A few mildly interesting things to report today, today meaning yesterday--that's just the way I roll, yes. I see you, and I don't: I see somebody you resemble, somebody I knew a long time ago. I walk through the world, and I don't: I'm walking through a construct, a dream, a memory, a parallel universe. I speak to you and I don't: I'm just talking to myself. I have this longstanding fantasy, in which I am the only person alive. Everything and everyone else is a phantom that I've conjured up without even knowing it. So seventeenth century hypochondriac French philosopher of me, yes I know. Or so Plato. Or so Berkeley. Or so Philip K. Or so Bros. Wachowski: whoa.
Yes, I suppose it really is a fairly common fancy, a fairly widespread disease. It's the way the world's made, I guess. Who the hell really talks to each other? Who the hell really knows what somebody else is thinking? I think you're reading the words that I'm writing, but for all I know, at your end what I'm writing might be something completely different. You could be a fifth dimensional lizard who just happens to look kind of like a human when you're projected onto three dimensions. For you these words might mean something completely different in your fifth dimensional lizard-ese. It might be a series of dead baby jokes, for example, if fifth dimensional lizards have babies. Or yo' momma jokes, if there are fifth dimensional lizard mommas. And if you write me a message, it could be the case that you're trying to send me a short proof of Fermat's last theorem, or the way to square a circle, or the answer to the question about life, the universe, and everything, or a detailed description of hell--any of which might be, for a fifth dimensional lizard, an entirely appropriate response to a series of dead baby jokes. And I'll read your message, and at my end it will say something like: "WTF are you smoking? I want some" (just help yourself to a Marlboro, then, if Marlboros are Marlboros in your world). There's no way to know, is my point. We're all in Chinese rooms.
And that being the case, aren't we always alone? Benighted? Ships passing by? We come into the world excreted through a tunnel of flesh, alone, alone. They cut the cord and we are detached. We are cast off, shed like lice. Parasite without a host. And we leave the world in a wooden box, or in flames, or by steel or lead or poison or a bloodclot or our own cells running riot, on the shitter in an airport like Louis Kahn, or feverish and shitting ourselves on horseback like Genghis Khan and Saint Louis King of France, or destitute and coughing our lungs up like Kafka or Keats, all alone alone alone. Nobody follows us into that country. No companion, no lover, no friend. In between entrance and exit we move around, bounce off each other like ball bearings in a sack. Or convince ourselves that we do. Our orbits fixed and separate in the wide black sky.
But I was going to talk about yesterday. So: left work feeling grumpy, disgruntled, lonely, sad, bored, everything grey grey grey silent like Sunday. Nothing real. All illusion, maya, virtual reality, shadows. What am I doing in this town, said I to myself. So far from home, although where's home? Not where my parents live, which is Seoul. Not where I live, which is Boston. Not where my wife lives, which is Mansfield. I had nothing to do. Nowhere to go where I could escape myself. I didn't want to read. I didn't want to write. Didn't want to eat. Didn't want to sleep. Didn't want to go to where I live, since it's not home. I'm not homeless; just un-homed, unheimlich.
--Hell is other people, said Sartre. Fuck that. Hell is yourself.
So I went to see a mindless movie, namely 300. And I guess it kind of did its job, because I was numb for a good five minutes afterwards. It's an ok movie, if you can handle Spartans saying things like "Freedom isn't free." Or if you're ok, while Baghdad eats itself, with a movie that is ok with the idea of Spartans (who are "fighting for freedom and reason and light" of course, of course) piling Persian bodies up into a ten foot wall, so as to later bury more Persians in a corpse-valanche (well, honestly, while watching the movie, I didn't really have a problem with it--the movie has its own internal logic, and its internal logic works--it's just that it's kind of ickily fascistic, when you think about it later, is all). Or if you're ok with the idea of Frank Miller letting the sole female character get raped just so that she could later deliver a middling-good one liner. Other than that, it was pretty. And almost violent enough for my taste.
But anyway, during that fleeting five minutes of numbness I got on the Green Line, and sat myself down a seat away from a stolid, unsmiling young woman. A stop later, a large young man smelling strongly of alcohol sat down next to the woman, and accidentally on purpose bumped her shoulder with his.
Oh sorry, he said. I was just at a bar, so I'm clumsy.
Oh it's ok, she said, perfunctory. I was just at a bar too.
Yeah, you too? he said, gladness filling his voice, which bar?
Suzy Q's, she said.
Oh oh yeah, I know that place, he said.
There was a small silence.
He said: Hey, you're really beautiful, you know that? in what must have been his best I'm-being-really-smooth voice.
She said: Oh thank you, in what must have been her best I-think-I'm-sexy-enough-to--never-show-emotion monotone, probably indistinguishable from her best you're-a-creep-I'm-too-sexy-for-you monotone.
More silence.
So where'd you go to school? he said, desperately.
Some people never know when to give up and take the next train.
Later, around midnight, I stepped out of the apartment for the last cigarette of the day. Across the street, on the Green Line platform, I saw a boy and a girl arguing, the girl screaming and screeching, the boy pleading, his voice low.
--I can't DEAL with this STUpid SHIIIIIT! She put her back into her shouting. She alternated between arching her back to inhale in between words and leaning forward to exhale/shout, as if she were trying to add the momentum of her movement to the sound coming out of her mouth.
--You (deep breath) AAASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!
You couldn't hear what the boy was saying in response to all of this. All you could see were gestures, postures, all of which simply seemed to further enrage the girl.
--And still, by the time I finished my cigarette, somehow they were kissing each other...
So yes, communication is mysterious, probably non-existent. We might be riding the train together, but we each have our own stop. People are very very strange, and most of them are annoying.
But sometimes, unaccountably, people kiss each other.
If I'm really making up the world, I guess I'm kind of glad I put that detail in, even if it doesn't really count for much, and even it's not logically consistent with the rest of the whole damn shebang.
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