rocket to nowhere

I used to own a porno film on VHS— The Devil in Miss Jones 2. It was quite a bit campier than the original (and classic), and contained a scene at the beginning with the titular Miss Jones in Hell, damned to an eternity of being unable to come, and trying desperately to get off on Cyrano de Bergerac’s nose, which, because this was Hell, was a cock.

Nobody wants a cock nose.

I say “own,” but really I borrowed it from someone and never gave it back.

I bought my first DVD player the very week DVD rentals surpassed VHS rentals.

I had a friend growing up who owned a Beta-Max machine. Together, we watched the Beatles film Let It Be and several episodes of a Monkees marathon MTV had aired one weekend.

I have not and will not spend money on a Blu-Ray player. My computer doesn’t have an optical drive, and I don’t miss it.

I have a hypothesis that Apple Computer’s rise from the ashes in the late 90s was funded primarily by the porn industry. Consider: The iMac was an easily portable, all-in-one machine with photo, video, and sound editing software pre-installed. The iMac also made it ridiculously easy to get on the Internet, which, at the time, was enjoying its first boom.

Wikipedia tells me that the theme song to The Devil in Miss Jones 2 was sung by Johnny Hartman. I don’t know what’s more shocking about that statement: that Johnny Hartman recorded a theme song for a pornographic film, or that a pornographic film had a theme song that wasn’t plunked out on a $50 Casio by somebody’s nephew.

Johnny Fucking Hartman.

So is Jazz the Beta-Max to Pop’s VHS? That would assume, I guess, that Pop is dead, which, of course, it isn’t. And perhaps I shouldn’t be so proud of not owning an optical drive.

In Act I of the play, Edmond Rostand says of Cyrano, “He’s famous for his long . . . sword.”

Although I don’t mind them, I feel cut off from all the other people in this country—to mention only this country. They of course speak their own language. I think I also mean body language. For instance, if I were to touch a finger to my forehead, I would most certainly mean that I should be better at thinking. That I myself should be better at thinking. And if I were to snap with first the fingers of my right hand, and then the fingers of my left hand, and then clap my right hand over the hollow made by my half-fisted left hand, it would just be me passing the time. That is all.

It is also true that they may not want me here, but I think that might be true everywhere. I mean, surely there is a place where I might be wanted, but nobody really likes foreigners much. Probably because they’re foreign. And they do such foreign things. And speak foreignly. It works the other way too though. I find myself in a country full of foreigners.

Connecting is difficult, no matter what. The other day for instance, I sat in the same place for eight hours, and tried to talk to someone. In the end, though we had namaged to communicate some certain things, I’m afraid the larger point was lost. I do not know on whom the larger point was lost. I’m not at all certain that my time wasn’t wasted.

*The first sentence of this story is from Lydia Davis’ story “The Professor,” which can be found on p156 of Davis’ collected stories.

[Three Ton Coworker, when he comes to work, stands by the water cooler, and dares you to pull a conical cup from the dispenser.]

“These days I try to tell myself that what I feel is not very important.” —Lydia Davis, “What I Feel”

In order to close the door properly, you have to lift up on the handle, and slide the upper outside corner of the door past part of the frame so that the latch will click. Doing so makes the scraping noise of wood on wood or painted wood on painted wood, the same sort of noise skin might make against a balloon. If you are inside the room, you have to push the door closed. If you are outside the room, you have to pull the door closed. There is something wrong with the handle on the outside, and it has come off in my hand more than once. But the door does close, and the latch latches, and there is no reason to believe that one is not safe on either side of it really, unless one is allergic to mold, but that’s another kind of safety maybe. The door is made of solid wood. It is painted white. I do not know how many times it has been painted. The paint is chipped in places, and the door is still uniformly white, so it’s been painted white a number of times. We use the phrase “a number of times” to mean multiple times, but one is also a number. The smell on the other side of the door varies, but it’s never bad. The mold smell isn’t bad either exactly, but no one would probably ever call it good. The door’s handle is also white, but plastic, not wood. Part of me would like to describe the noise of the closing door as a squeak, but it’s lower-pitched than that, and another possibly better word isn’t coming to me at the moment. The thesaurus is of no help. It is an uncomfortable noise, a noise of unease, a noise that reminds one of the fact that not only does Nature not produce any right angles, She also doesn’t really want us to either. You build a frame and hang a door, just like a picture. This picture is ill-fitting, and cannot easily be straightened. I do not know what this picture shows. It shows three things: one when closed, two when open.

The room smelled of mold, and the covers didn’t hide me quite as thoroughly as I had hoped, but I crawled into and curled up in my nest nightly anyway.

Every morning was the same: too early and no hope of shutting it out, so I would just lie there and sniff at the mold. Eventually, the need to pee would get me out of bed. The thought of coffee kept me from going back.

I drank three coffees today and still took a nap.

I think there was going to be a description here of the mornings and the afternoons, and the evenings which all bled into each other, and how the color of the blood was beige, and how it smelled, but something about the three coffees and the nap distracted me from that description, or perhaps just showed me that it was unnecessary, that it would have been unnecessary.

Last night, I went for a walk in the dark. I walked through three tunnels. They were actually too short to be called tunnels. The insides of these “tunnels” were very colorful. I almost wrote that they were “festooned with color.” Most everything else was a dark-greenish gray.

The room smelled of mold, and every night when I shut the door, I shut the window because it was also cold, and I waited quite a while before turning on the heat, and even then it hardly mattered. And I worried the heat would intensify the smell.

Every day, I woke up and was still myself.

The previous sentence is trying really hard to be one of those profound banalities. It is failing.

Every day I wake up and there’s a brief moment of something before my mind spirals off with itself.

Closing the door required lifting up slightly and sliding a corner of the door against the frame. It made that dull squeaking or sliding noise that wood makes against wood, like scooting your chair away from the table.

The room was too small to be called a tunnel and only had one door anyway, and it was too bright to be called a cave, but it had a nest of blankets I could warm up, and it smelled of mold, which it has always done.