“There’s a clause, though, for manslaughter. Heat of passion. Might be funny if I hadn’t been there, but you should’ve seen the poor girl. Hadn’t moved. Still on her knees. Grey matter everywhere.”
* * *
Sex Tips from Magazines, #4
-Kim Basinger, of course. Definitive. How many kids you think were conceived in kitchens that year?
-Absolutely. And we hit all the standards at first. Chocolate, honey, whipped cream. He was really into it, we both were. The most time we’d spent in the kitchen since we moved there.
-So what happened? Chris won’t even try it. Too messy, he says.
-Right, I know. And if we’d just kept going with that I would’ve been fine. But he got real into it, really, just not the sex part. He started baking.
-What, like cookies?
-No. I mean, baking, really baking. Cakes, tarts, pastries.
-That doesn’t sound so bad.
-Sure, I guess. Except when he’s done he wants to photograph them. On me.
-The cakes?
-Yes. Comes out of the oven and we wait for it to cool, just sitting there. And then he takes it and puts it on my stomach or something and just starts taking pictures. Not one picture, multiples. Close ups of his latest tiramisu attempt. He just bought some really expensive camera.
-That’s weird. Really weird.
-Yeah but get this. Yesterday I’m on his computer and find his blog, Jane. His blog. And he’s got all the photographs up. With recipes. You should see the kind of comments he gets. What kind of flour do you use? Did you think to try currants? Oh, and hot babe.
-So what are you going to do? I mean really. You can’t be okay with this.
-I don’t know. I really don’t know. He’s talking about changing directions now. Making dinners. Casseroles, Jane. What am I supposed to do.
* * *
Sex Tips from Magazines, #3
-Silk scarves, things like that.
-Watered-down bondage.
-Right. Danger that doesn’t leave evidence. Tomorrow she just wears the scarf the normal way, no worries about stray houseguests stumbling on a pair of handcuffs.
-Seems to almost miss the point.
-Maybe, yeah.
-Could be good, though. Something new. Make you look at scarves different.
-Yeah sure. I’m glad she brought it up, I guess, but I can’t help thinking it’s just unnecessary. She lies there telling me this, looking up asking if I want more danger, if things are too safe, and it’s the last thing on my mind.
-It’s good enough, then.
-No. Or yeah, it’s good. It’s fine. But when she’s asking if there’s anything dangerous I want to do all I can think is this is probably it. The most dangerous thing we can do we’re doing. Because it doesn’t get more terrifying than the possibility of us making something together, for her to get pregnant. Like the premise nullifies the response.
-Then this is still good, right? A distraction. Gives you something else to think about.
-I guess, yeah. But that dread, though, the middle of the night dread that maybe this time the science didn’t work. This could just be worse. She gets pregnant while we’re trying to do something dangerous. With colored scarves on our wrists.
* * *
Sex Tips from Magazines, #2
“She just decided this, one day. The day before that dinner party we had last month, you remember? I talked to Mark about it, her brother-in-law, still in school. Says it’s considered a mark of something, trauma, or an associative thing. That’s how it’s diagnosed. But it’s supposed to be tied to something, not grabbed out of thin air like a goddamn insect. But that day she just picks that chair in the living room, the green one, and decides it’s the sexiest thing we own. The sexiest. And that day I’m all for it, you know, she wants me in that chair and I’m there. But that party? That party was weird, man. Because every time someone’s in that chair she won’t stop touching me. All our friends there and it just gets weird. It’s like some kind of conditioning experiment, people just sort of hovering around the chair unconsciously but no one sitting down. Like that fucking dog, man. Except they have to avoid it to keep things from getting uncomfortable. And we’ve been doing this for a month now, a month of dinner parties where she’s reaching out to friends she hasn’t seen in years just to get people to keep sitting in that chair. Mark says these things’ll last for at least six months, at least. But I can’t do it, man. I can’t eat any more canapés. Shake any more hands. I just don’t get where this came from.”
* * *
Sex Tips from Magazines, #1
“Because I think it’s something you’re supposed to do in bed, lying down. Either after we’ve fucked, or right before, maybe, one of those things. But I come home to two chairs set up for dialogue, for an audition, and she’s there telling me to sit down and face her. The lights still on. And her face is right in mine where she’s staring and she just starts breathing these abnormally deep breaths, loud and painful, almost. I can’t figure it out but she’s got her hand on my stomach trying to get me to breathe the same way, or I guess reverse. She’s in when I’m out, I’m out when she’s in. So all we’re breathing is what’s in our lungs. And it’s intimate, sure, because all I can think while we’re doing this is This is what it feels like to suffocate. This is how it feels to nearly die.”
* * *
15 Items or Less
From Stephen Fry’s podcast on language, which I mean I know but this is how I feel channeled through Mssr. Fry’s British accent:
Words are your birthright. Unlike music, painting, dance and raffia work you don’t have to be taught any part of language or buy any equipment to use it. All the power of it was in you from the moment the head of daddy’s little wiggler fused with the wall of mummy’s little bubble. So use it.
When a person finds out somehow that I read books, they “he or she”, perhaps, is what I am going for here suddenly begin to make comments on how it makes them nervous to write me emails, afraid that misspellings or misused commas will deter me entirely from finding them interesting. This could not be further from the truth. I hold no strong opinions on grammar except for this one idea that it is completely contextual: if the idea is to convince someone to pay you bimonthly, use language correctly; if we’re discussing opinions on narwhals or writing blog posts by all means use both a colon and a semi-colon in one sentence.
Once this comment is present, however, I will become abnormally nervous about my own spelling and grammar and will grow to resent said person for the reluctant development of correct-usage-hyperawareness. No good comes from this, and I will become emotionally stunted, resulting in a solid handful of occurrences of complete email paralysis. I will blame you.
I imagine the laxity of my opinions comes from attending a performing arts magnet school in the early 90s, a time ripe for experimenting with whole language just before its downswing in popularity. I learned to write by doing it incorrectly, or “incorrectly,” and believe I owe every ounce of understanding just how remarkable language can be to this kind of pedagogy. Learning patterns before learning rules ingrains things like the way real people speak into your mind and makes language above all an experience, not a particularly constructed thing. That comes later, when you learn to use spelling and grammar to make the experience better.
As this goes I will never, ever correct someone’s grammar in person because it is both embarrassing and entirely uninteresting. Exactly as he says in the podcast, there is no “right” or “wrong” way of speaking just as there is no “right” or “wrong” way of dressing. I become jealous of speech patterns in the exact way I become jealous of a nice coat, so I have no reason to take that from anyone. If I find your coat ugly or you have an inclination to use the phrase “Where you at?” repeatedly, do not consider me an obstacle. Mostly I am just for the using of words, whatever that means to anyone.
* * *
How we fortify
Having a baby is the exact same as everyone says it is. You are afraid that it won’t be the way everyone says it will be and then you go to the hospital and then you love something in a way that is a new definition of loving something, like everyone says. When you have another baby you are afraid that you can never love it the way you loved the first one but you always can. I believed everyone after the second time and we have two boys.
Once you love something this way you want to protect it with a new definition of protecting something, same as everyone says. In our house, which I liked, we unsharpened everything which was fine until they started blowing things up. I didn’t do a lot then, professionally. I was learning that it was really easy to do research on the internet, so I started doing a lot of research on building, mostly on building materials that are really strong. Most people blogging about building spent a lot of time fighting about materials or complaining they didn’t have the land they needed to really test things out, but they’re mostly really nice. I made friends with a British man who lived in Tokyo, which is also really easy to do, and he said he had an idea about building a house and asked if I would be interested in trying it out because he didn’t have a family. We weren’t going to move, so we thought we could build another house around our house which would be a stronger house.
It went really well. When it was finished I felt better than I had for a few years, and I’d made sandwiches for the workers everyday and didn’t worry about germs as much. We decided to try for another layer. It was easy to explain to the kids with matryoshka dolls because they were still learning with their hands then.
Since people are always inventing new things we did this for a while, and our houses looked like this:
Eventually the living room was not a living room but a living house, and a kitchen house and a master bedhouse and the kids’ bedhouses. I think James is smoking pot now, but I don’t know.
We couldn’t afford to do it any more but I’ve been emailing with some companies like Kmart that are interested in sponsorship so we might be breaking ground on another layer as early as March 2018. It will both be safer and convenient to live inside a Kmart.
* * *
When it starts with Sanskrit in a German accent
It eez vierd, no?, zat our leetle feet carry all our body
All I ever seem to want to talk about is our bodies, which gets boring, maybe, because it’s not really sexy at all but just weird, weird that all of myself is upright on two feet and it’s childish, I know, a little banal to speak like this, because everything is a miracle! Everything! Every(god man we get it) And the only reason I want to talk about it here, in my body, is because this is where it’s at its most immediate, but I only seem to really think about it sitting here in front of a screen which is a little like the year you realized that happiness is like ninety nine point nine percent choice, introducing all new levels of shame or guilt along with whatever good there was to it, and sad too because one day it will stop being miraculous and just be a burden, this thing that hurts a lot and aches and doesn’t work the way you want it to anymore. But whatever it comes down to it is weird, all of it, and it will be weird forever and just keep being weirder. And it’s going to be best to not just let it be weird, but be glad it is.
Happy New Year. 2009, everyone.
* * *
WATER COOLER
-You hear what he did?
-Hear what?
-The office. What he did to the office.
-No. What.
-There’s three hundred copies of the patient’s diagrams–the ones where they can circle what muscles on their bodies hurt– there’s three hundred copies covering the walls.
-That’s it.
-No, man. Each one he’s written out all our names on the muscles. All our names on the muscles covering the walls.
-Oh.
-It’s wild. Wild.
-It’s December?
-Yeah. December.
-Last December he rigged the vending machines to give out pictures of his childhood home, polaroids. On the back of the photo he wrote out how to find a folder on your computer, and when you opened it there was this video, this endless loop of a kid running into his dad’s arms, over and over again, the dad just home from Vietnam or some shit and the kid just keeps leaping into his arms. Only over the kid’s head he’d pasted each of our pictures, all of em different for each computer. If you stood up whatever part of the day you looked over the walls you’d see someone watching this video of some kid that wasn’t him but had his face, now, jumping up into this vet’s arms. Over and over.
* * *
Simon is amazed by what he doesn’t care about.
You can find a lot of Barthelme on the internet, but you cannot find all of “The Balloon.” Part of it is here, but that isn’t all of it. I know because I once said that I found the ending of “The Balloon” spectacularly adorable, which was immediately misinterpreted, and that adorableness is missing from this excerpt. In any case
Here, Henry, take this package of money I have wrapped for you, because we have been doing so well in the business here, and I admire the way you bruise the tulips…
I’ve recently finished Paradise which is about a married architect who lives away from his wife and with three other women who insist upon offering him their nubile young bodies, often simultaneously. The back of the book calls it “a meditation on the melancholy of fulfilled desire,” how I often imagine most everyone.
Patron Saint of the Perpetually Unsatisfied
People often respond to Barthelme et al with a disgust at their lack of real characters, which I could not disagree with more vehemently [yes you could. you’ve never responded with violence, which would be vehement-est. even your self-characterization is a lie!] “Tim, the professional whistler, is a sad Saab of a man about thirty.” pg. 114 2005 Dalkey Archive Press edition. I have met that man.
The architect falls in love with a poet. Crafty. I have wanted to be an architect since I was born but am no good at math, at all. How nice it would be to make things you could live in. Barthelme’s sentences, though. Better than log cabins.
She holds out an empty wineglass. Simon pouring.
Goddamn.
Goddamn.
Barthelme’s father was an architect.
* * *