Asked K. and P. whether they knew the situation of the War Powers act relative to the two wars the U.S. is involved in and they didn't know either.
June 22, 2003 Chicago
The grid goes out westward, seemingly without end and the street names
don't change even after it seems they should, belie the easy intimacies
with Chicago friends. Walked out on Division past Humbolt Park, past the
hells that cars make for one another on a day made for bicycles. The city
that works would come to a halt without the car--only the very rich live
close enough to walk to work (or else have no need to work) or at such
easy juxtaposition with the grid that Chicago crucifies its poorer citizens
upon, leaving them trapped in remote neighborhood that can only be reached
by an impossible number of left turns. But the police have everyone turning
right around Humbolt Park on this, the second day of Puerto Rican Day.
It is a holiday after all and one feels rich and special and knowledgeable
making right turns in Chicago. They lean on the horns and put out flags
and then more flags, until the banners seem commensurate with the noise.
And then they raise more noise.
Sitting here at the Pick Me Up café, sitting sideways at the little blue table where I wrote C. with such longing in French only slightly worse than I write now, trying to tie today together with yesterday. Waiting for the bus and the bus is not coming, not ever. The Puerto Rican girls all remade in the hostile, hard ghetto-elegant style of Jennifer Lopez. Two bottles of bad chardonnay bought for what five bottles of decent Bordeaux word cost at home with C. How everyone in Chicago dresses like a tourist in Paris--how the midwest takes itself for being the American Standard (also a brand name of a toilet as R. would be quick to point out) without this being true. Tourists melt invisibly into this city. Except the Europeans. If someone looks well dressed he is certainly from elsewhere.
But anyone on a bicycle is necessarily a resident. The bicycle is the machine by which certain Chicagoans resolve the inequalities of geography, a king of reverse spinning machine upon which the grid is unraveled. A bicycle: this machine kills real-estate developers.
June 23, 2003 Chicago
Drinks at K. and P.'s house.
Was half an hour early and so found K. with the boys in the bath. K. took
little V. out to dry him, leaving me with little J., who promptly threatened
to pee in the remaining water and then splash it on me. I don't know whether
he made good on the former but he certainly did on the latter, so I hose
him down with cold water after one warning. Cruel I suppose, but funny,
too. It made his mother laugh anyway. Read the boys the story about the
Sneetches and we put them to bed. Little J. insisted I put his stuffed
snake into bed with him and so I did. (a hearty hello to you, young J.,
perhaps reading this in the future. Where is the green snake now? Do you
remember your little black bear? I am the man who gave it to you on your
first birthday).
M. came over and we all went out to the garden to discuss subversion, obsessive knitting, and drastic antirat measures involving hairspray and lighters. But what I wanted to know about was American airports.
Everyone informs me that it is indeed the new custom that all airline passengers take off their shoes of their own volition, so as "not to hold up the line." Conformity is always good citizenship--this is simply an impromptu custom not suggested by any sinage or public notice. Same dynamic as self-censorship.
Read about what seems to be an even more disgusting version of Seinfeld in the Reader that captures perfectly the mediocre snarkiness of upper class Chicago. It appears to be based on the principle that those who live at the center of this city that is everywhere a suburb of itself are culturally and morally equivalent to those who actually live in the suburbs. Apparently written by a group of Lincoln Park friends for whom Sex in the City is the height of wit. Am once again reminded of how the tone of the city is set by those who persuade themselves of the rectitude of their lives by accumulation material and by conformity to the demographic standards as broadcast to them on television. This certainly accounts for the feeling one has of being on a movie set that one suffers while in a so-called better neighborhood, like Wrigleyville or Lincoln Park.
June 24, 2003 Chicago
Late breakfast at Filter in Wicker Park.
Used to be something else bust, aside from the name, nothing seems to
have changed. Seven dollar French toast. Everyone has a tattoo and wears
flip-flops.
(12h55 over Lake Michigan)
U.S. Air managed to change my ticket to an earlier flight and the guards
were much more respectful than in Boston. I didn't see other passengers
putting their shoes on the conveyor belt either, so there seems to be
some hope, anyway. seemingly hundred of security personnel congregated
near the terminal entrance seemingly with nothing to do.
(15h48 Pittsburgh)
Tried to call C. , but the only payphone that would place an international
call was monopolized by a breathy adolescent girl in the full cry of some
betrayal drama. I stood nearby for over forty minutes! At times she seemed
to be asleep, having slumped forward in the booth to better bear up under
a dire weight that could have only been communicated to her stout shoulders
over that one phone. A second day of disgusting food. Feel heavy and slow
and cross. Everyone but everyone here is eating ice cream--to soften the
blow of traveling?
June 25, 2003 Brookline
Went down to the language school for
my orientation. I'm to have one tutorial student for about two hours a
day. As such I'll make about $150 a week, which is close to what I made
working summers in a grocery store in Texas. Well, work anyway,
a place to go at a specific time, specific place. Will cost me ten dollars
in commutation. Must admit this makes me want to look for a more traditional
job. A job offer isn't an insult, goes the logic, so get along. But why
are wages so artificially low? Why is this allowed? I'll be making considerably
less than when I went door to door, hassling people at dinnertime for
donations to a Texas environmental lobby years ago, a job which I consider
the low point of a very unimpressive career.
Second really awful ride on the subway. Idiot conversations by intelligent people sapped out by the heat and bad jobs. Want to lie down and sleep now and then, a fatigue like I suffered when working in New York. Just curl up in my afternoon funk and ride the T until they throw me off. Weekends in New York were really about avoiding overfatigue, not about rest or anything like it. You run like hell to prove that you aren't tired. How I hate people who hate people who hate work, the smug superiority of that position. It's work just being alive for fuck's sake. Dreaming of the big rock candy mountain, where they hung the jerk who invented work.
Still a bit sick, feverish, no doubt owing to my excesses in Chicago. Slept not at all, a constant grayness in my head that ice water alleviates for five minutes only. Aunt and Uncle out late to dinner, I suppose. They bring home Greek lamb.
June 26, 2003 Brookline
What is it about this idiot culture that
makes me want to hit back? Or a better question might be what doesn't
make me want to hit back. On television its Ben Affleck and Matt Damon
turning movie production into a reality TV show and everyone is so fucking
grateful. On the other channel it's vampires biting vampires. The American
spectacle is a race to see who can first commodify the most infantile
and baroque imaginings. The plotlines of our lives in this country are
so rounded off that it is not only the politicians who paint us in broad
strokes but we ourselves. (The vampire on television now bites his own
wrist).
American imagination at its point of exhaustion, run out of land to conquer, unequipped for any intellectual task not closely aligned with commerce. We just want to look cool and be noticed by Ben Affleck. Me the jerko writer who is really just kvetching over the level of public entertainment, an acknowledged evil, the self confidence long ago trained out of him in pursuit of an art that no longer exists. The exhaustion of imagination. We need to swing through the gravity of another planet before we have can return to a happy vector.
One can see it in the citizens who, if they do not look like children, seem insane. A clownish man entered the café wearing leather Swedish clogs, carrying a cork-handled walking stick (quite technical-looking) in one hand and, I guess a granita in the other, wearing rainbow suspenders, and a paper bicycle cap. He must have been fifty, a poster boy nevertheless for one whose needs must constantly be met, preferably in beverage form.
I remember hearing Tom Waits's song "Alice" on France Culture and being choked by its beauty, by the feeling that few in earshot could appreciate how well written it is: "I must have been insane to go skating on your name/ and by tracing it twice/I fell through the ice/ of Alice." all I wanted was to go to some public place where it was being played and watch for others to notice it. Nobody does. The popularity of sad songs owes anyway to the sad-like feelings they raise in us citizens, how they help us feel something other than acquisitiveness, make us realize that there are others who lead so-called authentic lives. Accordingly, there is an air-conditioned joylessness in most upbeat American music, just another mode that has lost the relevance of its address thanks to commodification (a word which I am surprised my word processor is unfamiliar).
Everything good in this country has to hide to survive, is almost impossible for foreigners to discover and completely hidden from the Average American jerk who drinks every beverage from a plastic cup--how soon will it be before adult sippy cups appear? The afflicted woman beside me, who cannot perhaps afford her antipsychotics, shakes and writes little wavy lines that signify the sea when they are drawn by a child, but done with such brio that I am convinced she imagines herself to be composing a symphony.
And then two pissed off old Lefty women who make my day eavesdropping on their outrage at Israel. And then of course the talk turns to computers. And then to catching flies with the vacuum cleaner, an excellent idea that never occurred to me. Imagination lives in the U.S.
