Update on Ground Zero

I wrote a massive email today to a friend in India, catching her up on about a year’s worth of news. I was tapping it out on an iPod touch while doing errands all around town (Russ & Daughters was all out of the super special matzoh), and at one point I walked past the World Trade Center site. I work nearby, but I haven’t actually seen it in a long time.

One World Trade Center has been going up for a while, but it’s massive now! Wow. It must be fifteen, twenty stories tall already, towering over what is now a field of white cranes. They look like a herd of bleached sauropod spines. Bridges that used to look down into the pit are now dwarfed by the red girders; “Yankees #1!” is scrawled across the thickest horizontal.

I share this because after writing for six hours, you want something to show for it, something that can be shared with more than one person. Curse you, intimate details, sprinkled indiscriminately throughout this masterpiece of heartfelt correspondence!

Also: have you seen that building recently? I know it’s been a long time coming, but still. We don’t have a gaping hole in the ground anymore. Quite a feeling.

History of The World: Part 1 (through 100)

The British Museum is producing a series of stories attempting to tell the story of the human race. They selected 100 objects from their collection, and with BBC Radio 4, are building fifteen minutes of radio around each, releasing them in chronological order.

It’s worth noting the disenchantment over how the museum acquired these pieces, and the institution’s claims to universal importance; the imperial roots of this collection are clearly audible as you listen. The skillful storytelling and the range of experts you’ll hear goes a long way towards selling this project despite that, but the gorgeous story itself is the draw here: how humanity developed, grew, and changed over these last thousands of years.

No one account can do world history justice, but it would be criminal to give up trying. Nothing gives me a greater thrill than great big stories about the shape of the human story, and like other entries in this genre, A History of the World reminds you how complex and amazing this story really is.

We have accountants to thank, for example, for our species’ most important achievement: writing. What we would call literature was content with spoken language, memorized and performed generation after generation. The first bureaucrats, on the other hand, looked to reliable, physical accounting to administer an expanding state. Some of the earliest surviving writing concerns itself with rationing beer in 3000 BC.

It doesn’t hurt that Radio 4 delivers everything in a British accent and peppered with dry humor. One of the learned experts, on the topic of beer as currency, quips, “no liquidity crisis here.” Then he chuckles to himself. It’s so bad it’s awesome.

You can stream episodes here, but the site’s pretty messy. I recommend downloading the podcasts.

An article in The Economist first convinced me this project was worth following. The kicker is delicious: “Of the 100 objects, only one has not been selected yet. Mr MacGregor is waiting until the last possible moment to pick out the best symbol of our own time. Suggestions, please, on a postcard to: British Museum, London WC1B 3DG.”

Gladwell on Drinking

I don’t know how he does it. Once again, Malcolm Gladwell has managed to sound original, insightful, and entirely common sense.

Turns out we misunderstand the effects of drinking: it doesn’t simply remove inhibitions.

Alcohol makes the thing in the foreground even more salient and the thing in the background disappear. That’s why drinking makes you think you are attractive when the world thinks otherwise: the alcohol removes the little constraining voice from the outside world that normally keeps our self-assesments in check. Drinking relaxes the man watching football because the game is front and center, and alcohol makes every secondary consideration fade away. But in a quiet bar his problems are front and center—and every potentially comforting or mitigating thought recedes. Drunkenness is not disinhibition. Drunkenness is myopia.

Drinkers get loud and rowdy because they respond to signals sent “by the pulsing music, by the crush of people, by the dimmed light, by the countless movies and television shows that say that young men in a bar with pulsing music on a Friday night have permission to be loud and rowdy.” This means that intoxication in a different setting, with different rules and different expectations, presents very differently.

The article recounts several fascinating experiments and case studies that demonstrate this effect. Gladwell concludes that our efforts to “moralize, medicalize, and legalize” alcohol abuse are ultimately less effective than providing “a positive and constructive example of how to drink.”

Read the piece here (abstract only without subscription, unfortunately) and check out more of Malcolm Gladwell’s work here (including full articles, 1996-2009). He really doesn’t need the plug—I already seethe with jealousy at this guy’s career—but the writing’s just so good.

Look for future admiring posts: Gladwell on underdogs, Gladwell on invention, Gladwell on entrepreneurs…

Whitman on The High Line

I went wandering Sunday and found myself on the High Line. Watching the sun setting over Jersey, gawking at all the west side’s new diva architecture, and lighting up with the Empire State building, I felt very happy, very, very lucky.

I wrote a paper on High Line Park freshman year of college, when it was just a whimsical proposal (as I now brag to anyone who will listen). For all its expense and vanity, when the park opened I immediately fell in love. Walking it—an abandoned elevated freight railway reimagined by the wealthy and fashionable as a stroll through the skyline— you feel kissed by history, the river, the generous city.

Down on 14th, afterwards, I found Whitman quoted at length in a chic shop window. I stood and read from the huge glowing display:

PASSING stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you,
You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking, (it comes to me, as of a dream,)
I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,
All is recall’d as we flit by each other, fluid, affectionate, chaste, matured,
You grew up with me, were a boy with me, or a girl with me,
I ate with you, and slept with you—your body has become not yours only, nor left my body mine only,
You give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh, as we pass—you take of my beard, breast, hands, in return,
I am not to speak to you—I am to think of you when I sit alone, or wake at night alone,
I am to wait—I do not doubt I am to meet you again,
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.

Some days the world overwhelms you. Sometimes, despite everything, you feel solid, clear and calm. I am to see to it that I do not lose you.

…Or Not to Tweet

I signed up for Twitter a week ago at the request of a family member, and after resisting for so long, I’ve found it to be exactly what I expected: equal parts fascinating and ridiculous. I’ve read the stories about how powerful it was this summer in Iran, and the stories calling that into question. I’ve looked up what a “hashtag” is and wondered what Ashton Kutcher could possibly be saying that is so interesting. (I still don’t know.) I’ve marveled at my ability to look up what people near me are tweeting, and been amazed by how little I care.

One Slate article I read highlights the 90% of users of the service who don’t write often… or at all. Orphaned Tweets collects messages sent by those who “sign up for Twitter, post once, then never return.” They offer strange and often hilarious glimpses into anonymous lives: kttheet was “Wearing a gigantic t-shirt (2XL),” and anord04 was “eating a miniature pie.” DouglasAllen, in his first and only tweet, wrote: “I am writing an email to the makers of Spray N Wash to thank them for making a product that got the blood stains out of my new PJs and robe.”

Click on these accounts and you’ll find most of them have now been updated, after a year or more of inattention, presumably due to this very article. The second kttheet post assures us “My clothing is now appropriately sized,” and anord04 seems to be enjoying his new fame, as he is currently “Making fun of people for following me on twitter.” DouglasAllen, however, has never revealed what came of those blood stained pajamas. I fear we may never know.

Speaking Of Not Being Alone…

Apparently, if you start paying attention to that constant crazy, fearful, judgmental, and unintentionally hilarious voice in your head, and come to believe it is okay or even desirable to write down these thoughts, overnight it becomes impossible to stop. I haven’t posted in two days and already I have amassed many thousand manic typed words in a desperate attempt to record this running commentary I didn’t know I contained, which is now self-important and vain with all the attention being paid to it. Incredibly, this makes it even less likable. I feel like the woman who innocently opens the comically overfull closet and is buried in a mountain of junk for her trouble. In addition to deciding to take dictation for the voices of my neuroses, I have commissioned several ambitious essays from myself, and extended my running list of the many things I should but have yet to write about, and in this way I have convinced myself that complete forfeiture of my waking hours to my writing habit is imminent and I may have to give up a few of the hours reserved for sleeping, too.

I took time out of being a crazy person this evening to attend How I Learned, which monthly invites several people to perform personal essays in a bar on the Lower East Side. It was absolutely wonderful and I highly recommend you attend next month’s show, that is, if you are in fact a real person living in the greater metropolitan area and not one of the imaginary readers of this blog who is constantly being bored by and unimpressed with my writing and telling me so in unnecessarily mean ways. I’ll write something about the event and link to the contributors’ individual websites sometime when I don’t need sleep so urgently. For now I’ll say only this: I spoke with one of the men who read tonight, and when I asked if he writes full time these days, he told me that he does, and is primarily working as a writer of The Hardy Boys books. Did you know they still write The Hardy Boys books? I did not. Now, not only do I know this fact, but I have met the guy writing them. He also writes for Nancy Drew when they do crossover stories.

It’s the little things, you know?

Not Alone Anymore

When we find out we might be alone in thinking something, we tend to remember the sensation. Surprise, followed quickly by worry, or curiosity, or pride, can overshadow the actual topic of conversation. I remember one moment like this. I had just described to a friend how those unofficial, packed dirt trails that you find curling through every park are fascinating to me.

You see why, right? These trails are created by many people over many months if not years. The finished product looks intentional: there are clean lines between the path and the grass around it, the route confidently heads towards the place most people want to go, and it’s well maintained, routinely reinforced, sometimes in contrast to neglect, very close by, visible in some less popular park features. This is a collaboration, but the collaborators rarely see each other, generally don’t know each other, and never actually communicate about their shared project. It is an accident and unintended consequence of thousands of actions that this path gets made.

What struck me is how path makers are separated not by space but in time. When I walk down one of these paths I imagine all the people I’m following, and all those who will follow me. We influence each other, affect the steps others choose. Unseen, unknowingly, we transmit information across time, coordinating our efforts to produce an inviting little walkway. Membership in this secret, silent club tickles me. No one is aware of having joined or what their contribution was. Our members cannot be gathered by any imaginable technique or technology, because time moves only in the one direction, and the world soon forgets who made the first footfalls and where that person was headed. And without aiming to, we’ve created an informal institution, a monument to decentralized decision making. Dear reader, I give you: the well defined yet unsanctioned path, a whimsical and determined thing, fixture of parklands everywhere.

My unprepared attempt to communicate this and my wonder at it to a friend was halting, but after getting it out I saw immediately that my fascination wasn’t shared. Other people just don’t think like this, I realized, surprised. I was torn between feeling proud of how my clearly insightful observation separated me from the unwashed masses and being disappointed, like when a joke isn’t laughed at, or the personal anecdote you expected to be recognized as embodying something universal, isn’t. It was disappointing to find that the busy, complicated world I lived in was a lonely place. It’s not just paths in parks. I’m often paralyzed by visions of the countless roles we play, the endless connections and interactions between us, the infinite consequences of our smallest actions. I’m not infrequently dumbstruck with awe at the products of our undirected and unplanned efforts, overcome in public places with mute delight. I stare at the city around me like a caveman.

Although I never seriously believed that I was the only person with an active imagination and a ferocious curiosity about the world around me, I did feel separated from fellow awestruck path watchers by my inability to put my wonder into words, and therefore lonely. A path maker might feel the same way were one to become aware of his or her diffuse coworkers and wish to speak with them, if only to share introductions over a beer and pass around congratulations on a job well done. But while there’s no hope of traveling though time (except the usual way), there should be a way to overcome my less fundamental isolation. There must be others in the world with a passion for self organization and its power. Now just how do I meet one?

Podcasts. When it comes to emergent order, I recommend reading The Price of Everything by Russ Roberts, who I first heard as the host of the essential EconTalk and who also writes a great blog, Cafe Hayek. For more, and please trust me on this, it is never a bad idea to read Hayek himself. Discovering that there exists an entire academic discipline devoted to exploring the mechanisms, mediums, properties and consequences of our species’ constant creative interaction has been one of my life’s greatest pleasures. It turns out that not only am I not at all uniquely brilliant, but the men and women who have been thinking, writing, researching and debating about exchange, incentives, and externalities for centuries have so much to teach me that my learning will safely last my lifetime.

To complete this happy ending, I need to develop the ability to communicate my curiosity. A lifelong project to be sure, but one I want to start today. Writing, this past week, has engaged me terrifically, been welcome work of the kind my life recently has been sadly lacking. It’s hard, and for now, feels rewarding. My busy imagination is already telling me that if I really keep at it, by the time I’m sixty-four I might actually publish something valuable. I’m really looking forward to that.

Reading about writing, I ran across this lovely passage in Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird:

I remember reading C.S. Lewis for the first time, Surprised by Joy, and how, looking inside himself, he found “a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a harem of fondled hatreds.” I felt elated and absolved. I had thought that the people one admired, the kind, smart people of the world, were not like that on the inside, were different from me…

The moments we discover we’re not alone, like the moments when we first fear that we are, get glued in our memories by adrenaline, and then stuck where we’re sure to see them, like favorite pictures on our wall. Remember this. We forget, of course. Like all important lessons in life, we have to learn it again and again. Fear of being the only one like you in the universe is, famously, universal.

Share your stories about the conversation where you discovered that you’re on your own. It’s a familiar beat: talking to a friend, the easy assumption that you’re on the same page is suddenly questioned. This tends to happen most frequently when the topic being discussed is certain superstitions, the status of a relationship, or Israel. The moment tends to be memorable. I can recall a half dozen conversations I’ve had that fit this description.

Alternately, share your stories about the time you suddenly no longer felt alone. Although it has taken me a thousand words to get around to it, the story I had in mind when I started this post falls into this category. Today I was listening to The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe and they were discussing several recent articles in mainstream sources that are big wins for skepticism and evidence that an important campaign in Britain is having an impact. The mood was high. Then Rebecca said this, about the podcast’s audience:

There are 60,000 of you our there right now. I know that right now, like, you’re listening to this and it’s just you, riding the subway, but there are actually 60,000 of you…

The story of how I came to find the SGU, and organized skepticism, and how it felt and what it meant to me is another post entirely, if not a dozen. It’s quite something, discovering how powerful it is to name yourself, to share passions and fears, and to belong. It would be a large, heavy, dreadfully earnest story. Hearing Rebecca’s words this afternoon was different: the moment was delightful, simple, and deliciously specific.

I’ve often imagined that there are others who, like me, ride the subway with earbuds in not to drown out the crowd or zone out to music, but to learn about scientific breakthroughs, technological achievements, the latest paranormal claims, quackery, what is fact and what is, in fact, fiction. Looking around as I ride, however, it never seems like I’m sharing a subway car with one of them. Instead as I listen I feel like there’s an unfortunate chasm between me and my fellow riders, growing wider with every moment I absorb information which I seriously doubt they have, as I sure wouldn’t were I not standing there with the rogues in my ear. Our common ground is thin and our disagreements untowardly deep, my imaginary fellow passengers and I. It’s not a good feeling. Most people separate themselves from the city around them by simply ignoring it, distracting themselves, or through small harmless acts of rudeness, but here I am actually shoving a planet-sized ideological wedge between myself and all those around me. What a sad, bitter old man I will become!

In a species as numerous as ours, a club consisting of sixty thousand is not in the business of setting cultural norms or writing policy. But put sixty thousand people in a room and you’ve got yourself quite a party. A big thank you to Rebecca for a truly neat moment, when I allowed myself to imagine my friends and allies, in hundreds of different subway cars in dozens of cities across the world. I smiled, then, picturing us, we who are excited about the future, we who love and cherish “the Universe as it really is.” At once, we all hear “right now you’re listening to this and it’s just you, but” and look up, all thinking the same thing.

I know podcasts are not listened to simultaneously. I know my habit of inventing visuals to stand in for the intangible things I’m awed by can get more than a little silly. I’ve been known to picture the myriad cell phone conversations going on around me as long strings arcing through the air, attached at the other end to far away towns and other continents, wrapping around the world a dense, tangled ball of string. And ask me sometime about the make believe Kingsbridge Tofu Club. Still. Explaining what’s going on in my head makes me feel elated and absolved, and even if this never reaches the right person, I’m confident someone out there thinks the way I do.

Science is a great path making project, the greatest decentralized collaborative effort there will ever be, with partnerships spanning the globe and reaching across time, accumulating results step by step that shape our emerging understanding of reality. It is the undertaking of the human race, discovery, and no one is truly alone who understands that they belong to this great and curious species. I will never be a scientist, but I long to contribute something to the discussion, if only to stand to the side and remind people how beautiful it all is. I will talk science over dinner and over drinks, inviting more people to share in our collective accomplishments, reminding everyone, you need not be alone, and look at what we can do when we work together.

This Is Halloween

Batman or Superman? Kirk or Picard? Would you prefer to have the power of invisibility or of flight? Describe your best Halloween costume. At age ten, who was your favorite fictional character, and why? Who would it be today? Tell us about a time you were fired from a job. Explain in five hundred words what you believe in. If you were a flower, what kind of flower would you be?

If I waited for an original idea to begin working, I think I’d get as far as actually tearing my eyeballs out of my head before I gave up and joined a monastery. Diving right in, then. Batman. Kirk. (In case you weren’t aware, Krik or Spock? is not a question. You’ve completely missed the point.) To be brutally honest? Invisibility. I know. We can talk about it later.

—

What I remember about Halloween, other than how surprising it was every year that I could and did forget that it bumps right up against my birthday, is being disappointed with myself on the costume front. Maybe there is nothing I actually enjoy about dressing up, and my expectations were all unconsciously based on movie montages set to aggressively fun music, but it seemed like something I should be good at, something I should have fun with. My failure to do so was dismaying, and painful.

When it came to costumes, as in my other earthly pursuits, I aim high. None of the standard ghouls for me. Come to think of it, Halloween never really had much to do with fear or fright in my experience, but it’s not just that plastic moulds of Frankenstein’s monster didn’t pass muster. The standard costumes are familiar to everyone, I’m sure, but just to make fresh in your memory the utter inanity of this peculiar cottage industry, let’s review.

There are doctors and nurses, a strangely mythical rendering of a real world profession which may contribute to our love of soap operas set in hospitals and our expensive inability to resist a sales pitch from someone in a white coat. You can purchase superhero clothing that makes you look even less glamorous than you usually do, which is strange because it seems to go the other way on the superheros. You can be a pirate, which in light of the internet and the Indian Ocean makes less and less sense every day.

Bizzare aside: I did hear on EconTalk that the voluntary arrangements among eighteenth century pirate ships were atypically democratic for the times, possibly influencing subsequent governance, but even if we grant them that, it isn’t really what we like about them, is it. Maybe we make protagonists of mobsters, bank robbers and pirates because in our lives we resent the criminalization of victimless acts and therefore admire the balls it takes to disregard a law. Unfortunate then that the crimes we glorify are ones with victims. Pirates, the real ones who stole rivalrous and excludable things, may have occasionally had more fun than other denizens of the eighteenth century, but they did so on the backs of others and therefore don’t deserve our respect or our Halloween tributes.

So: no good options. I was looking for a costume that looked good, referenced something reasonably cool from popular culture, made immediate sense to onlookers, could be assembled from things we had lying around the house, and took about half an hour to take from conception to completion. No real successes, I’m sorry to report. Lest you think my criteria were unreasonable, and look to blame my failure on an unwillingness to purchase something, plan ahead, or otherwise put at my disposal anything other than my usual wardrobe, I’ll have you know it can be done. I had a friend, the one I always ended up trick or treating with, who pulled it off, year after year, making it look silly to do anything else. He appeared to spend no time or effort. He bought nothing, he never dressed in logo-printed polyester, and let me tell you, he looked good.

This was my general impression, but if pressed for specifics I can’t recall many. The costumes that impressed me included my friend throwing on a fedora and a suit jacket and calling himself a gangster. (So effortless! So cool! Why did this never happen to me? Where did he get a suit jacket?) Another year the article of clothing he found lying around his house was a wide, round hat pointed at the top which his father brought home from Vietnam. I think these are used by poor peasants who farm rice and need to keep the sun off their necks, but here, on him, it signified something much sexier and exotic. Were there ninjas in Vietnam? Probably not. It did not matter. No one was reminded of a farmer. He was, if I may, ninjaesque.

As for the embarrassing results of my attempts to replicate his feat, the only one I remember with any clarity was the year I put on my grandfather’s long black wool coat. It is with great difficulty that I reveal to you, in a spirit of openness and honesty, and not letting the past hang over us and all that, that the only thing I found to accessorize the coat with was, wait for it, balloons. Several balloons, I seem to recall, floating along over my head, just begging the question. I answered, with the heavy resignation of someone who is waiting patiently for this night to be over, that I was a balloon seller. You know. A balloon seller.

I’m not enjoying this, but I want to spell it out for you: I did not look good. My already tenuous self esteem was taking body blows every time someone new looked my way. I had no connection to any cool character, past or present. I also was not identifiable, not easily and not ever, not even after I’d done my best to explain, and my best, by that point, had moved past half-hearted and was actively flirting with words like “sulking,” “gloomy,” and “inaudible.” I didn’t know what I was myself. Couldn’t explain it. I couldn’t figure how I had come to be in such a awful position, scrambling the night of Halloween for something, anything, considering that costumes typically appeared, fully formed and awesome, a week before the holiday, after the discovery of some obvious and effortless linchpin garment, preferably one brought from a far away land, by a father, maybe.

That year as we walked through town I remember running into a classmate, a pretty and intimidating blond, surrounded by her friends and looking the opposite of an embarrassment. Not being far removed from elementary school and its automatic intimacy, we knew each other, and said hello, although this girl wouldn’t have considered herself a friend of mine. I was mortified. I think I tried to avoid even mentioning the words “balloon seller,” so tired and disgusted was I with my non-idea for a non-costume, so frustrated by my inability to justify, to myself or anyone else, why I was wearing this stupid coat. I had nothing to say, and bowed out of my social responsibilities, as I often do, with the grace of a log.

She was wearing a red baseball hat, backwards or cocked to the side, and I think her shirt was pulled and tied in a knot at the back. All her friends were dressed the same. The colors were red, maybe black, and white. Someone asked what they were. She said she was nookie. Like that song. Fred Durst’s band, what was their name? I did it all for the nookie. Limp Bizkit.

Limp Bizkit was a popular musical act, circa the earliest of the years I spent being awkward and dressing in oversized black coats. They were loud, dumb, and boorish, and their most popular song featured the refrain, “I did it all for the nookie, yeah! The nookie, yeah! So you can take that cookie, and stick it up your, yeah! Stick it up your, yeah! Stick it up your, yeah! And stick it up your, yeah!”

At the time it was not clear to me exactly what nookie was, and so nagging was my uncertainty that I much later looked it up just to pin it down, but seeing these girls I got the general idea. I now knew with certainty that was not a nonsense word, like those that featured in so many pop hooks of that era, but instead a word that referred to something a little dirty, something a little cheap, something sexual but not sexy, something childish and duchey.

My blond acquaintance was dressed like we had seen Fred Durst, the lead singer, dress in the video for this song. It is an ugly and smug wardrobe, the highlight of which is the aforementioned bright baseball cap, which says simply, I may be stupid, but I’m also mean, so stay the fuck out of my way. On her the outfit was tighter, and seemed sadder, less bullying and more tragic. She was volunteering to be the target of his cat calls, the willing subject of his leering and his arrogant appetite. It skived me out. I had that sense that history would not look kindly on her costume. Limp Bizkit never seemed like a keeper to me, and in my experience grown women did not subject themselves to this sort of thing, so presumably there was a moment when one left that kind of desperation and degradation behind. I hoped there was. Despite my balloons and wanting to disappear, I left feeling embarrassed for her.

I’ve accused myself of being judgemental and prude more times than you’ll ever manage, so don’t think I’m not aware of how I sound. She was young, Pop lust rarely hurts anyone, and playacting the part of a sexually desirable and available woman is often harmless, even charming and pleasantly embarrassing in hindsight. I had my own reasons for reacting the way I did. She was frighteningly confident, glamorous, and inaccessible, and things were much simpler if I could pity her. Her overeager embrace of sex didn’t have to highlight my own nervousness and inability to feel desirable if I could, instead, laugh it off. And of course, my failure of a costume wasn’t so bad once you considered I might have gone as nookie itself.

I hope she’s doing well. There were other things over the years that fed my pity, like her tendency to slavishly follow around a certain bossy alpha girl, and hints of a relationship with a boy who was significantly older and therefore potentially dangerous. Her fragility may have been all in my mind. It’s still a powerful memory. I wanted then to protect her, from the world, from herself. I wanted to be the beautiful and confident one, wanted to take her away, release her from the politics and paranoia of middle school. I would offer instead the serenity and solidity of my maturity, and she would be so grateful, so relieved to take off the nookie costume and leave her stupid friends behind forever. Most importantly, she would see me as I really was, not mumbling and sincerely hoping to vanish, but smiling gregariously, putting everyone at ease, charming, sparkling, shining.

—

I don’t know why but no other costumes, no other Halloweens, come readily to mind. I’ll think about it and try to figure out what else I put together. Somehow the adrenaline coursing through my system in my embarrassment has made that one night my brain’s go to story about the holiday and left no room for others. Some years I may have not attempted anything, figuring (correctly) that dismissing questions about my lack of a costume would be easier than finding something good or suffering something bad. It wasn’t like I got good at it after a while. The costuming was never really my thing.

I know people who are not me have memories of elaborate childhood costumes, and parents working overtime, or that time you had the best idea ever, and whether or not it worked, it was a glorious making the attempt. If you want to share a best or worst costume, explain why you’d rather fly than turn invisible, or talk about being dumped or fired or the songs your father taught you, write me at thisjoyfulnoise@gmail.com. I’d love to hear your stories.

Notes on New York

With many thoughts daily demanding to be remembered, and not being in the habit of taking time to write them down in a serious way, I have gathered a pile of handwritten notes that sits on my desk, reminding me that should I ever decide to sit down and begin my new life as a writer, the task ahead of me will be impossibly huge. Instead, this pile suggests, I should aim for some other line of work, garbage collection, perhaps. I should search for that clerk position in charge of sorting, shuffling, and filing things that no one will ever ask for again. Your strengths, my unruly collection of ink and paper gingerly suggests, lie somewhere else. No offense.

Occasionally I transcribe the phrases scribbled on this paper into a computer file, which I’ve titled Notes on New York and situated at the dead center of my desktop, so that like my desk, my computer thoughtfully reminds me that productivity is not really my thing. Leave that to those ambitious types. Don’t be a fool. There is solitaire to be played. Terry Gross is interviewing Iggy Pop. Relax.

When I open this file I sometimes find mysterious little poems that have no remaining connection to what they were supposed to record. One day, apparently, I intended to write down some thoughts on food, and took this note: “eating, new fruits.” I’m intensely curious as to what fruits I was referring to, but the following line offers no help: “on being too loud.” I think the person being too loud was me. Why I didn’t go with a memory aid more direct or detailed I don’t know. And now you, dear reader, will never know.

Other notes are very clear, if a bit much. One day, presumably after watching the Discovery Channel for a little too long, I wrote this: “the wonders of mass production! holy fuck – toothbrushes! breaker boxes!” I understand your enthusiasm, former me. I really do. But what, beyond delight at the very existence of objects we all take for granted, do you want me to convey? Why toothbrushes? And, let’s be honest, is the profanity really necessary?

I’m not so worried about having misplaced a stunning insight on breaker boxes, but I know for a fact that I loose a lot. They are not the thoughts that I write down and later find less than impressive (“how charismatic, the hudson valley”) or those I don’t fully understand (“Subway. Benneton Ad. Utopia.”). They are the things that never make it even that far.

There are impressions, sensations, and experiences that absolutely fill me up, make me instantly ache for the ability to share my inner life with someone else. I go for a pen and can’t think of anything to say. I try to stay in the moment; tourists passing me with video cameras fixed on outstreached arms are a constant warning not to shortchange the present in service of its preservation. Inevitably when I get around to trying to put words to what happened to me, they’re of no use. The only ones I encounter anywhere in the vicinity describe motion, temperature, color, brightness, viscosity. I’m intensely dissatisfied with them. And without a detailed description of what was happening – every shade, every texture, every point of light – even the best words are impotent. Without knowing everything that happened that day, and the day prior, without precise familiarity of my mental landscape, the life I’ve lived up to this moment, my understandings of the shape of the universe and my place in it, my opinions on politics economics history and culture and the long story of how they came to be what they are – I’m sorry, it’s just a loosing battle.

It surprises me how often the sensations that are most central to the experience of being me, how many of the moments that move me the most, seem completely beyond the reach of writing, indeed of any communication medium. I wonder that the world seems so full of fascinating and worthwhile writing, storytelling, and reporting when this process seems so doomed to miss out on the meat of life. What we manage to stick words to and share, as wonderful as that output is, could this be in reality only a tiny fraction of what is, of the experiences we are? Is that wonderful or terrible?

I’m not sure what it is about the world that inspires this kind of conceptual vertigo. It could be the physical size, although I’m fairly certain I have absolutely no grasp of that, or the numbers of people, on which I can’t imagine I understand any better. It could be this unwise attempt at calculating the possible realationships between our billions of lives, each governed by a good hundred trillion cells, each made of so many atoms, and so on, that my brain keeps making. But there’s more to it than that, bigger things going on. I believe we can identify and describe historical and cultural currents and patterns, which are not well defined and understood things, but neither are they imagined. I believe there really exist, in some nearly intangible way, ideals and ideas and memes, those things that defy quantification but have real effects on the physical universe. In fact, I admit they seem to color all the stars in the sky.

Dizzying numbers feeding impossibly complex relationships within maddeningly inaccessible scales, that’s what this universe is, and it’s high time I admit that it’s not something I can ever hope to write down. I want to sing it, the beauty of what is, the body electric, the noosphere thilling with its existence. It seems unbearable that I cannot understand it, explain it, contain it, and pass it around like a jar of fireflies saying see? Do you see? This is what is. This, this is what is. Is it not beautiful.

I’ll make do with the moments I can capture. I’ll dutifully transcribe the impressions from my notes (“the sweat on my face, the breeze playing over my ear, the black marks on every sidewalk”). I’ll gather them up, toss aside the chaff, and weave the strong ones into something whole, something with a beginning and an end, and before you can blink something new will have come into being, a narrative, a story. It has been carefully assembled here, cultivated, culled and coaxed. Suddenly we are grinning, we are laughing, no longer troubled by our failure to describe the beauty of what is, because here is a new beauty, a thing all our own – a story, built of glottal attacks and serifs, nothing but photons and the firings of neurons, nothing but patterns in darkness. Which is really more than enough.

He Becomes A Nudnik

Mr. Singer’s admonition has me paralyzed about writing here, which is no good, seeing as how I’ve decided to try to write every day. Yesterday I let myself off the hook because I ended up working 14 hours straight. Today it was quite simply too hot to think. Proposal for a work of conceptual art in the form of a blog: every day, I will post an excuse as to why I cannot post on that day.

Tonight I did headstand. I was so proud, looking in the mirror during the class, of my broad shoulders, my collar bone, my heart. My ego was basking, rejoicing, as everyone in class watched me balance on my head, move my legs through a series of postures, and breathe loudly.

In both writing and yoga, I have to both utilize and get past this huge ego of mine. It won’t let me admit fault. It also won’t let me reveal faults to others. It doesn’t react kindly to criticism. Sometimes it seems to be holding me back – in fear of failure and embarrassment, or in certainly that I don’t have to change, don’t need to be challenged, don’t deserve to be disagreed with – more than any other part of me. But there’s something about that flood of love for myself, prideful and arrogant though it may be, that I need to listen to. It wants great things for me. It makes big plans and trusts that I can follow through. It takes great pride in hard work, rewarding me for my effort with a renewed certainly in my awesomeness.

Yoga is great at putting you right in your work, your challenges, as you simultaneously hold and release, strive for more and accept where you are, surrender and strengthen. There probably hasn’t been a class I’ve taken that I haven’t come face to face with this ego of mine, listened to it, mindfully ignored it, and gotten to know it better. So I want to spend a lot more time on the mat, and also writing here, where my work – about when and how to include the first person in my writing, what tone to set, what words to chose – will be uncomfortably and productively with me at all times.

ga ga ga ga ga

In Garnerville today for the open house. Among my finds: 1) An internet radio station I may be able to hook up with – they don’t podcast because of royalty issues, but any DJing experience would be worthwhile. 2) A few guys who love their jobs. Always inspiring to see. Also, people for whom their work and career are separate. Always thought provoking. 3) Beauty, especially where human design interacts with non-human forces, like in woodworking, in cooking, and in that striking quality streams have while meandering through industrial complexes. 4) An intemperate love of carbonated water. What gives? I used to hate this stuff. 5) The Issac Bashevis Singer quote, “the real power of literature is in observing other people… Although I do write from time to time in the first person, I don’t consider it a healthy habit… The writer who writes about himself all the time must become a bore, just like the man who talks all the time about himself. When the writer becomes the center of his attention, he becomes a nudnik.” Something for all bloggers to think about. Here’s to observing other people. And seltzer.