In an effort to reduce paper waste and maximize efficiency I signed up for paperless billing on all my bills. Then I created a separate email account for all the bill-paying reminders to go to, so my regular email account would not be tainted with such unpleasantness as bill-paying. I also use this account for Netflix and Amazon and anything I suspect might send too many emails not filled with salient details from the lives of my friends and family. As a result, this special "all-business" email account is so boring that I never check it unless I happen to actually remember that I ordered something online and want to know where it is. (I do most of my online shopping drunk late at night and therefore am often completely and pleasantly surprised when the packages arrive seven to ten business days later.) "Paperless billing" has become, for me, "bill-less billing." Bill-less billing has been a fantastic solution to the annoying problem of bills arriving in the mailbox and the ensuing financial challenge of paying them.
As a result of my new bill-less billing system I did not pay my Con Edison bill for six months. Though I had been paying the bills online and having the reminders sent to my special boring email address, the account was still in my former roommate's name. When they started sending notices about the imminent shutting off of my power it was forwarded to her new address and she alerted me to the matter of the unpaid Con Edison bill. When I finally read the three shut-off notices she had collected I noticed that Con Edison is willing to negotiate. They put you on a payment plan and provide a phone number to call if you just "need more time" to pay the bill. It says, "Call this number if you just need more time!" I was really touched by their understanding but had no desire to draw this out. I had a boyfriend who let his power get shut off with twenty pounds of Omaha steak in his freezer. I have seen a world before Edison, Thomas of yore and Con of late. Though my freezer contains only Hendrick's gin and ice cubes, once you see (and smell) what it means to run afoul of the power company it's hard to get the experience out of your mind. Not to mention the fact that I was pleasantly surprised to find out that I only owed $134.45 for six months of electricity. To me that seemed quite reasonable. I had charged my laptop and iPhone, used the blender, kept the ice cubes solid, blasted music and read by electric lamplight each night all for less than $25 a month. A bottle of Hendrick's doesn't last that long and costs $30, and it doesn't light the bulbs or charge the laptop. Though to be fair, Hendrick's does other things for humanity, even if it's no electric sun.
In order to pay the electric bill, I had to call Con Ed. After my nineteen-minute hold time due to larger-than-average call volume, I spoke with a fairly knowledgeable and pleasant customer service representative who offered me several extra services I politely declined.
"Do you or anyone in your home use life-support machines?" asked the customer service representative. "If you do, Con Edison will provide you with special services in the event of a storm or power outtage."
"No," I told the customer service representative. "I'm still running under my own power."
I have a tendency to over-disclose to anonymous customer service representatives once we are embroiled in the intimacy of our transaction, especially if the hold time was long and the arrival of the live voice on the line was long-awaited and for some time disbelieved. I continued. "I mean, I will be thirty in the fall, but so far I'm still breathing on my own. If the power goes out, I will go on. I do not require any special services of Con Edison to stay alive at this juncture."
And I felt really good about this! It's been a rough road of late for all the usual reasons--broken heart, financial ruin, artistic despair, existential nausea, feeling alienated from my wardrobe, etc., etc., etc--all in the last fiscal quarter. But tonight, telling the Con Edison customer service representative that I am still operating under my own power, I felt a sense of hope and self-sufficiency. If the power goes out I will go on. I will not rot like steak, for my meat lives. Let Con Ed shut off the power! I will still have impulses! I will still have charge! Let them charge me all they want, for I charge myself! I plug in nowhere! I have power everywhere! I am my own backup generator!
"You know," I told the Con Edison service representative, "I haven't been feeling too good about things lately. But you really put it in perspective for me. I may dwell in darkness, but I have not yet lost power. I'm really glad we talked. I can't thank you enough."
"All right ma'am," she said. "You have a very nice day."
This Being the MySpace Page of Marcus Junius Brutus
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
-Ecclesiastes 1:9
Brutus bought it last night. When it sunk in that he'd been defeated at Philippi by the combined forces of Mark Antony and Octavian Caesar he grabbed a sword and marched down the hill, snapping the ties on his breastplate. By the time he reached the enemy army on the field below he was defenseless. He kissed his father's ring and waded into the sea of soldiers, provoking them to stab him to death, just as Caesar had been.
The swords made a horrible squishing noise, wet and crunchy at the same time. Four of them went clean through Brutus before he collapsed to the ground in the fetal position and the camera floated up birds-eye as the mob closed in.
It was incredibly realistic, though historically inaccurate. In ancient Rome, Brutus actually took his own life several weeks after the Battle of Phillipi. But in "Rome," the HBO Original Series, he dies on the battlefield. More poetic that way.
*
Once again transfixed to the point of dissolution with HBO Original Series programming, I am seized by a fever, a Caesar fever. One moment I was looking for some distracting entertainment, and the next thing I knew I was up all night studying military diagrams of the ancient world.
"Rome" has awakened in me an interest in ancient history that had lain dormant since the Greek mythology class I took freshman year of college, in which I found myself most absorbed not by the professor or the material but the sign-language interpreter the university provided for a deaf student in the class. Better than reading or hearing the myths was watching the interpreter act them out, and by the end of the semester my classmates and I had learned the signs for "sword," "battle," "rape," "kill," "god," "death," and "thunderbolt." Better still than watching Greek myths translated into sign language is watching the civil wars of the late Roman Republic brought to life on the largest film set ever built.
At some point in my immersion in "Rome," the HBO/BBC original series, I realized I was asking more of it than twenty-two hours of lurid entertainment. I was asking that HBO and the BBC's $100 million efforts in the field of set design and prop accuracy convey me to another time and place where I might free myself of being me, here, now.
Just what I am hoping to gain from my spectatorial travels I am not quite sure. Assurance that nothing is new under the sun, and my problems are as old as humanity itself? Relief at being born into this time and this place, where it is fortunate that people of my particular description are recognized as human and allowed to live safely and freely, if angstily? Escape from angst into gratuitous sex and violence? Evidence that sex and violence are all there are? People kill each other and fuck each other and fuck each other over and it all goes on and on? Or maybe it is not ideas I'm in search of but a story that's properly told, in which it all hangs together, however tenuously, in which people move like arrows toward their destinies, triumph gloriously or fail spectacularly, seize important moments or recognize when it's all over and bravely disembowel themselves?
Oddly, I am looking for suspense in stories to which the endings have long been written. The major characters on Rome hurtle towards ends that have been definitively known for over 2,000 years. Now that I've been on the interwebs, I know that Antony and Cleopatra will fight Octavian, lose and commit suicide. (Though I was ignorant enough of ancient history to scowl "Spoiler!" when I first encountered this information one frenzied night of Wikipedia clicking. I had Cleopatra confused with Lady Godiva, and kept waiting for the naked horseback ride.) I knew Caesar would get it and Brutus would do it. There was no suspense in how it would end, only in the pure conjecture of what the characters would say and do in each moment of their doomed and decadent lives.
There is an unfortunate gap between "Rome" and Rome. "Rome" is thrilling, but ancient history is very boring. There are no pictures and no YouTube videos of these events, only re-creations of varying degrees of accuracy and believability. The stories themselves are unsubstantiated. Maybe he killed himself. Maybe he didn't. Maybe his wife killed herself when she heard. Maybe it was the other way around. A letter was found, but it could have been forged. He went by seven different names, but everyone had the same seven names. Maybe he killed himself, or maybe he killed some other guy with the same name. Or maybe two guys with the same name had a drink. Either they had a drink, or they killed each other, or they were lovers, or they were the same person, or they never existed.
In ancient times you had to be famous to even be mis-remembered. You had to command an army of thousands. You had to be eulogized by blind poets. You had to get into Plutarch's Lives. You had to keep copious diaries of your military campaigns and hope they weren't lost. After all that, the best you could hope for would be the half-truths of the few surviving fragments, themselves hearsay, and a marble statue likely to be missing a nose or a limb.
The records of the few figures who were well-documented are dry and unsatisfying. I find I don't want military diagrams, or droning lists of accomplishments, the hithers and thithers, marriages and divorces, alliances and enimities. When depicted in full color and surround-sound these with ample sex and violence these events are enthralling, but when wheeled off like a laundry list, quite boring.
I have been spoiled by our age to delight in the small details, not the big facts. History is by necessity heavy on begetting and last words, the stuff carved on the cheat sheets of tombstones. And history even argues with itself on those simple facts. Birth and death are all very good, but I've become accustomed to a wealth of information on the time in between.
And so in my fascination with the lives of the Romans on the cusp of year zero, I look for the sort of record we're all so blithely making of ourselves--the constant updates of Facebook and Twitter, the tags of Flickr, the Google-able life of the early third millennium. (What will they call this period? The Late American Republic? The Early American Republic? The Middle American Republic? How can we know how to live when we don't even know if we're in the beginning, the middle or the end?)
My entire social cohort lives in the instantaneous nostalgia of our shared internet photo albums. These contain memories not of the orange-y brown days of the seventies and eighties but of last night, last week, last year. I've come to find it comforting that my own life is being sufficiently archived in word and image. By midday tomorrow the pictures of tonight will be uploaded and tagged, revealing what I drank and who I hugged. And just this afternoon someone I knew from sleepaway camp posted one hundred pictures of the 1990s. The album of myself thickens even with no effort on my part. The only challenge is to remain upright in the face of tsunamis of nostalgia, and to grow accustomed to a life of publicity without true fame.
The constantly-documented present instantaneously becomes past, and the past remains incongruously present. I've come to accept and in some way even thrive on the thrice daily updates on the activities of people I haven't seen in five or ten years. In this way, even the ancient history of my own short life is neither history nor buried. The people I went to camp and high school with are "eating the best hot dog right now" or "loving Paris" or "watching this video." We are in public even as we are in private, and the format of Facebook and Twitter status updates deploys the state-of-being verb in the present tense. Even statuses not updated for weeks or months remain immediate: Emily is. We have blurred the line between past and present, public and private, fame and obscurity. Moments I don't even remember are out there forever, and yet I don't have to wait for any blind poet to tell my story, or any sculptor can make me look pretty, or mysterious, or badass or silly. Somehow we've come to have both more and less control over our mildly public images. The internet keeps no secrets but allows the pleb his propaganda.
It was not enough to read the timelines of the lives of famous Romans (and Greeks and Macedonians). It was not enough to see them brought to life by recognizeable actors. I did not want to see Alexander portrayed by Colin Farrell or Achilles portrayed by Brad Pitt. I came to realize that I was not seeking Brutus's life as told by Plutarch, but Brutus's life as told by Brutus. I Googled and Googled, finding a lack of that which is so abundant now--the life of the individual told in his own words. We are all writing our autobiographies sentence by sentence, with our thumbs. Thought it seems primitive it is also fitting that the thumb is the writing instrument of choice in the age of iPhone and Blackberry. The opposeable thumb, after all, is what makes us human. (See "Rome," Season 1, Episode 5: When Titus Pullo tortures and murders Evander for the crime of committing adultery and fathering an illegitimate child with the wife of his best friend, he cuts off the man's thumbs and throws him into the Cloaca Maxima.)
Plutarch had the clever idea to tell the stories of important Greeks and Romans in pairs, side by side, but Facebook and MySpace have outdone him. We live not in pairs but in webs, lists of hundreds or thousands of people who know us or knew us or don't know us. Instead of being tortured, bound or gagged, we are searched, viewed and tagged.
Some friends and I were discussing the combined oddity and nicety of Facebook. The compulsion to "friend" is so powerful that among the little trading-card heads of friends one inevitably collects one's old boyfriends and even people one's randomly slept with. Some of these are legitimate friends, others odd blasts from the past. But into the pile they go, neatly alphabetized and often incongruously listed next to a cousin or a co-worker. One friend remarked that she had recently been "poked" by her freshman-year boyfriend, the one who took her virginity. Unwilling to let the opportunity to make a crude joke pass me by, I said, "That's not the only way he poked you!" But as I looked around the room I realized that everyone with a Facebook account was friends with her first. By keeping in touch we were keeping a record of things. And into the annals of history it goes: He poked me.
*
Compared to the startling accuracy of the internet, misinformation on Brutus abounds. In "Rome" they have him die in de facto suicide on the battlefield at Phillipi, in the ABC series "Empire" he is denied the pleasure of martyrdom, gets exiled and returns disgraced. Caesar didn't say, "Et tu, Brute?" when Brutus stabbed him. Some say his last words were, "Kai su, teknon?" which is Greek for, "You, too, my child?" He didn't say it to reproach Brutus for betraying him, he said it to mean that Brutus too would have a taste of power, or that Brutus too would die by the dagger. But according to Plutarch his last words were, ""By all means must we fly; not with our feet, however, but with our hands." His last words according the Rome: The HBO/BBC drama were, "Tell my mother...something suitable." Mark Antony wrapped him in his finest cloak, says Plutarch. Mark Antony wanted his head packed in salt to brandish in Rome, says HBO. Who to believe? In the end, the man is just a myth, a name to activate and animate in any number of plots. We may never have the opportunity to become the victim of confused and conflicting stories of glory and failure; we've compounded too many facts to leave room for any of the sort of speculation that leads to lofty poetry. But on the other hand we won't be taking any chances on dying in obscurity just because we didn't take it upon ourselves to assassinate Julius Caesar. We don't have to do anything to ensure an archive of ourselves besides click "Create Account."
If there is no Facebook page for the ancient Romans, there is at least a Wikipedia entry. The Wikipedia entry on Marcus Junius Brutus led to the MySpace page for Tobias Menzies, the actor who played Brutus. There is much more information available about Tobias Menzies, the actor who played Brutus, than there is about Brutus himself. Tobias Menzies briefly dated Kristin Scott Thomas. Tobias Menzies recently read Heart of Darkness. Tobias Menzies enjoys walking and sitting in cafes. These are the things I wished to know about the people of ancient Rome, but this information is not available in Plutarch's Lives. I wanted to know what Brutus thought, and what Brutus liked, what Brutus said not on his deathbead but in passing. Brutus is...nervous about his conspiracy? Brutus is...not shaving much since he went into exile?
Since I could not know these things about Brutus I friended Tobias Menzies instead. I also enjoy walking and sitting in cafes. It is better than honor suicide after lost battles, better than being run through with four swords, and none of it even being true.
It's a beautiful day for senseless ranting and pointless grudges against the long-forgotten crimes of all the big three: gentification, the government and work.
It continually surprises me that it continually surprises anyone that politicians screw whores. Or, for that matter, that they screw interns, movie stars, other men's wives, their secretaries, their daughters' friends, the women they meet at parties or the men they meet in public restrooms. They always have. They always will. Surely the jaded American public must know this. Surely this is not news, but old news.
It's a tired piece of political theater, the public shaming, the long-faced wife, the under-bitten mask of lip-curled confession. "I have disappointed the standard I set for myself," they say. "I am a gay American."
Then comes the promise. "I will seek help." "I will definitely talk to my minister about this, this rampant fucking of women or men who are not my wife."
The question is not "Why do they" or "where do they?" or "how do they?" though in the aftermath of these revelations always comes the compulsive and pornographic re-telling of the affair in the interest of the public good. One of the true cornerstones of America is the national obsession with sexual shame, and the shame of sex. The question is: "Why do we continue to care about the sexual transgressions of our politicians when they are among the most minor of their crimes?"
Yes, it's ironic and hypocritical that Spitzer prosecuted prostitution rings and then patronized one himself. Yes, it's maddening that the people who supposedly make and enforce the laws break them at just as a high a rate as the people they govern. But if there's any truth to be uncovered in this--or any--political sex scandal, it's not what, exactly, Spitzer wanted to do that wasn't "safe" or what made him a "difficult" customer or whether he used a few grand he raised pressing flesh to get his flesh pressed. It's that we are such weak creatures, so easily lured by the lurid, that we only really get it up for the dirty details, and it's too boring and too depressing to care or even think about what else politicians might be doing behind closed doors, with their pants firmly belted and their flies summarily zipped. The rooms in which we should be prying are those in which transgressions occur that might actually affect us in some vague way. At the moment he is engaged in the act of coitus or fellatio or light bondage, the politician is actually least dangerous to the citizen, for at that moment (unless he is truly kinky) he is not selling his soul (nor ours) but pleasuring his body.
"But," everyone murmurs, "if he used taxpayer dollars..." If political officials used taxpayer dollars exclusively to get laid, the world would be a better place. There are desires more destructive than the average public servant's bootlicking masochism, or whatever the middle-aged lawyers are into these days. The desire to, say, bomb an entire country into oblivion and then pay Halliburton, Kellogg, Brown & Root and Blackwater billions of dollars to police and rebuild it is more depraved, one could argue, than sex.
Political officials use taxpayer dollars to fund needless wars. The government of New York State uses taxpayer dollars to enforce the Rockefeller laws and execute people. If the government spent more of my money on hookers I'd be grateful.
Yeah yeah, the water--potably polluted, yeah yeah, the highways--jammed with traffic, fouling the environment, yeah yeah, the schools--teaching lies, breaking spirits, yeah yeah, the trains--ill-maintained, books cooked, never on time, fares meteorically rising. But still. Someone is doing something. I know, I know, without someone doing something there'd be murder in the streets. Everyone would be a solider. Imagine that, soldiers and killing, right here, in America, instead of everywhere else!
There are two ways to look at the government. One is that they are incompetent, moronic bureaucrats and thieves, but their work is so boring and their lives so full of shit that we should be glad it's them doing it and not us. The other is that they are evil geniuses who use the claim of providing us with clean water and effective sewage systems to oppress us. But either way, whether they are public servants or outright crooks (and isn't every government and every individual official in it a mixture of the two), one thing I am certain of is that it doesn't matter who fellates them while they go about the simultaneous business of committing their crimes and doing their thankless jobs.
I get the sense that in places like France, it is tacitly understood that politicians, or rather just men, or rather just people, stray from their primary relationships, and it is handled delicately, without hysteria or outcry. It is handled with the nihilism that suits France, or at least French cinema. But here in America it is the taste for violence that is handled with kid gloves. We're quick to call our politicians cheaters or perverts but much slower to call them murderers or criminals. That would be disrespectful to the office. It seems that the quickest way for a politician to disrespect his own office and end his tenure is not to defy the constitutional laws he is swore to enforce, but the marital laws he vowed to keep.
Daniel Ellsberg came to speak at my college just after Lewinskygate broke. He was a man who cared enough to expose the war crimes of his government rather than the details of their sex lives. He pointed out that Clinton had been steadily bombing Iraq throughout his administration, and yet the nation was currently far more absorbed by the news that Clinton and his young consort had used a cigar as a sex toy. (Was ever a more Freudian object passed between sex partners a generation apart?)
"The American people," said Ellsberg, "should be more concerned with where Mr. Clinton puts his bombs than where he puts his cigars."
I am not disillusioned because men cheat, or women cheat, or people cheat, or politicians cheat. The human animal is naturally devious and the heart is deceitful above all things. I am disillusioned because rather than concern themselves with the failure of the ideal that affects all of us--that oft-bandied word, "democracy," the public continually harps upon the lie whose consequences only truly affect a relative few, two to be exact--that even older myth, monogamy.
Politicians and governments use the money they raise not only to buy themselves hookers, but to buy themselves bombs and bullets. No matter how depraved a particular head of state might be, politicians don't spend the bulk of their time fucking whores, interns, movie stars, other men's wives, secretaries, friends of their daughters or the women they meet at parties, or men they meet in public restrooms. Politicians spend most of their time meeting with people far more powerful than the former teenaged runaways/aspiring singers they seduce or pay to fellate or whip them. In those rooms, at those meetings, they authorize executions and they authorize wars. They authorize torture and they ignore warnings. They give out no-bid contracts and waste sums of public money exponentially larger than Spitzer's outstanding balance at the Emperor's Club. They move billions of dollars into secret accounts, they bring misery and suffering and death upon thousands of people with a single signature. They are all such fuckers, but it has nothing to do with who they fuck. They may fuck Kristin or Monica or Marilyn Monroe, but in the end it's us they fuck, and they fuck us all.
The L train is doing that thing where it glides very slowly and silently under the river in slow-motion. There is no noise coming from the tracks; at this speed the wheels don't clatter and the machinery doesn't rattle. There's just that low whine as the weird stuff on the walls of the tunnels slips by, signals and then reflectors and striped bits of plastic, arcane technical markings and bursts of lurid graffiti then the odd glimpse of some passageway that looks like it belongs in Lord of the Rings, or something lower-budget involving quaint parallel universes.
The woman next to me is reading that morning's free paper, an article about the development in Williamsburg.
"Williamsburg is over," she announces to no one.
"You live there, don't you?" she now addresses me specifically. She wearing pounds of makeup, cohered into a unified object.
"Well," she says. "What do you think?"
"I think it sucks," I say. I don't say: I think it should be BLOWN UP, because you're not supposed to say that, especially on the subway. If you say something, see something! I don't say: You know how at the end of Fight Club, all those empty glass office towers go down in a kind of beautiful controlled demolition? I think they should do that. Though that would be bad for the neighborhood, too. It would cake the neighborhood in a layer of toxic dust for several years, tiny shards of all the glass and stainless steel awaiting the yuppies' arrival hanging in the air and the DOH and the DEP and the EPA slow to tell us it's killing us.
The empty condos, rising so fast and high, who will live in them and where are those people now? This coming invasion, where is it massing? And if it can't be stopped, can it at least be organized? I want marching. I want lockstep. Goosestep, even. I want them to make it official. When the remaining yuppies come to take over Williamsburg for good--not the first two decades worth of decreasingly brave settlers but the final hordes who will constitute the full success of the Brooklyn lebensraum--when they come for real I want them to unfurl their banner, I want to see the strength of their numbers, I want to hear it reverberating in their canyons of glass. How come they never make a ceremony of those momentous events? Why can't we have an ending, why must we realize the ending happened at some indiscernible moment long ago, or maybe the ending happened before we got there, maybe it was over before it began?
"Whaddya gonna do?" I say to the woman. So much makeup. Does she sleep in it? Why are all broken things slathered in cheap paint? Why must everything old be shellacked or glazed instead of permitted to fall into beautiful ruin?
The train, inexplicably, picks up speed. They never say anything about these delays. They never say, "ladies and gentlemen, it's going to be a fucking slow ride." They never say, "ladies and gentlemen, Williamsburg is over."
I have finally been (re)-published with serifs on my letters. This occurs here. Rather than serifs, I actually wished for serfs, but I have been misheard by the gods. What next?
I do not know why every time I am published elsewhere it is in a Sans Serif font, but it has happened yet again. The fine folks at Identity Theory (sounds like a seminar you may have taken in college but in fact is a thought-provoking literary publication) have given me sanctuary and a very lovely illustration. You read it here, now read it there.
I was little, before my brother was born. Like most little kids, I woke up early. In an attempt to wrangle a few more minutes of sleep, my parents tried to convince me to amuse myself before I woke them up. They left me a banana on my kid-sized play table.
The first morning, I woke up, tried to crack the stem of the banana and smushed it. I ran into their room, holding the impenetrable banana, demanding help. The next day, they scored the banana with a butter knife and left it on the play table. Again I ran into their room, crying, because the banana was brown where it had scored. The third day they left me the uncut banana and a butter knife on my play table, with explicit instructions on how to cut the top of banana safely.
I cut the top of the banana, most of the way through but not all the way through, as we had discussed. I was able to snap the top, peel the banana and eat it. As soon as I was done, I wanted another banana. Another banana would be out of the question, because my parents were in charge of the bananas. But my parents were asleep.
I climbed up on the kitchen counter and procured a second and finally a third banana. When my parents woke up I requested a fourth banana.
"How many bananas have you had today?" my mom asked.
This was an interesting question. Technically, I had had three bananas. But my mom only knew about the original banana. I recognized that there were multiple answers to the question of the banana. There were the number of bananas she thought I'd had and the number of bananas I knew I'd had. I recognized that different answers would yield different results. I weighed the outcomes and came to the obvious decision. I told my first lie.
"I had one banana," I said.
I don't know if she believed me or if she was keeping count of the bananas, but she gave me the fourth banana. I ate it feeling equal parts guilty and satisfied. But there was a gulf between us now, between what I knew and what she knew, and it was then I learned that lying, though profitable, is lonely.
The problem with the noise was that it silenced the silence. Now, in the spaces between sirens and garbage trucks and screams and shouts and machinery heavy and light, in those places where there should have been silence, there was only more noise.
It wasn't a loud noise, but it was a constant noise. It was the kind of noise you might notice acutely only if it stopped abruptly, but since it never stopped I noticed the acute lack of silence rather than the obtuse noise.
It was determined that the noise was coming from a broken fan blade in a basement air conditioning unit that cooled computers that controlled cell phone antennae on the roof of a nearby building. The super of the building said to call the landlord. The landlord said call AT & T. AT & T said lady, we don't have a location within three miles of your address, so it must be Verizon. Verizon said they're our towers but AT & T rents them. AT & T said call AT & T Wireless, separate company. AT & T Wireless said press 1 for a new cell phone press 2 for a new rate plan press 3 to learn more press 4 to repeat the menu and offered no menu options regarding the slow march toward the brink of insanity. My landlord said why don't we just gain access to the basement and turn it off? Their landlord said only the super had the key to the basement. The super's grandson said the super wasn't home.
So for a whole month I'm calling all the time, I'm calling the city, I'm calling the phone companies, I'm calling the super and the super's grandson, and I'm asking and suggesting and begging and pleading and mainly being told to fuck off. It is also gently but firmly suggested to me that I might be going insane.
II.
I begin fantasizing about climbing over the fence into the neighbors' yard, and then climbing over their fence and the fences beyond, following the sound of the noise. I will bring a sledgehammer. I give a lot of thought to how I will carry the sledgehammer as I climb all these fences. It won't fit in a backpack. I will have to make a sling for it so I can carry it tightly on my back.
I will bring goggles. I will bring gloves. I will need protective gear as the destruction I am about to wreak will produce many splinters and shards. I imagine the super and the super's grandson and the technicians of Verizon scratching their heads when they find their machinery in smithereens.
But first I make one last attempt to address the problem through the proper channels. I know that it is doomed to fail, because capitalism is doomed to fail, and institutional government in the form of the state is domed to fail, and because of this inevitable failure I will be justified in taking matters into my own hands.
I call the city's noise complaint hotline. The city sends two guys with a meter. The two guys say this noise isn't as loud as most of the noises they get. Most of the noises they get are really loud, like barking dogs or booming subwoofers.
But can't they hear the noise?
"Oh, yes," say the two men. "we can hear the noise."
Would that noise bother them if they lived and worked and slept in this one room of this apartment all day long?
Not like a barking dog or a booming subwoofer, maybe, but yes.
One guy stands by the window half-assedly extending a probe in the direction of the noise. Meanwhile, the other guy tries to gain access to the basement of the other building, so that they can turn the sound off and then measure the difference between the silence-like sound and actual silence. If it's not that different than it's not a legitimate complaint.
The super's not in, says the super's grandson. The two guys tell me to make sure that the next time I call the super is in, because you only get two complaints. I go out that day and I come home that night and when I open the window and hear the grinding of the noise, I hear an eternity in it and I cry about it on the phone to my father and he offers to come pick me up.
My friends and I have discussed the phenomenon of one's well-meaning, still-overprotective parents offering to come pick one up when one expresses distress, even if one is well into one's twenties. We have discussed how often the offer on the part of our parents to come pick us up shakes us back to the reality of our adulthood.
"Mom," we sigh, or "Dad. You can't come pick me up from my life."
III.
I think of air raids, bombings, awful noises, the Pynchonion screaming that comes across the sky, ungodly howls and cries, the feral cats that used to mate and fight in the alleyway behind my first apartment, other noises, far worse noises. I think of Guantanamo Bay and PsyOps and all things worse than this, but it is no use. Other suffering, however more horrible, is abstract.
The noise can be somewhat drowned out by one of those noise machines favored by troubled sleepers and psychotherapists, but I don't want to drown out noise with noise. Constant noises--even ones that are supposed to imitate the constant absence of noise--frighten me. I need to hear babies crying and trash can lids banging and engines starting and the faint but unmistakable sounds of sex in a nearby apartment. At three in the morning I need to hear someone locking up their bike, and at five I need to hear the garbage truck's brakes. These things are real and the silence of a noise machine is fake. It will pull a veil across the sonic world and deafen me to it, and I will no longer live in whatever is left of our flimsy reality in whatever is left of my short time on earth.
Once, in a movie about making movies, I saw the fictional film crew do this thing that real film crews must do. They recorded the sound of silence in a room with people in it. They did this so that if as they were editing the movie they needed more silence in between the dialogue, they would have the sound of the silence in that room filled with those people. The sound of the quiet in the room with that particular group of people was called "room tone." It is this priceless nothing I am desperate to get back.
IV.
The breaking point comes when I finish a movie. Among the moments I cherish to the point of fetishization--the stepping out of the tunnel of a baseball stadium into the light, the electric thump and sizzle of a mic as the band takes the stage, the exact instants of liftoff and touchdown of the wheels of a plane--I hold very high the second or two of blackness between the end of a movie and the beginning of the credits. In this moment you have not yet woken from the dream that is the movie, but are still dreaming the dream, suddenly aware you are dreaming it.
One night I finish a movie, a very long, slow painful movie with the recently deceased and very good actor in it. I've watched it because his death disturbs me as all death disturbs me, and his death particularly disturbs me as the deaths of all people exactly my age particularly disturb me, especially the ones who are said not to know when to stop.
This movie was about people who didn't know when to stop. It was hard to watch, except the parts that were in slow motion and about love. As I watched the movie I forgot that the actor was dead, and then I forgot that the actor was an actor, and that it wasn't all real, and that just because he moved and breathed and spoke on the screen it did not mean that he was still alive. In the movie the character lived, despite all of the heroin he shot, but in real life the actor died, they say from combining too many pills.
When the movie ended and the screen went black there was one of those quiet moments before the credits came on, and it was then I noticed just how grave a loss was the loss of silence. It made me angry, because I wanted it to be silent for the dead actor. I wanted just this one thing for him, a true moment of silence to honor his very fine work in this movie about addiction and madness and suffering which may have precipitated his own decent into addiction and madness and suffering or simply drawn upon his previous experiences with addiction and madness and suffering, to honor the fact that he had been here and now he was gone and I was still here and knew that this was a temporary and somewhat random thing.
The movie ended when the very good dead young actor's character sent away the love of his life because he feared that together they might destroy themselves with their shared addiction. She came back to him from a mental institution. They had had a stillborn baby. Tim Buckley, who also died at the exact same age as the actor, the same age I was, twenty-eight, sang hauntingly over this last moment and it became a kind of funeral for the actor. When the screen went black I realized that the noise had no respect for anything, not for him, not for me, not for art and not for death, and I would have to try even harder to get back the silence, not for my own peace of mind but out of respect for the dead.
V.
First I did what I do when a movie really gets under my skin, and bought the book. It happened to be that rarity of a decent movie based upon a decent book. The description (in the book) and the depiction (in the movie) of heroin addiction was terrifying and fascinating to me. I've never seen fit to try heroin, mainly because of all the literary and cinematic descriptions and depictions of its inevitably ruinous properties, and thus have drawn my conclusions about it from art rather than experience.
The critic Walter Pater said, "All art aspires to the condition of music." All drugs, then, must aspire to be heroin. It achieves what all other drugs aspire to achieve. If other drugs promise euphoria with the possibilities of anxiety, restlessness or paranoia, then heroin sounds somehow more pure. Not just bliss but bliss with no object or subject. Not the worldly delight of being stoned or tripping but delight with no beginning or end. Not the upsurge of ego of a stimulant and its momentary relief from uncertainty--YES! THIS IS GREAT! I AM GREAT! EVERYONE WANTS ME! ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE!--but the absence of ego entirely. Not even the pure joy and fascination of ecstasy but the ecstasy of neither finding nor needing neither joy nor fascination. A neither/nor drug, a nothing drug, a nothing better than anything, better than everything. A being-and-nothingness drug, a drug that understood the essential non-essence of being, which, as Sartre said (though he preferred mescaline), is nothingness.
It sounded so very much like enlightenment, the real deal, a timeless eternal peace and bliss that came from nowhere and went nowhere, wanted nothing and knew nothing--a true and eternal sound of silence. I remained terrified of this bliss and the awful ruin it portended. Only if I was on the way to ruin myself could the further ruin be productive.
My friends and I always joked that we'd retire to the Rockaways and become heroin addicts before we got disgustingly old. In our early eighties maybe, or whenever things started to look really bad. We'd get our addiction underway before the deepest indignities of aging kicked in, before we forgot who we were, before it was pain all the time. And by the time we really started to fall apart we'd already be so far gone we wouldn't know it, and then one day we'd OD on the porch looking out at the ocean and that would be it.
This is a fine idea to us, hilarious and tragic; it imparts to our deaths a patina of gravity and a kind of desperate agency to our inevitable deterioration. We won't die of old age, we'll die the way young people do, because of drugs and self-destruction, and then somehow it'll be our choice and our tragedy, instead of what Kerouac called "the forlorn rags of growing old." It's a fantasy that we can live a long time and still flame out, not fade away. It's a rock and roll death for people who want to live.
VI.
The week after the young actor died I was walking by a gymnastics place and stopped outside to watch. It wasn't the littlest girls, it was the older ones, maybe even the competitive team. They were small but not little; their eyes and bodies were hard. Gymnastics is a sport that makes little girls dense, makes them into dark matter.
I used to do gymnastics, but I had forgotten, or never been able to see, the true weirdness of it. The unnatural sinew on the prepubescent girls, their equine musculature, their grim faces. There is a cruelty in it, painted with the brush of world politics. Gymnastics is always projecting international conflicts onto the tumbling female bodies--the Russians are boycotting, the Chinese are forging. In a world of nationless terrorism and oozing oil, gymnastics remains almost quaintly nationalistic, warmup suits proclaiming countries' names in foreign alphabets, coaches defecting, choosing new flags.
As I watched, I was struck by the gymnasts' military precision and consequent lack of artistry. Gymnasts are foremost athletes and therefore terrible dancers. The flourishes of their hands and extensions of their legs are perfunctory, their motions far more dutiful than beautiful.
The very best ones express the least of all. They perform but they do not emote. They quite literally go though the motions, ticking them off an invisible mental checklist. The harder they set their jaws and the less they show they feel the higher their scores from the equally impassive judges. Like simple projectiles, they go from point A to point B. The awesome quality of their feats is conferred by the fact that a human body is not naturally a projectile and even more rarely a self-propelled one. Sometimes, when they land, if they stick it in a way that inspires their coach to exult in some guttural language, they show for a moment a flickering joy indiscernible from relief.
I thought, watching creepily from the dark and the cold, about how the parents would see you in gymnastics class, at the end. They waited behind the glass, arms crossed, to pick you up. And you would ask if they'd seen you as they bundled you into your snowboots, and they would say, "Yes, I saw, very good, it was very good." I felt an almost parental heartbreak for these girls, for the sincerity of their efforts, for the premature hardening of their bodies and the truncation of their youth. I felt sad for the dead young actor's little girl, that he would never take her to gymnastics, never wait behind the glass to pick her up.
I read later that he did actually take his daughter to toddler gymnastics, and I was saddened by that, too, because this and many other things were lost to the dead actor and his daughter, and they were lost to each other and he to us and so many fathers to so many daughters and so much, to everyone.
VII.
Maybe I am wrong and I certainly don't know, but I don't think he meant to do it. I don't think he wanted to die. Maybe I have been conditioned through celebrity magazines to overidentify with famous people but when I think of what happened to him I think it could easily have happened to me or any number of my friends. The proverbial wrong combination at the wrong time.
Some speculated that the evil character he'd so recently and spectacularly portrayed had gotten inside his mind. He gave his last performance as the villain in a superhero movie, but his villain was so good, so nuanced, so real, so alive, that the villain somehow became the hero. The movie was so dark and violent that the hero it glorified wasn't the one who fixed things, but the one who destroyed them.
The reviews of the movie mentioned that its sound mix was unusually loud. I found them accurate. For this and several other reasons, I did not enjoy the film. It overwhelmed and depressed me. The ingenue was killed, everything was broken and smashed but none of it was fun, and the supposedly good hero was played by a cold, impassive actor who showed no emotion. It was supposed to be about some complicated questions of vigilante justice and the responsibilities of power but they didn't seem very well developed and like so many American movies it was mostly about violence with only the faintest nod to ideas.
The cold, impassive actor had been very good in a different movie about a stockbroker serial killer who used a lot of high-end facial products, who wore, as it was, a lot of masks. In one scene he stood naked before the mirror in his marble bathroom and peeled one from his face. In this movie he also wore a mask, a black rubber one with bat ears, and his mouth underneath it was cold and mean and still. The very good, recently dead young actor wore smeared makeup and chewed his face just like you would on bad coke. He was horribly alive, like you would be on bad coke. It was bad coke had that made me want to take all the pills in hopes of getting out of life alive, and I couldn't shake the feeling that for him it might have been the same thing.
VIII.
I couldn't bring back the dead but I could get rid of the noise.
I called Jim, I called David, I called Val, I called Jerry and I called Steve. Steve was the hero, the one who made it stop. He called me right back, on a Saturday. He said he normally handled North Jersey and the Bronx but the Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island guy was off and he was filling in for him.
"I know this noise is not as loud as some noises," I said, "like for example a barking dog or a very powerful subwoofer, but it is very much audible to me and more than that it is constant and I can't sleep or think."
"Oh, I know," said Steve. "Those cooling units can make a real racket when the fan blades get loose. Believe me, I know!"
Steve sent someone over the next day and when I came home from working the genuine silence was all around like an armistice. Steve called that afternoon to make sure and I told him how I wept with relief, the most underrated emotion. The awful noise has stopped. I have landed on two feet, and not fallen awkwardly from a height. I have landed from the night, safely in the morning.
Was that what heroin was, would be, I thought, relief? All those opiates, their intended use was for the relief of pain. I was banking on these drugs to relieve the pain of growing old, of dying, the very drugs that killed the very young, very fine actor. More than once I or a friend had come into some of them from the leftover prescription of someone who had died, not from overdose but from cancer. This to me seemed the most depraved, to use for recreation the medicines intended to relieve the horrible pain of dying. But they had a second use, which was to relieve the pain of living as well.
Maybe he could not get any relief, and he just wanted some relief. He just wanted to sleep, he said. He just couldn't sleep. Sometimes it can be hard to sleep, whether you are coming down from bad coke or not. Sometimes it is hard to sleep because of the noises that seem like silence, but upon closer inspection are not. Maybe heroin and other drugs like it could stop some of the noises, the very loud noises and the not-very-loud noises, the ones that were constant, all the time, wouldn't stop, so you could finally, would finally, sleep.
IX.
My landlord and super comes into his office on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. I saw him Tuesday.
"Hey," said my landlord, "You did it! You made it stop."
"I just made some phone calls," I said. "Actually, it took me a while to get the job done."
"You did a good thing," he said, '"for the neighborhood. That sound was bothering the whole block.
I decided to seek recognition for my deed. I went down the street to get an espresso. The neighbors were taking out their garbage. I smiled. They smiled. I stopped.
"So," I asked. "Were you affected in any way by the noise?"
"The noise?" they said pleasantly.
"Yeah, the noise. The awful noise, that never stopped, that just went on all the time, that you could always hear but was worst at night, when everything else was quiet..."
The neighbors raised their eyebrows, their smiles a little frozen on their faces.
"We never heard any noise."
"Oh, well, that's good," I said weakly. "It must have been contained to the other side of the block, then."
Thus ended my attempts to be recognized for what I had done for the neighborhood. Real superheroes hide their identities at all costs and do their good deeds anonymously.
I continued unnoticed to the pastry shop and drank my espresso in my black-rimmed glasses. Like Clark Kent, I told myself. Like Superman.
The espresso made my mouth dry and I licked my lips. Like him, I thought. Like the Joker.
I wanted to want to fire the gun. I wanted to be prepared for the revolution, when it came. I wanted to be an agent of praxis, the unity of theory and practice. I read about it in college, underlined, made notes in the margins. The theory was that we could liberate ourselves and overthrow them, all of them. But if all our talk really came to action it would require instruments of liberation. The gun would be the instrument. From its barrels would come the physical enactment of the ideas.
I wanted it to be like in the movies, like the Jews who didn't die in the Holocaust because they took to the woods and got themselves some guns, like Angelina Jolie, badass, firing in all directions, firing two guns from a wingspan outstreched around Brad Pitt's torso, as he embraced her and fired two guns around her torso, the sexual effect of firing these guns so powerful it crumbled Brad Pitt's previous marriage and brought six children into its embrace, safe within the perimeter of bullets traveling in all directions from an epicenter of hotness.
You could say so many things about the gun-as-phallus and therefore the woman with the gun as pansexual conflation of sex and violence, fertility and destruction, birth and death all wrapped into one. I wanted to know all these things and be all these things and live all these things and say all these things, but say nothing, because the gun was the possibility of communication beyond words.
I wanted to know about gun safety, to know that it was a tool like any other tool, it had its proper uses. What if the revolution did not come, but instead the apocalypse did? What if anarchy reigned in the streets and it was dangerous? Didn't I want to be able to defend myself and my family, if it came to that? It probably wouldn't come to that, but if it did, didn't I want to do it right?
I wanted to see how guns united America, and how small and stupid was my world of independent cinema and goat cheese and late-night many-layered witticisms made by me and all my androgynous poseur friends as we tried to impress one another, and how this (whatever it was) was real and true and alive and immediate and we all deserved to die.
At the gun range, however, I was full of judgment. Before we even went in, a teenaged boy stepped outside and jammed a cigarette behind his upper lip, where it hung like an overgrown tooth. He was pimply, weak-jawed. He was a ringer for the undersocialized borderline personalities I feared would blow me away on a whim.
"If you weren't here jerking off explosive firearms all the time in a pathetic attempt to combine masturbation with violence you might get laid more and then you wouldn't have so many violent impulses, you stupid fuck," I thought. The hippies were mostly style over substance, but I do agree with their concisely stated insight that war occurs because certain parties do not have enough sex. (Case in point: Clinton: blown in office, did not enact war.) If this teenaged boy would exit the gun range and relate a bit more to his chosen gender of attraction we might be spared another random shooting, or so was my oversimplified hope.
Inside, at the counter of the gun range the guns were hanging on racks, neatly arranged in size order. I found them pleasing as I find all organized things pleasing, but I felt sick.
"Sick sick sick sick sick," I muttered.
I tried to be open-minded and tell myself that I had pastimes other people might not approve of, but I was terrified of everyone in there. Any one of them might be psychotic. What if someone opened fire in the gun store? That would be too ironic. But pinned right above the counter was a flyer offering a reward for anyone with information leading to the arrest of the person responsible for the robbery and shooting at another gun store.
What did gun store owners say when they got shot in their own stores? Gun don't shoot people bullets shoot people?
There were, in fact, posters all over the gun store. "Not your father's gun," said one. It was too easy. It was such an obvious penis metaphor there was no point in pointing it out. This is my rifle, said one poster. There are many others like it but this one is mine. This was the mantra of the Marine Scount/Sniper corps, the STA, the Surveillience and Target Acquisition, I knew this from the book Jarhead, which I liked very much. Wonderful words, beautiful poetry. I heard it in movies. It was so romantic, how a man could come to relate to a killing machine with the same tenderness and specificity he might reserve for the love of his life. I wanted to know the poetry of the gun.
There was the performance artist who had his friend shoot him. There were Rimbaud and Verlaine and William Bourroughs and poor Joan Vollmer. Those were all bad stories of the improper use of firearms but the point was that guns were everywhere, they were in many great stories, they brought men together and tore lovers apart and were important in the world. The natural extension of the wildest loves was bullets.
And the boys had been going to the gun range and invited me with them. It was something boys did and something I could do to be like a boy, to be with the boys, to be better than the boys. It was an equalizer. I could get one and shoot all the rapists.
Last time they had shot a Glock so this time they wanted a Beretta. They discussed the comparative merits of the Glock and the Beretta with the guy at the counter. He favored the Beretta. They all agreed it was more substantial.
You couldn't rent a gun if you were alone and unarmed. In order to rent a gun you needed to either bring a gun or a friend. I didn't understand this logic until it was explained to me that if you came alone with no gun of your own it might be the case that you planned to shoot yourself. If you had a friend it proved you weren't suicidal. If you had a gun already it proved that even if you were friendless and suicidal, you already had the means to shoot yourself and so you had no particular incentive to do it here.
The first serious clue I got that I might not be able to fire the gun came when the guy put the gun on the counter unloaded and I asked him to arm the safety. I realized then that I wanted to leave the safety on all the time. The next clue I got that I might not be able to fire the gun was when he showed us how to load it. I realized that I did not want to load the gun. I wanted to keep the gun unloaded with the safety on. I wanted to do as much as possible to keep the gun from being a gun and keep it from its intended purpose. I realized that I had very little interest in guns and even less interest in shooting them.
When the man put the box of ammunition on the counter and I wanted him to put it away. I much preferred the gun without the bullets, with the safety on.
We put on our ear protection and went into the shooting lanes. We were alone there for a while. Doug shot a clip. My brother Noah shot a clip. Noah left the gun on the counter of our lane with the clip out. I was to load it and fire it now.
My target was hung. I had asked for the human target. I was being snide and facetious at the counter. "I want a human target," I said. "Isn't that what handguns are for, shooting and killing humans? I want to kill humans!" I said this with a false and slightly maniacal enthusiasm. I hoped that my remark would prove to the people in the gun store how sick and twisted and stupid they were. I hoped that in my one snide remark they would see the error of their ways, herd us gently out of the gun store and torch the place. I hoped it would prove that the Second Amendment was totally psychotic, because it was a mildly psychotic thing for me to say, and if it went unnoticed it would prove that our culture was so psychotically violent that it accepted psychotically violent statements as normal.
The only person who noticed my remark was my brother. He looked alarmed and somewhat annoyed. He knew it portended more further inappropriate ranting. My brother is somewhat the same way. He and I had recently enjoyed ourselves at a Michael's craft store in Long Island, running around saying mildly psychotic things and laughing maniacally. The Michael's craft store in Long Island offended us both equally. My brother kept muttering that he was going to expose himself to the security cameras, within earshot of the middle-aged women fondling packages of mosaic tile and vials of beads. I hated the Michael's craft store, the way it pre-packaged the components of art for people who were too lazy to make real art in the same way I now hated the gun range for the way it allowed people to play at doing violence in similarly toothless ways.
At another Michael's craft store in Spotsylvania, Virginia, the D.C. snipers wounded one of their thirteen victims. They fired the opening shot of their 2002 spree through the window of yet another Michael's craft store. Then they killed ten people dead in twenty-three days, many of them while they filled their cars with gas. The snipers bought their gun from a gun store and shooting gallery much like the one I visited. One of the snipers was a domestic abuser, the other a minor. Neither was supposed to be able to buy a gun, but the former Army Ranger who ran the Bull's Eye Shooter Supply of Tacoma, Washington didn't check.
While Noah and Doug were taking their turns, another man had entered the shooting lanes. He appeared to be some kind of serious gun enthusiast. He had special bags. They looked like camera bags but they were designed especially for guns. Just as there are online stores with all kinds of yoga equipment and photography equipment and special bags to put it in there must be similar accessories for gun enthusiasts, including clever little bags with little pouches for ammunition. I thought about how lame and dorky any enthusiast looks slung with the perfectly-designed ballistic-nylon luggage of his trade--the birdwatcher, the amateur photographer. It's good to be properly prepared but past a certain point the gear overshadows its use. Rambo didn't have a little shoulder bag full of ammo.
The man had an instructor with him. They started shooting. The noise was deafening, and much louder now that I was standing in line with the other shooter and not back by the wall. Each shot terrified me, and in between shots I held myself tense, waiting for the next one. I thought I might drop the gun, misfire the gun, accidentally fire the gun and kill myself or one of my two loved ones, or the gun enthusiast with the special bags. I was there to learn gun safety, to get comfortable, but I was not satisfied that there was any such thing as gun safety, and I knew I would never be comfortable in this place with its awful noises, bad smells and terrifying machines.
I started to load the gun. I hated each mean little bullet. The casings were two-toned, yellowish brass shafts and pinker metal at the dull, deadly point. Phallic just like everything else that kills, I thought. I was dealing in stereotypes, in obsolete paradigms, in unhelpful dichotomies, but I couldn't stop. What was the opposite of misogyny? I was becoming that. (It was misandry--the hatred of men. I had to look this word up. You know what is another lesser-known word? The feminine analogue to phallic, which is "yonic.")
Oh you sick, sick bastards, I thought as I picked up each bullet, you sick fucks with your little lead penises. Why is it not enough, the penis you have? Why did you have to make these awful noisy penises? Why must we also have penises that kill, penises that explode? Isn't it nice that your actual penis explodes with the seeds of life? Why did you make this one that explodes with little seeds of death? Why did you make a metal death penis? There is something wrong with this. There is something wrong with you. I was getting so angry I wanted to shoot the men who made the guns.
Except I didn't want to shoot anybody. I didn't want to shoot the gun at all. I only loaded three bullets and then I put the gun down. It repulsed me. I didn't want to touch it. I went outside and fumed. Any man who wants to fire a gun should be forced to masturbate until all the testosterone has spurted out the end of his dick, I thought. They couldn't possibly have the energy or the ill will to use these things for sport or in seriousness if they simply had enough orgasms. They can say what they want about "defending their families" but I can see with all objective fairness that the firearm is a replacement for the orgasm. It was not fair for them to jerk off with these noisy, dangerous explosives when they could jerk off quietly into tissues or socks. I realized that this left out the question of female gun enthusiasts. For them I had no answers, for I now realized I was a female gun nonenthusiast.
In my attempt to be, for at least one ten-bullet clip, a female gun enthusiast I was hoping to become a gender-transcending Omniscient Investigator of All Experience, to follow in the footsteps of my more masculine literary heroes and gain claim to all the ego and snobbery their gunplay licensed them. I envisioned myself a Zen mistress of acceptance. I would accept that violence was part of the world, I would loosen my grip on the prissiness of pacifism, I would move past musty kumbaya whinings about peace in a world where everyone wanted to kill one another, where love was about hate and sex was about death and birth was about death and death was about life. I would lay claim to my revolutionary ideals with the skills to enact them. I would liberate myself from the fear of dying at the hands of my fellow barbaric humans, secure in the knowledge that I could handle the One Great Equalizer, the firearm.
Guns did not work out for me the way I planned. I wonder if they ever do for anyone.
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