the experiential hit

I rarely walk without headphones. I like the idea of starting my day with a coffee and the idle browse, picking through artist after artist until I find the day’s desired play. The sound follows the background, sets the scene. There are days when you can usurp the offered trajectory, play something upbeat when the moment demands its sleep. Then there are times when the contrast grates, leaves the finger reaching for delete. Music has its own moment too, the song last listened to when you were four feet ten and licking braces. The riff that bared repeating forty-two times a day when you were eighteen and about to please the female.

By virtue of some copy paste cheat, I was stuck with Collective Soul when steering down Mission street at 3pm. For a moment everything about the present feels unfamiliar, forced. The mind rekindles its previous context, draws you up as the teenage kid with size ten feet and counting, draws you sitting in some row-by-row classroom endeavor. The big boy with the bushy hair turns to your face, flips you the CD and exclaims, “you can buy it from me now, but only if i can buy it back off you when you’re done.”

You comply.

a match, a man and an okcupid walk into a bar,

“If the dating sites had a mixer, you might find OK Cupid by the bar, muttering factoids and jokes, and Match.com in the middle of the room, conspicuously dropping everyone’s first names into his sentences. The clean-shaven gentleman on the couch, with the excellent posture, the pastel golf shirt, and that strangely chaste yet fiery look in his eye? That would be eHarmony”

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/07/04/110704fa_fact_paumgarten?currentPage=all

Find out who’s been looking at your Facebook Profile!

I’ve been looking at your facebook profile. I couldn’t help myself. You’re awfully good looking, a likeable smile; that chin. You have better friends than me. Better, faster, stronger; hipper. I see you made a new friend last week. He’s really good looking. My insecurities creep. But I won’t say a peep, just observe. When you broke up with me I checked your profile four times daily for two years running. Habit forming, less destructive than you’d think. Click, scroll the offered steeple, note the changed make-up of your social teeth. And I totally clicked that link; find out who’s been looking at your facebook profile. I click it every time. I click it despite the false-promise I know it to keep. I click it because I’m a creep.

Internet peace.

dog eared encounters on monday afternoons

A pudgy man meanders into a bookstore. His make-up, a collective of cataloged hooks; best-of, neighborhood favourite, fashionable fit. Thick wayfarers sit perched atop a Jewish nose, juts out to jail his personality; born this way. A thick bushy beard bares its bristles across his jaw, shifts a little as he speaks. Across his frame he fits an improperly tight plaid shirt, crafting his stomach into something a little less round. Jet-black jeans decorate his legs, send them into the purposely worn sneakers he covets like none other. A girlfriend in tow, she walks ahead; an empty leash draped from her hand. For him, we assume; the sexual selves an internet aroused.

Together they round the showcased island. A touch of books follows his trailing hand, non-committal. Her presence, disinterest, the implicit offering: “hurry”. Three rounds done and his path turns to the counter, the assistance of a paid head.

“Hey dude, so we’re like, going on a road trip for three weeks.”

Pausing, he waits for the piqued interest.

Spurned.

“Right, so yeah, um, this road trip. I was hoping to get some good reads for it, you know, some good books to keep me busy while we drive out and explore the country”

The paid head tilts itself to the side, a quizzical effect. Responds,

“Is there something specific you’re looking for? Like, do you have a favourite author or something?”

“Well, um, I mean, I love to read books. I just, love them. So, like, whatever you could recommend would be really cool”

Again, the paid head asserts its stance. Turns further to the side, severs its contact with the offered eyes.

“I mean, that’s really broad. Who was the last author you read?”

“Oh, yeah, um, I read so many books, I just don’t really remember, you know how it is”

“No, I don’t”

On that note the girlfriend intervenes.

“You bought a Michael Chabon once, it’s in your bathroom, but I don’t think it was ever opened. Maybe you like him.”

The paid head nods.

the three thousand mile [t]high[s].

My thin friends will have to excuse this pursuit. My cycling record just turned to three thousand miles; three thousand miles since September sixth. Three thousand miles and one hundred and seventy one hours on a bicycle. I like the number, I like that I’ve gone a distance without going anywhere. Iterations, a commute. The common dialog hates it, hates the forty-odd miles between the city and the nine-to-five. I used to, used to drive the conversation between people on a train, “Seriously, imagine a job in the city, the sleep in, the easy weeks”. I remember hearing of others who took to their bicycles to pursue the route, remember thinking them unnecessary, unfit to exercise rational thought. There was an excess to it that I refused to pay tribute to; excess lives outside my own character, an observed mark.

But I went, started up, found a friend who framed the gap.

“You’ll manage. Small increments.”

Weekend rides through the park; wet with sweat and cursing ills. Weekend rides through the park and across the bridge; dead legs and muttered words. Weekend rides through the park and across the bridge and down to Sausalito; remembers the view. Weekend rides through the park and across the bridge with a loop through paradise in turns and back; remembers breathing, remembers feeling rarely better.

And then to work.

The rhythm draws you in; draws you outside your thoughts. No matter the meddling the day might front, starting it off with a two and a half hour ride keeps that contained. There’s a meditative quality to it, something to the early morning, the silent company of surly men. There’s occasional chatter amongst our ranks, but the connection lives in rare air. We laugh through cadence bursts, console with feathered brakes, lash out with a brace of changed gears; little ring to big. Ours is a simpler time, a societal order that lifts the strongest man first. To watch us flood the southern bounds of the bay is a pictured frame. The spotting of suburbia as the miles count down; the scene cast against a morning light, the lashing rays that settle a waking bay.

There are few things better.

she knows what ‘nothing’ means.

…
I rarely inhale books. My pursuit of the ending is more methodical, incremental. I observe clusters of pages pressed between dog-eared implements; evidence thereof. I won’t go so far as to describe Didion’s book as the finest I’ve read, or anything near, but it was lovely enough. Sad and spacious and empty, her characters were this perfect reflection of their landscape [Los Angeles, Vegas, the desert around]. There were pages where one could feel the delirious heat of an insufferable valley day, feel out the lack of cohesion it brought to a series of thoughts. Maria falling from place to person, falling apart with careful thought, falling apart as her externalities demanded.
…
One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what “nothing” means, and keep on playing.

Why, BZ would say.
Why not, I say.

taste.

…
The cover and title draw us in, but it’s not a tenuous pull. How we choose to decorate our front is a measure of our purported content; not separate. It speaks to our tastes, a fleeting flash into our mind’s work. An author will seek out the publisher they believe best able to push their work, they’ll fight for a fine title; some concessions, give, but the author knows what their work should look like. The final choice will be cognizant of that. Even insofar as selection of an image or spine goes, there’s something of them to be found in the manner that it’s put together. I’ve seen Franzen bandied about any number of books charts for years, but nothing of his pursuit of the American epic or family trauma appealed [to me]. A friend mentioned it worthwhile to give him a go, and so my pursuit took to a store. “How to be alone” is a collection of his essays, nothing cohesive. The title has everything to do with one of the included stories, but it doesn’t necessarily speak to a particular narrative holding the rest in place. With respect to my choice of it, the title appealed, that meld with the visual setting, a lone figure buried in a book, her surrounds a blurry hold of fellow readers; the idea of that was something I connected with, connected with the the author’s selection of that front as an illustration into the way he thinks. His particular tastes as something I could relate to, would trust. And, by extension, the recommender as someone whose own tastes I connected with; it’s a flimsy circle we set around our hips, but it’s fair and correct more often than not.

There’s some truth to that in most all facets of life. One’s sense of preference is an established set of variables and rules, it’s a representation of our person to the outside. It’s not a far stretch to sell the airport bookshelf reader as a perpetrator of poor taste. This self-same man watches whatever television is on at a convenient hour, he wears a North Face jacket in black and classically blue Levi jeans, and his feet sit firm in running shoes. It’s not a stretch to imagine his eating habits and wine routines, his offered adjectives when complimenting a wife, “Well you look nice.” Nice, the thoughtless offering a magazine-reading-man learns from dating strategy garnered pages back. By the same token, I trust in the tastes of a woman who delves into books for reasons beyond required reading, and I trust that her tastes extend to her wake in life. We all have our mediums, my own knowledge of what makes great art [be that photography, painting or whatnot] is slim, but that same worldview I impose on my selection of books, I carry with me when observing other forms. I trust myself not to love the romance novel of renaissance art. I think that’s true of most people; people who talk to well-considered selection criteria in one form, are unlikely to discard the barriers to adoration in another.

This has a touch of narcissism to it; misplaced. I don’t know that I consider my own tastes better, simply that they’re a reflection of my way of thinking. Perhaps with age, and the refinement of one’s own tastes [an inevitability with iterations], we also better trust in our ability to identify others who exhibit similar criterion when consuming life.

…

versioned.

As someone who likes words, I like this idea of presenting myself with a textual base. I like the way I look on paper, and equally, I trust my ability to judge another based on the way they present themselves on paper. I can find some semblance of attraction through this means, though it’s never complete unless touched by a physical hold. I need to like the way her shoulders are put together, to need the smell that sits behind some obstructing hair across her neck. One doesn’t exist without the other. I’ve often heard the head banging bash of internet hatred [with respect to dating], but I think it misses the point somewhat. The internet, as with any medium that accounts for presence and interaction, is nothing more than a context. You can slip a man into a bar and watch him flounder over beer and the brevity of poorly worded small-talk, but have him perched atop a golf cart on a fine green day and he’s peachy in turns. We react to circumstance, we’re a play of personality in flitting light. It’s easy to think you regress to some familiar past when visiting family, but in many respects it’s simply your personality responding to known variables. Within the confines of family, an expression of self [relative to those variables] returns. It’s not that you necessarily changed when leaving home, but more that your externalities shifted, and as did you with them.

I like this idea that we have versions; some conscious, some reactive. I like this idea that the introduction of a song with the right rhythmic blow will pull us along in its draft; pleased. And in the company of others, our offered self becomes a victim to the boundaries those interactions build. To be short tempered and cynical in the hold of a man we’re jealous of, to loving and lecherous in the presence of the man we want something from. Most people have some idea of choice surroundings, this place that offers their best reflection of self; and by extension, that comfort lends itself to the latching of others. In my case, the characterization of another comes down to characters. To see somebody in a bar leaves me grasping at unknowns; to greet, to please, to flail, to fall to my knees. But the neglect of an apostrophe, an abbreviated word, the excessive enter of enthusiastic exclaim, these are things I know not to need. These are things I trust. A sentence requires thought, a lustrous hair-flick is thoughtless groin-fodder [though to be fair: a lustrous hair flick thrown by a well-sentenced woman is lovely enough].

Just a thought, discard and leave me pleased.
…

edible words.

A day of dappled seaborne clouds.

The phrase and the day and the scene harmonised in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?

…

An excerpt from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [Joyce].

whacking off, a jew and an irishman jest.

I like these contrasting views of teenage angst.

…

Joyce, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

[...] the light laughter of a girl reached his burning ears. The frail gay sound smore his heart more strongly than a trumpetblast, and, not daring to lift his eyes, he turned aside and gazed, as he walked, into the shadow of the tangled shrubs. Shame rose from his smitten heart and flooded his whole being. The image of Emma appeared before him and, under her eyes, the flood of shame rushed forth anew from his heart. If she knew to what his mind had subjected her or how his brutelike lust had torn and trampled upon her innocence! Was that boyish love? Was that chivalry? Was that poetry? The sordid details of his orgies stank under his very nostrils: the sootcoated packet of pictures which he had hidden in the flue of the fireplace and in the presence of whose shameless or bashful wantonness he lay for hours sinning in thought and deed: his monstrous dreams, peopled by apelike creatures and by harlots with gleaming jewel eyes: foul long letters he had written in the joy of guilty confession and carried secretly for days only to throw them under cover of night among the grass in the corner of a field beneath some hingeless door or in some niche in the hedges where a girl might come upon them as she walked by and read them secretly. Mad! Mad!

Or, the willing filth of Roth, in Portnoy’s Complaint.

Then came adolescence–half my waking life spent locked behind the bathroom door, firing my wad down the toilet bowl, or into the soiled clothes in the laundry hamper, or splat, up against the medicine-chest mirror, before which I stood in my dropped drawers to I could see how it looked coming out.