive writing. Why is it that all handbooks you get when you're a kid look alike? The Palmer script handbooks they gave us to teach cursive writing looked very much like the little song and lesson books I had when I took piano lessons. They were so corny, with their goofy little graphics and cute old-timey fonts. Everything was so innocent. Every piece of writing was about a little boy and a little girl going up a hill to a cozy little house. Every song was likewise about a little boy and a little girl going up a hill to a cozy little house, except maybe in the writing one there was a dog and in the song there was a duck. It was Europhilia. They were hearkening back to the olde days of the olde country of yore when culture (music in this case) all came from Europe and all Europeans had, you know, ducks. Because they lived on manors with huge farms, or in little Swiss villages in the Alps. See, nobody ever fantasizes about that kind of thing any more. It's always Gstaad, Gstaad, Gstaad. Everybody is into that decadent Eurotrash thing: drugs, sex, etc. Whereas I am totally not into that. I am into the little boy and the little girl going up the hill to the cozy little house, to visit their friend the duck. Maybe that's why I feel so alienated. Quack!
I won a contest in second grade that might have been taken as an indication of my future employment: a punctuation competition. My teacher, Mrs. Miller, kept making the questions more and more difficult, smugly assuming she could stump me. But I prevailed and won her box of Girl Scout cookies away from her.
In a fascinating twist of fate, my mother happened to be the Girl Scout cookie leader that year. Though I was just a Brownie, man oh man did we kick ass in cookie sales. We devoted ourselves utterly to moving that cookie product. If you have never marched into the home of a helpless neighbor wearing a fascist-looking brown uniform consisting of a minidress festooned with symbolic patches and pins topped off with an elf beanie, and badgered them to buy mediocre cookies at inflated prices, you have never lived.
But now, in this moment of reflection, it's suddenly plain as day to me that we were being used. Unknowingly, we had made a devil's bargain: our girlish hearts, in exchange for--what? We sold our little souls for Thin Mints and Scot-Teas, and what was our reward? Nothing. We never went camping. We never went on trips. We never did any of the fabulous activities outlined in the Brownie Handbook. It actually wasn't fabulous at all compared to the Boy Scout Handbook, which was stuffed to the gills with useful things like secret codes. I studied the Boy Scout Handbook intently and then proceeded to spend the rest of my school career passing notes and keeping journals written in various codes. Cipher codes, codes of substitution--you name 'em, I used 'em. I learned Pig Latin and Ob, too--have you ever heard Ob? Obit goboes sobomethobing lobike thobis ... obin fobact, obexobactobloby lobike thobis. Moby nobame obis Mobarobisoba Bobowe. But I didn't earn any merit badges for that.
So being a Brownie sucked. I'd rather have been in 4-H and cared tenderly for a little lamb or pig which would, upon reaching adolescence, be displayed at the Minnesota State Fair, pronounced wanting by an unfeeling judge, and then slaughtered for some fat-assed suburbanite's barbecue, leaving me devastated, in tears, inconsolable, swearing never again to eat meat. That would have been a good thing, because I do eat meat, a lot of it, never having been traumatized by the loss of a trusty 4-H companion, and I worry about my cholesterol level sometimes.
Do you really want to hear about third grade? You don't, do you? You're bored, I bet. I'm not in the mood to talk about it anyway. Not that there was anything so incredibly interesting that happened then. Well, a few significant things happened that would give some key insights into my personality. But I don't want to talk about them.
I was a swim champ when I was nine and ten. I could do no wrong. I won all the time. I knew, poised there at the edge of the pool, my toes curling around its rounded lip, that when that shot rang out and I dove smack onto that crystalline, chlorinated surface in my little blue Speedo, I would swiftly and surely follow the black line beneath me to the opposite end and whack my hand against the side before any of those other wimp girls would. Well, OK, I am doing them a disservice: not all of them were wimps. Some of them were tough little country club bitches. Their faces were blank, determined. You could always tell who was a wimp and who wasn't by their swimsuits. The wimps had those little skirts. But the non-wimps among them were lame just the same. I always won. I knew what I was doing. It all goes back to Lake Minnetonka. I was swimming before I knew there was such a thing as swimming. I had nothing but contempt for those who were afraid of the water. I was in it all day long. I was like a dolphin. When I was a teenager I had my ears pierced and one of my favorite pairs of earrings was a little pair of bells. I loved to go underwater and hear those itsy-bitsy bells ringing in my ears. It was a private thing.
But it's funny. Occasionally I go back to Minnesota to visit, and I go up to the attic and look in the cigar box with all my swimming ribbons and medals, and you know what? There are some red ribbons in there. Red ribbons are for second place. And I can't quite remember not winning.
Now I'm depressed. As if anybody cares. Nobody is even reading this. I could say absolutely anything and no one would even know. That's the irony of the Internet. A zillion people saying a zillion things, total communication, freedom of speech, all that crap, but nobody's listening and nobody cares. Here is a recipe that kills me:
BREAKFAST BEANS
Optional:
So I'm, like, sitting here, alone. I'm very, very depressed now. But who isn't, these days?
Maybe I should quote from some more books. I've got a million of them.
"UNDERSTANDING AND IMAGINATION
It is not possible to fathom the intention of the words or acts of the
enlightened by indulging in fantasy." This is from a Zen book. Do you
think I am
indulging in fantasy? Let's take a vote:
Shadows are a good topic. I have two books about shadows. Let's have a bit of each. The first book is called The Shadow and its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on Cinema.
Well, I just looked through this book and it is a piece of crap. I left off at third grade and look where I am now--babbling about shadows. I've moved so far past third grade and yet it's as if I never left it at all. In third grade we were supposed to learn the multiplication tables and I never did. I don't mean to portray myself as some big rebel. I made flash cards. I tried to memorize them, but I only got so far. The sevens was where I got stuck. 7 X 8=56. That never made sense to me. I am big on intuition and I could never grasp that one intuitively. Some of the nines I had no trouble with. 9 X 9=81. Is that right? The nines seemed user-friendly to me. They seemed right-brain. That's the creative side, right? Right brain is intuition and left brain is logic? This is where everything gets too hard. I'm a Libra, and we are a creative sign. Libras are obsessed with aesthetics. So that's right brain. But we are also a coldly logical sign, a cardinal, positive sign, which you'd think would lead to an easy mastery of math. But I wasn't coldly logical about numbers. I had favorites among them. They were not all equal to me. The nines I liked. Nine is a round number and seemed biological and somehow the rules of the nines--9, 18, 27, 36--these seemed natural to me. Though once you get past 36 it gets a bit tougher. 45. I could handle 45. 54 was easy because it was the reverse of 45. But after that, forget it, I was lost. Well, fuck the nines. What did the nines ever do for me? I was a swim champ at nine and now here I am with a cigar box full of red ribbons. This Shadow book is a piece of shit.
On to the next one: In Praise of Shadows, by Junichiro Tanizaki, a famous Japanese writer. "Most important of all are the pauses," it says on page 9. When are you supposed to type out "nine" and when can you use 9? I can never get that straight. Another lost lesson of childhood. Why even bother talking about it any more? What good did any of it ever do me? Or you? It's all useless, every bit of it. Listen to me, I know. My problem is that I can't explain to people about what I know. I used to try, but they just weren't ready for it. So I don't even try any more. But I will tell you this: all you can do is cling to the raft of love with the ferocious grip of the drowning. Only this will save you.
But you'll slip. You'll let go. Because you can't believe. You have no faith. The force of your will shall fade. You'll slide that long, slick, mossy slide down to the dark place with no name. And there you'll be, all by yourself, just like I am. No matter how many silicon words are rushing past you, you'll be there, alone as always, dying like an animal. But without the dignity and grace of an animal.
Resistant. Tender. Joy. Welcome to WORD.
