rocket to nowhere

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.

“but they dropped me in the coffin / it was shored up on two saw horses like a boat / the shavings of wood inside were like a nest of dead wasps / it felt so good real tight like new clothes that fit / like a muscle-man T-shirt”
—Frank Stanford, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, lines 4046-50

Yesterday, I went to the pharmacy, and I purchased one of those bulbs for washing out ears or possibly noses, but it was too small, probably intended for the cavities in a baby’s head, and I say it was too small only because today the very same ear I rinsed out yesterday is again full of something or at least feels that way, the major difference being that today I also suffer from a near-constant and also somewhat river-like post-nasal-drip, which in fact woke me up and now there’s a tickling, a possible shifting of contents in the ear I didn’t yesterday rinse, and blocked ears feel like death somehow, though I wouldn’t actually know, no one really actually knows, and those people who tell you about tunnels and lights and beckoning loved ones are describing hallucinations brought about by an acute lack of oxygen to the brain, and I suppose that the blocked-ear death I’m describing is simply a kind of aural hallucination, and though I’ve never been dead, I have been underwater, and maybe it is that when my ears and sinuses are blocked and I cannot breathe and my eyes are watering that I should be underwater talking to whales or dolphins since the clicks my nose makes when I attempt to inhale are—but of course then I’d drown, and I’m not entirely certain that a larger bulb would actually help or even solve the problem which actually has to do with pollen or something, a kind of drowning in the open air as pollen does cause one’s head and lungs to fill with fluid, and the problem with my ears, I’ve been told, is that the opening into the side of my head is narrower than maybe it should be and so my head doesn’t drain quite in the way it ought to, which has nothing to do with pollen except perhaps it’s pollen which causes the over-production of that which is not being properly drained.

“many a time in school I’ve had my mind like a circular table like a mirror / ready to be set with hope but when the teacher opens her mouth she besets / it with T.V. dinners” —Frank Stanford, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, lines 3128-30

My first grade teacher was missing the first digit of her right pointer finger. She was embarrassed by this and so pointed at us, when necessary, with her right middle finger. Even in first grade, we understood that his was a borderline rude gesture. I remember her as a somewhat crabby woman.

My second grade teacher was missing her left hand and left arm up to the middle of her forearm. She had this bald, mobile nubbin which he had learned to use much like a hand. She often wore sleeveless polyester tops and matching slacks. She always wore bullet-shaped bras over her ample bosom. Her left, polyester-clad breast often had a rectangular white spot on it because she would hold the eraser against that breast with her nubbin. I remember her as a resolutely cheerful woman who taught us about conservation within the home and the Golden Rule.

My fifth grade teacher showed us David Lynch’s film The Elephant Man, who wasn’t so much missing physical bits as he had several excesses.

After fifth grade, I left that school. As far as I know, I have never had another teacher who was missing anything physical though of course I had several who struggled with excesses.

I just heard a mother say to her three-year-old daughter, “Okay, let’s open your muffin.” Every third person in this cafe is fat. We are living the dream. We are not living in a dream. We are living the dream. We pointed ourselves in this direction first in 1945 and then again in 1963. We looked at/for what was missing and decided the best way to fix it was with more.

Taking a break from this writing has taken a toll on the writing.

Beautiful pregnant women knitting and bebaseball-hatted guys wearing leather wrist bands.

Gesticulating, middle-aged artistes and at least three Subarus in my line of vision.

Sunshine.

[Three Ton Coworker is attempting to find its feet again.]

“I feel like a spotlighted deer and the world is a pickup full of teethless hunters” —Frank Stanford, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, line 3991

It does make a kind of sense I guess if you take a moment to consider it but I mean I’ll weigh whether or not it seems to be a momentary superficiality or if perhaps it’s a longer-lasting deeper kind of superficiality and after I’ve weighed it and decided whether one or the other then I’ll either tell you or not based on my own answer derived from my own calculations which may or may not in fact make use of multiple variables and the likelihood is of course that I’ll start at the end of the alphabet even though when I took math in school we always solved for N but it was of course a small italicized N not that it much matters I suppose because if you wanted you could insert really any letter or symbol for your algebraic variable I mean you could solve for ö or perhaps even an image of a stag’s head, and so eventually after showing your work which by the way and of course you should always do you will have at the bottom of your calculations a line which simply reads: image of a stag’s head equals whatever if equals let’s say 15 just for the sake of argument.

Now let’s talk about maybe there’s something more or less interesting to—this is becoming tedious or was already and some 10 minutes ago I was told five more minutes and here we still are listening to the washing of dishes and a mix of music from the mellow 70s which is in fact and rightfully being drowned out by the white noise of sprayed water against metal sink it sounds like but seriously and like I said after I’ve made my calculations I’ll have made my calculations with this or that variable and I’ll happily tell you or not if I think you’re being at all superficial since that is as I understood it what you’ve asked me to do anyway.

“a dream like a plaid skirt that takes forever to fall to the floor” —Frank Stanford, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, line 1816

and so listening somewhere to the sound of intermittent hammering of something perhaps metal and the whole time I’m thinking not only about the sound of the hammering but also about the sound of the water running by behind the building and the cars driving by and the people walking by and other sounds I can’t identify and as I’m listening to all this I’m also thinking about beginning and beginning again she said let’s start over instead of let’s start fresh and though these distinctions hardly matter here I am am making them anyway while the guy with the hammer coughs and drags something from one place to another and some motor somewhere whines just a little but where was I why was I thinking about starting and perhaps how I should have answered was let’s always be starting let’s always be at the beginning let’s start that permanent revolution the theorists are always going on about but instead of Marxism and a whole state or nation instead of a people a whole people instead of some motley unruly heterogeneous mass and but here’s a small problem doesn’t the word mass imply homogeneity doesn’t the word mass imply singularity so use the word group instead she said and move on yes instead of some motley group but she interrupted we are a motley group of two and that’s kind of what I’m trying to get at we are yes you’re right not homogenous even when we mix and you are further correct when you say there needs to be more friction because you certainly cannot run a permanent ongoing revolution you cannot build up to another and another shot heard round the world you cannot find enjoyment if everything just slides off of everything else and now the man with the hammer or at least I’m assuming it’s him is yelling in perhaps Italian perhaps Greek and the water is still moving out there and someone closer is moving sheet metal and making inadvertent thunder and the water is still moving out there