Notebook

I remember standing before the gods on a rainy Monday morning in Taiwan. Once again, the question that haunts me when I approach any kind of altar: Am I allowed to pray before you if I don’t understand you?

And how do I pray? Forty-something years old and I still do not know how to pray even though sometimes I try. Thankfully these temples offered a clear ritual: toss two moon-shaped blocks, ask a question, draw a numbered stick, and receive your fortune from a machine. A beautiful collision of technology and ancient rites. Soon I was gripped by a Vegas-style fever as I tried to upgrade my “very inferior fortune” to a superior one. Setting luck and superstition aside, the simple act of articulating a wish was clarifying. It forced me to remember what matters most in my life, followed by a small catharsis. Leaving the temple, I passed an elderly woman in a t-shirt that said, “Stay wild and free.”

McIntosh County Shouters – Sign of the Judgment

Wade in the Water: African-American Congregational Singing

We wash our hands constantly like we’ve done something wrong. We try not to touch our faces. The man sitting next to me spritzes his hands with sanitizer each time he sends an email. Slow down, I think. That stuff is worth $400 now.

Last night I dreamt about a spray-tanned mouth hollering misspelled bullshit in all-caps. Fake news. Hoax. I dreamt of blinding dentures telling me the fact of the matter and saying here’s the deal. This election is going to be hell and I must stop watching the news. There was a time when being politically informed sounded dignified, even noble. Now it’s like throwing your soul in the trash. Hygiene starts with screens.

One of the finest things I own is a lamp with a stern brass pirate, one hand on his hip and the other gripping a sword. This pirate is a landmark in my mind, a mythic figure who haunts my first memories. For decades he stood on a spindly desk in my grandfather’s basement that smelled of spider poison and Saginaw Bay. I was afraid to look at it when I was small, perhaps sensing it was a relic from a different world, unable to imagine it would one day become part of mine.

My grandfather inherited the lamp from Queenie and Hazel, his spinster aunts. They say Hazel bought it at a Detroit pawn shop in the early 1900s, but nobody knows for sure. They said a lot of things about Queenie and Hazel. They said the sisters hopped a fence and walked across a military airstrip in Kalamazoo, determined to register as nurses in World War I. They said that a man tried to kiss Hazel, and Queenie grabbed her rifle and chased him down the street. She even fires off a couple of shots in some versions of the tale. I only know Queenie and Hazel from their images scattered in attic boxes, their faces unseen on glass Kodachrome slides. For me, this lamp is where they live.

The pirate watched over my grandfather’s spindly desk for decades, switched on when he went downstairs to putter in his woodshop, where he produced his vases, bookends, and chests. When he moved to a retirement home, most of his belongings were sold. But he brought his lamp with him.

To make it easier for residents to locate their rooms in the endless corridors of look-alike doors, the nursing staff encouraged each patient to place a memento on a little shelf mounted next to each door. Plastic flowers, birthday cards, family snapshots, and woodland figurines lined the halls because it’s easier to recall a photograph of your grandchild than room 27B. My grandfather placed this lamp outside his door, where it threatened the tiny shelf with its brass weight. The pirate looked as if he might murder the neighbor’s ceramic kitten. Some of the residents complained. When he asked my opinion, I told him I loved his lamp. “Me too,” he said. “I think it classes up the place.”

He taped my name beneath the lamp before he died. Today it sits on my desk, and although I still see the stern pirate that frightened me as a child, I see many other things as well.

Another chapter in this endless season of passive-aggressive battles in hotel lobbies and gyms, their flatscreens cycling between Fox News and CNN. After a breathtaking consolidation of the moderate candidates followed by swooning media coverage, a disoriented centrist with beautiful dentures dominated the Super Tuesday map. We will live through the election of 2016 again, this time as farce.

People talk in conspiratorial tones. They say the sudden winnowing of candidates was the result of dark money. They say the networks and boardrooms are happy to put up with another four years of a vicious idiot for president in exchange for tax breaks and boffo ratings. But maybe enough Democrats genuinely believe nominating a doddering man who wants to “return to normal” is the best way to win against a death cult that torched the rule book years ago. I don’t know which scenario is more chilling.

But I can’t read any more political opinions. I don’t even want to read my own opinions.

There are more seats on the subway than usual today and the library is extra quiet. Everybody’s taking care not to sniffle or cough. I’m trying to finish the book I’ve been writing for years. Instead I stare at old maps of the Mojave desert, dreaming of the day I find my way back.

I replay the days the two of us spent wandering the vacant grid of California City where there are only empty sandlots and signs for streets named Oldsmobile, Cadillac, Chrysler, and the heartbreakingly optimistic 140th Street. Or the half-abandoned towns with names like Desert Shores and Bombay Beach that huddle along the edge of the accidental Salton Sea, little failed utopias with streets named Diamond Avenue and Rainbow Lane.

The Saturday night vibration of buggies racing across the dunes. The celestial pinks that spill across the desert floor like a Renaissance painting. I think I could find religion out there.

Dirty Beaches – Golden Desert Sun

From Golden Desert Sun/Night Drive | Italian Beach Babes, 2010 | Bandcamp

A confirmed case of coronavirus in Manhattan. These are days of hand sanitizing lotion and being told to sing “Happy Birthday” twice in your head while washing your hands. Singing in your head is important. Sing it out loud and you’ll look like a serial killer preparing for a hunt.

Took the train upstate to visit a friend who moved into a massive barn after she retired. I like knowing there’s a direction to head after disaster strikes. “I know a woman in the Catskills,” I’ll say as we climb across the stalled traffic on George Washington Bridge with our belongings on our backs. “She has a well.”

A leap day. A reminder that if we can make extra days, we can do whatever we want. But today I’m reading headlines about viruses, panicked shoppers stocking up on bottled water, and a health task force held by a medieval Christian who does not believe in science. Meanwhile the Democratic Party is hellbent on nominating a candidate who promises “a return to normal” even though “normal” is exactly what led to today’s calamities.

“The beginnings of Dada were not art but disgust,” said Tristan Tzara in 1918. Each day the rationale for Dada’s rejection of logic makes a little more sense. But cynicism is a cheap dodge, isn’t it? The challenge is maintaining a sense of dignity and compassion in an increasingly undignified and dispassionate culture.

As public life turns increasingly inhuman and incoherent, perhaps the Surrealists provided an answer by directing their focus towards the subconscious and dreams. Our technologies are designed to focus on the self, to advertise and satisfy the ego—yet what if these energies were pointed at the subconscious instead?

At an academic mixer, a consultant from Brussels asked everyone to draw the shape of their lives on a Post-It note. I made a scribble and people approached me as if I’d scrawled a cry for help.

“But is the Bible considered fiction or non-fiction?” a woman asked nobody in particular on the Q train. Cut to a hospital waiting room where an infomercial babbled to a row of empty chairs: “This rare melon defies the aging process, allowing you to stay fresher and firmer.” Later that night, a stern middle-aged man would turn to the camera and say, “My mattress topper performs as promised.” In the meantime, a headline scrolled across the screen: The Food and Drug Administration Warns Against Buying Young People’s Blood to Prevent Aging.

A voice in the hallway said, “We’re all survivors here.” He’s right. We’re still here, doing our best to survive these days of propaganda, financial anxiety, and new viruses. Struggling to remain sane in a society that would rather tear itself to pieces than give up its myths and try something new. Anger or compassion? The answer must be compassion because it’s so much harder. Or maybe it’s time to end the American experiment. Break it into city-states and clear the stage for a better show.

Woke from a dream that I was pounding on a counter demanding a cash-back rebate because my soul was damaged. This surreal sensation continued when I stepped outside. Ash Wednesday and people walked the streets with smudged crosses on their foreheads. A beautiful ritual, ancient and haunted. Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. I envy the pageantry of Catholicism; it’s religion as art. Perhaps aesthetics can be a reason for otherworldy faith.

Today these smudges of ash looked a touch apocalyptic as coronavirus anxiety continues to take root. Squint a little and they might be a mark of infection or the protective omen of some new sect.

Flanked by health officials, the president held a rambling press conference and told us not to worry before blaming the Democrats. New infections are reported alongside articles that say it might not be a bad idea to gather supplies. Fill your prescriptions. Pick up some extra food and water. Be prepared for delays. How far will this thing go? Will history record this as a blip or is this the start of something bigger?

Bremen – Threshold Crossing

From Second Launch | Blackest Ever Black, 2014 | Bandcamp

Maybe we don’t need to have a president. Another chaotic debate among the Democrats, another feast for television pundits. They talk about jabs, attacks, and blows like it’s a boxing match. Meanwhile the Center for Disease Control is telling us to prepare for clusters of infection. Russian disinformation is spreading across our screens. Feels like everything is happening at the same time these days. Maybe it’s always felt that way.

Two hundred years ago, the philosopher David Hume pondered our imperfect world and theorized it was “only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance.” Not bad as far as magical nihilism goes. Beats the idea that we’re living in a terrible video game.

Instructional videos at the train station teach me how to behave in 2020. If there’s gunfire, take cover. Silence your cellphone. Take action only as a last resort. Be on the lookout for victims of human trafficking.

Pole – Winkelstreben (Peverelist Remix)

From Steingarten Remixes | ~Scape, 2007

A heavy slab of dub that shudders and jabs. See also Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.

Sixty degrees in February, and it’s never going to snow this winter. Twenty boxes of salmiakki arrived from Helsinki today. Salmiakki is Finnish salted licorice, and it can range from a tart confection to shrieking gasoline. It arrived in the nick of time because I’d been fantasizing about smoking again. I miss those minutes of unique solitude, the ritual of fire and ash. The world looked better when America smoked. A tactile world of cigarettes, record players, and newsprint rather than sitting with scrunched-up faces, tapping at pieces of glass. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.

The stock market plunged in response to coronavirus outbreaks in South Korea, Italy, and Iran. All day long, people have been on television saying we’re fucked. A trillion dollars lost in a day, they said, and the global economy could drop as much as twenty percent. I open another box of salmiakki and turn on the television so I can ignore it. Chipper commercials say things like “jawbone damage may occur” and “America’s most trusted home surveillance system.”

DJ Shadow – Building Steam With a Grain of Salt

From Endtroducing… | Mo Wax, 1997 | More

More classic salt.