Unlike what one might expect, it was not a hot day. The sun failed to beat down. A mechanical arm from the earthmoving engine rose repeatedly to a sky as defined as a floor, encoded as shimmering grey carpet. The fall—like each one—reverberated in wiffs of dry dirt and stretching and snapping of eaten wire, copper cable, rust frozen pipe, spaghetti strands and guitar strings, pulled tight, violently breaking.
          Top-heavy, gargantuan, a snarl-faced man followed the leviathan’s rhythm precisely, his pickaxe a steel posting shard lashed and melted to a palmworn antique crowbar. He was the best one. A dozen other workers performed worse than him, in some pecking order, always lagging the tempo.
          One yelled, “That’s a stupid spot!”
          This happened: full of ambition, a smooth-headed young man with a weasel’s eyes appeared, dug twice, and was chased from the scene with shouts and rocks. The men all bent low, enraged, for rocks from the ground. The earth-mover never paused, thought, or hesitated. It didn't care.
          “Fuck that guy!” the fat David Ripley yelled. The earth-mover nearly ran over his stubbled leg. He screamed like a boy; but lucky, the machine wheels missed.
          From the adjoining lot, John Jay witnessed the mild excitement slightly raised, his eyes momentarily vacationing from his TV screen. Between his feet were two bottles of sweet beer, enough for the morning.
          John Jay’s favorite show was Sesame Street, because it was stupid. Brainless garbage for brainless children. A rainbow-looking troll stuck its nose in the screen and yelled the ABCs, taking two minutes on each syllable. Most people called John Jay eccentric, or maybe they called him a goddam idiot. To an intelligent man—only intelligent, and only a man—John Jay would have pointed and explained, “I save three hours for idiocy six days a week. I fill up with it for health reasons.” Past that he would have explained nothing.
          Mister Mason Weller—huge, ugly, blonde—paused by John Jay. “Did you see that kid??”
          Someone yelled from the construction yard, “He’s a lucky guy!”
          John Jay felt so little like talking he made an acting lie of deep concentration, the letter GEE taxing all hemispheres. “You think I’m blind? Clearly from a broken home—no mother, no father, no nothing that cares a damn about anything. A leech, a screaming baby toad, toilet garbage, human shit.”
          When John Jay made such utterances, men like Mister Mason Weller often stood by vaguely happy just to receive the words, flexing their hands. Mister’s were wide, calloused, knuckles often torn open. In a common case of studied non-observance, everyone ignored his suicide attempt. Except the children who followed him in the streets and mocked him. Driving an enormous knife into the undersides of both arms—a body part soft and translucent, even on him—unless suffering from insanity, he must have known something like that was sure to fail. Now, anew, he dug.
          The wind blew through this neighborhood, no building tall enough to jump from. It was worldwide comfort. Children played all day, fairly well-kempt; however, their games were often cruel. John Jay didn’t like children, by far the most sadistic members of society. At their approach, three-legged dogs ran in fear. With temerity, a small band of them might even attempt a destructive act against the earth-mover. Stand right under the blade and dare it to strike between the eyes. No, not for him those little bastards.
          “You’re being hysterical,” Mother Nita would have told him. “They’re only child-ren.”

The moon lay in the sky, simply the sun, flattened and reversed. Walking, his arm was wrapped around his TV. John Jay’s best friend, David, had tried to kill himself in grand fashion the year before. He had climbed a razor-covered fence guarding a frantic, twenty-lane highway, broken his ankle on the drop, run painfully to an intermediate lane, and chased himself into the smoothly-evading grill of a green truck, which, presumably, tore him to pieces.
          They’d isolated him in a cleanroom, floated his spine and head in a fluidized bed, stabilized him with electric shocks, attached porous, metallized joints, given a full course of psychotropic drugs, and grown his skin in a vat. His hair came back dark. A tube reactor acclimated him to ambient conditions, and late on a Sunday he was birthed into a transportation bed with rough, bleached sheets. Discharge from the wellness center reminded him of discharge from junior high. A good feeling. Being photographed, he vomited once, and John Jay waited in family to collect him.
          John Jay expected an apology, but all David had to say was, “One dream I kept having was all these colors. It was the most beautiful thing I ever saw.”

After the accident, John Jay tended to take David with him whenever possible, from one of his daily, ritualized locations to another. Much of the time, they were walking. David spoke in a high voice, always had, and had born the brunt of childhood, efficient criticism, at least till the onset of gentle, forgiving adulthood. “Why haven’t you got anyone, John Jay?” After the accident, despite reconstructing the voicebox, it remained the same, faithfully the same, as though it were a fundamental, rigid solution to his immortal equation.
          “And now you ask things like that?” John Jay rubbed the scarred, puffy screen on his TV, counting his steps.
          “I feel like it.”
          “Do what you have to do and find someone then. Do the hard work and don’t complain.”
          “I meant I felt like asking.”
          “All respect being granted, you are no longer permitted to ask questions in that case.” John Jay exhaled through his nostrils.
          Arms at his side, David traced a check with a finger. “One I really want to know, John, how come you like TV so much, but you never make any shows yourself? You’re just a watcher, and the watchest watcher anyone ever saw.”
          The subtle, purple dusk thinned the already rarefied air, the two men walking in the middle of the empty street, John Jay hunched more than normal, heavy with the light of the sky. His arm stopped David and turned him looking face to face, with solemnity. “Are they telling you to ask me questions in your meetings?”
          David boarded a bright trolley train thrice a week to a windowless room for religious services. Had he not attended, a policeman would have arrived to direct him. “No one there but Jesus. And the other people, John. We don’t talk about you, I know you’re disappointed.”
          “You do so talk about me. I’m not stupid. I signed the damn form. I know what you people talk about.”
          “Well, believe what you want.” After a silence of wet lips, the surface of thought, and the wind, a moment meshed into place and they walked on. David pointed through a chain-link fence, into a corridor of bricks and plants. “Let’s go that way.”
          “If it makes you happy.” They stepped over a pebbled curb, indented with incomprehensible writing, into an alley too suddenly dark for their eyes.
          As John Jay’s retinas flattened and darkened, and one detail became five became ten, a dark child stood before them, walking invisible until directly in front of them. Entirely made of outline, his voice came thin and young. “Geeve me your TV, old man.”
          David waited, and John Jay stood in silence, dark and unknowable himself. Heartbeats passed, more than allowed, and still nothing happened and no one spoke until a small rock popped randomly under someone's shoe.
          “I want your TV and then I’ll keel you.” At that, the ends of David’s fingertips shook, and then evaporated, as all the nerves flew out into the universe. Desperately, he wanted to do something with his hands, put them someplace close and safe.
          “Say that again, you worthless child.” David heard John Jay’s voice deeper than usual, legitimately angry.
          “Give him your TV and get another one, John.” He whispered for the stage, pleading with John, pleading with the criminal.
          “I’ll take every TV you ever geet. I’ll follow you, old man and take everything away vrom you.”
          “I’ll urinate on your grave, you little bastard. You’ve never lived. You know nothing.”
          All the clocks on Earth broke—their thin second hands rested on a marking, waited, stayed, cracked, brittled, faded, rotted. When the seconds resumed, at normal speed, John Jay shook David on the shoulder. “Come on, let’s go.”
          His lips trembled with sweat. “John, a TV is free. You shouldn’t have done that.”
          John Jay started walking and David followed, they going in the cavalier, idiotic direction the thief had left in. “This one is mine. Insignificant asshole.”
          On the way from the dark alley where the thief had been, they stopped for John Jay to get drinks, the big bottles of beer he liked. Cold air from the store’s open door, narrow and crowded with packages, carried out the booming sound of call to prayer, played through a dark, sliced speaker, hissing on the high end with every long call for Allah. David watched as John reached far into the case to select the two bottles he wanted, from behind the others, looking no different to David. The skinny clerk sat patient and still, like a rock, as the speakers screamed the glory of God.
          John Jay lived off a marblite staircase in a dark, wooden building half a mile from the airport. After the accident, David’s apartment turned over to the next name on a list, as the procedure dictated. Actually, he had not even gone to check. Instead, he had simply asked John Jay to stay. Inside, John Jay dropped his TV onto the sofa where David lately had been sleeping, with the clean sheets John Jay folded every day. He washed his hands, went to his desk in the yellow light, and retrieved a small, ragged book from the top drawer. By the window, which opened onto a black brick wall, he ignored David, with purpose, opened to his place, and put his face very close to the pages.
          “I don’t know why you bother with that stuff.”
          John Jay stayed focused. “It’s hard to concentrate, and more so with you here. This isn’t the kind of thing everyone can do, so please just leave me alone.”
          David shook his head, lying back on John Jay’s sofa, closing his eyes, happy to sleep, haunted by a darkness, from within the fever dreams of the cleanroom, not liking to think of what conformation his body had been in. And the high voice of the thief asked John Jay for his TV, and David thanked God for the clean sofa. Sleep was safe—David repeated that to himself.

A grey button, looking metallic but feeling like nothing stood sentry beneath a grillwork speaker. Close to it, it smelled like fruit.
          “Betty, it’s me.”
          Designed with wasted space, the foyer glowed overlighted blue, underwater overtones. How they achieved order, he didn’t know. Each mailbox had the same lock, even though mail was useless, the names in print, and the apartments in alphabetical order. Someone, for no reason, swept up the hair from the corners.
          At a second door—glass with paper advertisements—he pressed again, spoke again. “Betty, it’s me.”
          For four storeys, he stood on the elevator shined sheetmetal floor. A robot’s red eye glowed a tungsten flame, brighter then dimmer. “Betty, it’s me.” Mechanisms allowed the doors to part. The halls were carpeted like a vintage hotel video. “Betty, it’s me.” He let his lips touch the empty, sharp plastic of the door sensor.
          As always, she greeted him with a single word, understated and complex. He could never read it. “Hi.” He responded in kind, “Hello, hello, hi, hi.” Their lives were overburdened with signs of the casual. Doors latched. Carried items set in their places. John Jay asked to kiss her, she softened, and they embraced and greeted properly, as always.
          Once in the past he had asked her what she smelled like, she had said eucalyptus, and he had admitted he didn’t know what that was. She laughed happily, and that laugh had been gorgeous. Ahead of schedule, he made her surprised and happy. John, John. Other times in obvious ways he’d attempted to attempt to attempt similar scenes as a ploy to get the laugh from her again—happiness before she warmed. It never worked.
          “John. John John John.” She went to her baby blue window. “Did you take Mother Nita her juice?”
          He felt a small headache from earlier in the day. “Yes. She’s going to go crazy all alone.”
          She waved the curtain like a wave. “You’re all she’s got.”
          John Jay exhaled through his nose, beset by thoughts as usual. More responsibility, as always. No one did anything; no one did anything unless he did it.
          Betty walked like a plain woman—not a note of feminine spectacle, she gave the world nothing. Her arms around his waist, thumbs in his belt loop. “Act like that, but you like it.”
          “What.”
          Dryly, using the outsides of their lips, near the skin, she kissed him. “You should run the world.” Bright blue pockets of sky skidded the white clouds beyond the window, robbed of enormity. John Jay patted her shoulder, wanting the subject to change and for her to change it, tell him something different.
          She ran water in the sink, over her hands, while they were in silence. Her bright silver faucet ejected a bubbling stream, John Jay smelling thin chlorine from his place on the sofa.
          She was serious. “Do you remember the tall man downstairs? You thought he looked like Joseph Stalin. He killed himself.”
          John Jay rubbed his nose. “Yes, the big man. He tried to, or he did?”
          “No, he did. With a gun, he shot himself. His eyes were pointed two different ways. They said that.”
          “A gun, right? Right.” Scratching his powerful chest, he felt compelled to stand; once in that position, it seemed useless, and he studied the street from the window.
          “A gun,” he said sarcastically.

Leaving the building, his TV under his arm, a grey-haired man shouted at him. “I’ll buy you something, asshole! What do you want me to buy?” He hung to an iron fence, a politician calling from a parapet, one that hadn’t washed, a politician with a strategy, olfactory, dirt, coming up from nothing.
          “No one in there got a damn job, either. Die if you’re gonna let go of yourself.”
          The expected response hollered back. “I’m a lucky guy!” It made John Jay wince. Always did.
          The white clouds, hooked like fish and drug at speed across the beautiful blue pit of the sky, held their action shapes, mismatched to velocity. So fast, blowing the wrong direction for the streamlined forms. First it would be grey, then rain, then blue. Always changing.
          John Jay kept to the sidewalk, rather than walking in the street, which made him nervous. The majestic evening shadows built themselves at angles across the five storey buildings and streets, straight as glass from a vanishing point, open and clear, and down each line blew a cool breeze. The day was liquid and perfect. At an empty playground, he stopped and sat on a bench split by the bulbous roots of a tree. His TV fuzzed, and he went his favorite place. Out stared the image of George Washington, the model of a soldier. “I’m a lucky guy,” Washington said.
          “Dammit,” John tuned out. “Every goddam time.” Every goddam time really meaning only once in a while, however. He angrily continued down the street, took a right into the burning copper sunset, and read the foreign letters embossed on a manhole cover. It didn’t make any damn sense.

Approaching the brick and matchstick pile of his own building, John Jay drummed fingers on his TV, shuffling, conserving energy, remembering not to hurry. Dissolved out of the purple twilight, Velma Smith Name, a thin woman, the thinnest he ever knew, met him. She decelerated, speaking in a low, even voice, “Barbara on the second floor had her baby, John Jay. As much as I hoped it wouldn’t happen, it did. It’s a curse, it’s a curse.”
          John stopped and knitted his brow. He drummed his TV, liking the even spacing he could put between the report from each of four fingernails. One two three four, they sang.
          “I know you’ll help her out, God willing, the poor baby girl. It’s a girl. Tell Barbara hello, it’ll make her happy.” She walked on, riding on the hard heels of her shoes.
          Inside, Mother Nita met him, resting halfway between floors. “Barbara screamed like I never heard a woman scream before, John.” Lance, a young man who wore a cross on his shirt, sat with her.
          “Is it a boy or a girl?” John Jay asked.
          “A little girl. She has a lot of hair on her head.”
          “That’s a good sign,” he said, making it up.
          “On Moanday, could you go to my job for me?” Lance asked.
          John exhaled through his nose. “You don’t have a job.”
          “I have jury duty. Yes, I have to have someone fill in for me or I’ll lose my spot.” He made a show of his palms, the most honest and trust inspiring parts of his body.
          “Your spot, that’s ridiculous. Ask David, because he wastes his moronic time like that. And you should skip jury duty, because that’s pernicious garbage as well.”
          “Jury duty’s fun, just about the only fun thing.”
          John Jay sneered and spoke exaggerated and low, “Yeees.”
          On the way to his apartment off the staircase, he stopped at an open door, expecting the sound of a crying baby, but not hearing one. Barbara’s sister stood at the door smiling to an older man from the top floor, recounting the story of the baby girl. She motioned to John Jay and said, “She’s sleeping.” He told her congratulations and to pass his best wishes on to Barbara. Opening his door, he noted David’s absence, likely at his prayer meeting. John Jay turned on a single light, pulled a chair close to his desk, rubbed away a patch of dust, and set his TV at the desktop’s edge, atop his paperback book, pointing the screen up. With his face near the screen, he switched on.

From an episode of Sesame Street, he navigated to the channel he never watched in public, and on it, Betty stood, in a sharp business suit, and the shot dissolved, revealing a scene underneath. She sat on a train, sitting sideways near a window, the other passengers there but slightly smudged, not attracting attention. Filled with shyness, she thanked the viewer reflected in the window, through which far-off lights moved in the darkness. Although Betty was not particularly famous, John Jay found the way she projected emotions startlingly perfect for TV—below the convincing, yet utterly uncharacteristic shyness, she flirted, but it was buried so deeply as to be a subtext of a subtext to the actor, not the character. But that was not her either. The audience would have been fooled, had they not been watching her for months.
          The train rocked, a slight motion imposed right to left, as it traveled onward into the dark. The viewer felt frustration at the conductor, unwilling to run the heater, Betty pulling a shaw around herself, holding her arms near the shoulders. In the reflection of the window, she watched the other riders, eyes going from one to the next. Each lost in his own thoughts, they were the natural choices, perfectly typical train riders—not that many of the viewers rode trains. Across the glass, under the visage of an attractive young man reading an old newspaper, the lights of a crossroads town slid past on the flat land, no details available, but each building in the life of a small town felt in presence. Nobody would know a thing about it, except the most certain and general, that normal people lived there, the old proud of the young, the young reverent and somewhat frightened of the old, and that while it was a happy place, it was also a melancholy place. The man reading his paper scanned his eyes perfectly along a paragraph, unhaltering, his sharp jaw perfect. Betty watched him, focused on his serious face, knowing he was thinking about other things than women, drawing his conclusions from the article he read. In a small way, she was in love with him. She wondered what kind of husband he would make.

Part One, Turning it Off Halfway

For the past year, I have been making an on-and-off good faith effort to use Ubuntu, a kind of Linux, on my computer. Ubuntu's goals as an operating system are "providing an up-to-date, stable operating system for the average user, with a strong focus on usability and ease of installation." Basically, they want malarial children in Africa to use it on their $100 crank-powered laptop, which is not a joke, and is a goal I whole-heartedly endorse.

However, when you start getting involved with any kind of linux, and you don't know what to do, and you go "online" to ask questions in "forums," you come face-to-face with the reason people don't use linux: No one can explain anything to you because a) they are unable, because they can't communicate with other human beings or b) they think you are stupid, and are compelled to tell you how stupid you are. This is like asking questions in HTML forums*, too. Either you find yourself in Revenge of the Nerds, or someone is telling you to "go die in a fire" because you didn't think to use Debian** to fix your problem.

So, I was wondering if anyone could help with one thing, just a simple thing.

When I am using Windows, and I need to stop working on the computer and go somewhere, I simply shut the laptop. Then, a day later, when I need to use it again, I open it up and it starts right up. Some battery life will be gone, but not a lot.

In Ubuntu, if I do that, it will apparently run at full power the whole time it's closed and if I open it anytime more than an hour afterward, the battery will be dead.

But, I notice that Ubuntu has a "hibernate" setting. So, if I hibernate it, then things are fine, but when I open it back up, it has to go through some kind of startup procedure where it loads drivers and setting and lists a bunch of stuff on the screen. Is there a way I can make Ubuntu act like Windows re: shutting the laptop for a while?

(PS: Maybe I found something to explain it, but see how it starts out with that acronym stuff? Everyday people won't make it through something like that. Malarial children will pass out before they read down to the good part.)

* I know it should be fora, but you shouldn't get your toga in a bunch.
** I still don't know what Debian is, and I am wondering if malarial children are going to figure that shit out any easier than I am.

The quote above is from G. Stanley Hall, one "father of modern psychology." I couldn't agree with him more. I would like him to be resurrected and set before me, so I can tell him how offended i am, and whine and cry about it to his face. I would throw a tantrum, in fact. Then I would take my blog and go home.



I have nothing so much to add, but instead present here a partial list of only children, kindred spirits all. The list fascinates me. Sometimes when I hear someone famous is an only child, I write it down, to add.

Vivien Leigh
Stalin
Frank Sinatra
Robert DeNiro
William Gaddis
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Elvis Presley
Elvis Costello
Ingrid Bergman
Ansel Adams
Jack Nicholson
Flannery O'Connor
Ronnie James Dio
Lisa Bonet
Raymond Chandler
Eric Clapton
Eric Idle
Ringo Starr
Sarah Vaughan
T. Boone Pickens
James Earl Jones
Annie Lennox
Joe Montana
Antonin Scalia

I would not give you false hope, no.

Tonight I was sanding and painting the door on the cabinet, and this led to picking up a pile of old stuff and sorting it out. One item, at the bottom, covered in dust: Mia's old Walkman.

I just came into the room with the computer, got out some batteries, and picked out a tape, which I bought in 1992 and played in a car stereo for exactly ten years, till the stereo was stolen, and has sat in a box since then. I pushed play. The first couple seconds were tentative, the speed varied, I shook it, and turned it on its side.

Hm, I thought. This sounds better than my i-Pod. It does.

Man, when all my musicky friends in high school still bought records, I was a tape guy. If you needed to throw a cassette across a parking lot to your buddy, you could, without too much worry. Tapes are the white trash of music formats. "But the hiss," neurotic hypochondriacs say with disdain. Well, that's all I can tell you. Still sounds better than what we all listen to today. I'm actually shocked.

The satellite radio networks merged this past week—XM and Sirius are now called something like XM Sirius, and all their stations got shuffled together. We have an XM radio, because I was riding in my mom’s new car, which had one, and I found a station called Lucy, channel 54, that played everything you grew up listening to if you were into the music in the 80s and early 90s. Song after song, they played something big, like Morrissey or Tears for Fears or Depeche Mode or The Cult. My dad said, “Do you know these songs we’re listening to?” I said, “Dad, this is an oldies station. Of course, I know them all.” This impressed my dad. “I’ve never heard a single one before!” He bought me an XM radio he liked the idea so much.

If you like all those bands up there, check this out: This is how XM’s alternative stations were categorized: They had Fred, which was alternative music pre-Nirvana; Ethel, which was Nirvana and after; and Lucy, which was the hits from both.

It makes intuitive sense, provided you’re on the brainwave cycle that makes Nirvana a natural dividing line. XM wasn’t the first place to organize music this way, because my local record store for many years here in New York, Kim’s, had everything filed the same way. They had Mainstream, Establishment, and Indie as their sections. That even took me a week or two to understand, but really, it is easy. Morrissey? Establishment. Iron and Wine? Indie. Liz Phair? Indie. Late Liz Phair? Mainstream. Chocolate Watchband? Establishment. Sonic Youth? Establishment.

What about tough choices? Spiritualized is totally Indie, but their precursor band Spacemen 3 is Establishment. Therefore, they will both be in Establishment.

Basically, the purpose of it is to be confusing. But it’s nice.

Sadly, Kim’s is gone. It’s a Ricky’s now, so if I want a hot pink wig and leather bustier, I know where to go. And now XM has been subsumed by the mostly-better Sirius. Lucy, Fred, and Ethel are gone. Now they are known as Lithium, First Wave, and Alt Nation. Those make more sense, with the exception of Lithium, which as far as I know means nothing, aside of being a Nirvana song.

First Wave and Alt Nation. How kind of boring, right? First Wave. Hey, it’s the first wave of alternative rock. Sure, sure, but you’d know that when you flipped to it and heard the song playing anyway. Psychedelic Furs, this must be like an 80s alternative station. And it would be. Fred—that was just an arbitrary tag named after I Love Lucy. A simple, meaningless four letters for you to affix to it. Just like all the people you know—their names don’t mean anything. They are just names picked off a list by their parents. People with red hair aren’t named Red. You know what they’re all like and you deal. You might even know two Bobs, but they’re both Bob and both different, and the problem doesn’t worry you.

First Wave is a descriptive, and somehow it offends my sensibilities compared to Fred. First Wave is a brand, something to make it easier for you. Fred is just something to call it, because it has to have a name. It leaves the thing itself alone. Does no violence to it. What kind of music is on Fred? The kind that is on Fred, that’s what kind. You understand it, you don’t need to sum it up.

I like the post-election Bloggingheads between John McWhorter and Glenn Loury so much, here it is. John (author of Losing the Race) and Glenn (professor of economics at Brown University) talk once every week or two, and have been having a spirited discussion on Obama for the past year. John, nominally a conservative, has been enthusiastically pro-Obama, while Glenn was an early supporter of Hillary Clinton. I like the section mentioning black nerds. Personally, I think all nerds are important, and especially the black ones.

If I try to visualize The Person I Hate the Most, what I get is remarkably constant over the years. Almost at no point do I think it's someone I really know. Rather, it's someone tangential. A bit part. Someone with no known personality, who, based on something completely shitty, can serve as a symbol. I fucking hate that guy, I'll think. Fuck that guy.



Not the most hated guy, but a runner-up: I remember after September 11 sometime I was on a roof in Greenpoint at a party, listening to a guy rave about how "middle America" didn't understand that Ground Zero was "sacred ground." Something about how they were all sheep and they couldn't get it. I have no idea what he was talking about, but I do know I found him truly offensive. Occasionally I think of him. He looked and talked a little like Gene Simmons, and he typifies something about my first year in New York. But he's not the winner. Not by a long shot.

My universal hated person is this guy: I was living in North Carolina, and there was a wooded spot in a park, off the road 15-501, where I would go to read, almost every day. It was late summer, I think, and I was sitting on a bench there, reading. One of those big huge bumble bees flew up and buzzed up close, like when you suddenly hear the buzzing in one ear. Oh shit, I thought and stood up and took five quick steps away from the bench, trying to get away from Mr. Bee.

Just so happens, a dude was walking by at exactly this time and saw the whole thing. I watched the bee, to see if I could sit back down.

Walking by, the dude said, "If you just sit still, they'll leave you alone."

Then he walked on. Am I over-reacting in saying I hate that guy? Not only do I hate that guy, but he embodied the very root of everything I consider awful: He couldn't mind his own business, and had to try to teach me something. On top of that, it's something everyone knows. Everyone on planet earth knows they won't bother you if you just sit still. In fact, it could just land and crawl right across your eyeball, doing that thing where it feels its way along with its stinger, and you'd be fine. You would be fucking fine as fuck. What could be more simple?

Anytime someone is a complete asshole, I see that guy, standing right behind them, nodding with approval. You made my life, eleven years ago, asshole. You're famous to me. With love, I send this to you.

In sixth grade, my best friend Scott moved from the small town where we lived to Louisville, a big city on the border between Kentucky and Indiana, two and a half hours to the north. To this day, I have no idea what Scott’s dad did for a living—he was a very short, quiet and authoritative guy, and from the way Scott described him, I assumed he was big in the government or a spy. In reality, I think perhaps he was an engineer for DuPont. Scott’s dad, seriously, stood about five-two, and Scott, in contrast, was over six feet tall at that age—twelve. This contrast, even then, always figured in the way I thought about them.

Scott and I drew comic books together—never the same book, but we each separately would have one going and would critique the other’s work. An example: once I had a panel of explanation that read “There’s an intergalactic war going down.” I had experimented, tried giving a twist to this standard comic book boilerplate, and Scott said, “No, I veto that. Going down? No, never, no one says that, what is this a comic book or a rap song, no.”

I think I was really sad when Scott moved. My parents said we were allowed to talk on the phone, long distance, for an hour once a month. We talked about Ozzy Osbourne a lot, and about fantasy movies like Deathstalker—things twelve year old boys like. We sent letters and traded tapes, and I think I still have, in a box someplace, the copy of Iron Maiden’s Powerslave he made for me. Scott’s handwriting was messy, so I threw away his cover and wrote a readable one.

Over the next year, Scott’s letters acquired an overtone about how awful it was to live in a small town. This hadn’t occurred to me before, because I’d never lived anywhere else. He’d say, How are things down in Shitville? Do things still suck down there? Yes, I would reply, not really feeling it. Thing do still suck. It sucks so much.



One night in seventh grade, something was going on at the Methodist church, a standard location for any manner of events. For some reason all the grownups were there, and many wives were in the brightly-lit kitchen in the basement, cooking a large dinner. I don’t remember the occasion, but by a coincidence Scott and his dad were there, in town. They were driving back up to Louisville that night, and my mom asked if I’d like to go with them to stay a week with Scott.

They had a van—an eighties van with captain’s chairs—and we drove up in the dark, listening to Rockline on the radio, because Scott begged his dad to. They were interviewing Ozzy Osbourne, and a caller on a fuzzy phoneline asked why Ozzy had left Black Sabbath. In his lily British accent, Ozzy said, “The main reason I had to leave is because the guitar player is a homosexual.” I thought, wow, the guitar player from Black Sabbath is a homosexual. That’s bad.

I stayed the week with Scott, and their family seemed really different than mine—he had a brother and sister, both younger, and he gave them verbal abuse constantly. The sister would come in the room and Scott would yell, “Get out!” Scott had Iron Maiden posters all over his room, also different than me, because I still had all the pictures my mom had put there years earlier. I hadn’t yet thought to change them; it hadn’t occurred to me I could.

“Let me play your guitar,” I said, picking it up. I’d never seen a real guitar before.

“Here, I’ll show you, this is how you play Iron Man. You should see my guitar teacher. He rides a motorcycle and he’s got a bunch of tattoos. All down his arms, everywhere.” Scott played the first part of Iron Man, which didn’t sound anything like Iron Man. Rather, it sounded like a thirteen year old who doesn’t know how to play guitar, but I didn’t realize that at the time—he said that’s how you played Iron Man, so it must be right. There’s something in the translation, how you run it through the speakers or something that makes it sound right, I guess.

“Do you want to see what a yearbook in Louisville looks like?” Scott asked. I said sure.

We looked at his seventh grade yearbook, and he had notes written next to all the people in his grade. Circles, notes, Stupid! written next to a name. He flipped through to Students Against Driving Drunk—something every single person in the eighties belonged to, it seemed. The vice-president was this girl Stacey, who he’d circled in red and written a lot next to: Stacey is a bad-looking slut who drinks and takes drugs.

“She is so bad. Oh God.” Bad of course meaning good. “I’m looking for a new girlfriend, and maybe it’ll be her.”

I didn’t have any idea what a slut was. “If she drinks, why is she in SADD?”

“It’s her cover.” He was smiling and nodding. This seemed very wise.

He flipped through and showed me this guy, next to whom he’d written REDNECK. “See this guy. He is such a redneck. People like me, I’m a red-chest, and someone like him, a redneck, it’s just so bad.” Bad meaning bad.

“What’s a red chest?”

“You wouldn’t know what that means. A redneck is someone who’s a farmer, basically. They sit outside on their tractor working all day farming and they get a sunburn on their neck. You see their red neck, and you know they’re a farmer. There’s other people who like to hang out at the pool, and you lie in the sun with your shirt off and get a tan. Since you’re doing that, you don’t get the sunburn on your neck, but you get burned on your chest. You see people like that with their red chest, and you know they go to the pool a lot and they’re not farmers.”

Any mention of a pool made me uncomfortable, because I didn’t swim very well. I’ve never really enjoyed getting wet, even now. “I go to the pool sometimes. My dad and I go in the summer.”



“You’re from Waverly,” he said, meaning our shared hometown, where I still lived. “Down there, you’re all rednecks, because rednecks is all they have. In Louisville, some people are rednecks still, but you get more red chests. It’s just different.”

“Oh. Yeah,” I said. I wasn’t sure what to say, but I certainly was a redneck. Scott closed his yearbook and put it away. I pointed to the poster of Iron Maiden’s Somewhere in Time on the wall.

“How long do you think it took the guy to draw that? I bet it took a week.”

Scott considered. “No, he did it faster than that. If he started it when he got to work, he was done by the end of the day. You could draw that in one day no problem.”

“No, it took longer than that.”

Years ago, I remember playing with the Next Blog button up there on all blogspot blogs, but I haven't touched the thing since then. I just now thought to push it and discovered something: Now you can do that ten times in a row and not hit one in English. (Example, e.g..) Used to be, Blogistan felt like a mysterious underground wing you found a secret door to in the church basement. Now it's an ocean, and you're on a little boat right in the middle.

The internet is a constant search for the next hidden, comfortable place.

Last Sunday I ran the New York City Marathon for the third time. The starting line--and the time one spends waiting there--always ends up as the most deeply grooved memories I have of the day. It's cold, and windy, by the foot of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, and everyone around is waiting to run the race. Speakers on tripods repeat instructions in dispassionate, inhuman female voices: You are in the Orange Zone. If your bib is orange, you are in the right place. Corrals will open before the race, corresponding to your bib number. After the corrals close, you will have to wait for the next wave. Then this repeats in German, in French, in Portuguese, in Chinese, in Japanese. The word "orange" is easy to pick out. You hear it over and over. After the corrals close, and the starting line forms, the windy, thin sky is filled with low-flying helicopters that pass slowly overhead, filming, watching.


Marathon de New-York 2005 : le départ, by Martineric

This year I wrote my name on my shirt, big, so people could read it. Over my racing clothes, I had a sweatshirt and sweat pants, meant to be removed and thrown to the side when I warmed up. By the start, I had ditched the pants, but kept the sweatshirt over the bridge, against the wind. Coming off the bridge, near mile 2, I took it off as the orange-route roadway curved down an offramp. These first two miles pass in isolation--you're applauded by a group of five bridge workers in safety vests, and you can wave to the skimming, dangerous-looking helicopters, but they won't wave back. But as I removed my sweatshirt, the crowd began, yelling. I saw four NYPD standing together, and so I waved and gave them the peace sign.

One of the cops, a short black lady, looked me in the eye and yelled, "Go, Josh! Josh, looking good, Josh! Go Josh, go Josh, go!" How does she know me?? Oh yes. Remember, you wanted people to see your name, Josh.

The race passed quickly--more so than in the past. At mile 20, crossing the Willis Avenue Bridge into the Bronx, I tripped and fell on a metal plate in the road. I will always remember the vivid slowness as I caught myself on my hands, and hit the side of my head, very gently, on the pavement. People were gasping. I wasn't even down yet, and heard myself saying, "Fuck. He's all right, he's all right, it's ok."

Back on my feet, running, I concentrated on my wrists. Broken? God, how will I know. But no, they were fine. I was unhurt. Before that, I had been a little woozy, daydreaming, but after falling I was wide awake. Perhaps, if you can rig it right, you should fall everytime, right when The Wall is starting to get you. Right when it hurts.

I didn't feel like shit till the last couple miles, which is good. There, through Central Park, the crowd is five people deep on each side. The last fifteen minutes of the race went like this: "Josh! Go Josh! Looking good Josh! You can do it Josh! Don't give up! One more mile Josh! Go Josh! You look great Josh! Way to go Josh!"

Before that, I'd acknowledged every person who yelled, but at the end I was too beat. I just focused down to a circle of light right in front, to run through. My name rained from every side, and I pushed through the middle.

Today is election day, five o'clock eastern time. I believe we will know the results from Virginia in two hours, and that will be a good indication of what is to come. Will Barack Obama, whom I consider to be the first candidate of my generation, be the next President? At seven, we will more or less know.

On September 11, a few months back, McCain and Obama appeared at Columbia University--where I work--for the ServiceNation Forum, to each separately discuss service to one's community (whether that be the nation, the city, your church, what have you).


Photo by Joseph Lin in the Columbia Spectator

I had no idea how large the event would be. I thought to check and see what the college walk looked like four hours ahead of time, and hundreds of people were already sitting and waiting. The building where it would take place had been made completely inaccessible, but a jumbotron sat at the foot of the Low Library steps. You shouldn't miss this, I thought. Picking a spot to stand, I waited.

The forum itself didn't interest me so much. Here's what did: crowd reactions. At one point I laughed when the mostly student-aged crowd booed McCain for chastising Columbia's no-ROTC policy, and then, soon after, cheered Obama for saying the same thing. If you were a person built solely from the bricks of reason, it would drive you mad. Yet, crowds don't work by reason--I'm not sure how they work exactly, what they are looking for, but I know this huge collection of people en masse wanted a reason to cheer for Obama and to boo for McCain. Which came first?--the desire or the excuse? And what really are these impressions built on?

Ten minutes before Obama would end, at around 9:30, I left my spot in the crowd, with a childish mission in mind. I'm going to the ATM, I thought. Sideways, saying excuse me, I worked my way through the crowd, down the steps, under the yellow lights, past the jumbotron screen, and down the college walk. Police were everywhere. One every five feet, ten feet.

At a checkpoint some people were going through and some being turned away. I held up my ID and walked through. I guess I'm allowed, I thought. Further into campus, I went, down a walkway lined with cops.

At another checkpoint, I showed again, and again went through. A Brooklyn cop was telling a girl, "You gotta goes that way, not this way." Was she asking directions, or did she not have a Columbia ID? Now almost no one was around, and I turned back and saw the crowd, watching the screen I could no longer see.

I was of course headed for the building where the forum took place. I could hear Barack's voice echoing off all the buildings, answering questions. My thought was: there was a public ATM in the building. Was it possible I could show my ID all the way to that ATM?

At the building, there were many more cops. Outside, black cars were parked, and much of the area was blocked with black picket fencing. Through gates I could see the east half of Broadway was closed--the stores were closed for the night, no one could go there. At the door to the building, I could see a white, clean EMT stretcher parked on the grass, waiting for a medical emergency.

I stepped in the door, and saw a large man in a suit fidgeting a lot, blocking the doors which led to the auditorium. I turned to the hallway with the ATM. No one said anything. Other than the big guy, no one seemed to be around. From off in the distance, I heard the muffled, doorblocked sound of applause.

The ATM said, "May I help you?" I'm in the same building as Barack Obama! I thought. Barack is right over that way!

Back outside in the night, retracing my steps, just as I passed the last checkpoint and left campus, I heard him say, "Thank you," and everyone--outside and on the screen--applauded.

When I got three blocks down Broadway, a motorcade of black cars made a slow turn by me and headed for 110th, flashing blue and red lights. There he goes, I said.