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26.12.02
From the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski, cahier 53, day 6, dawn:
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
-- Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory, ch. 1, sct. 1 (1955, rev. 1966)
I don't like women who talk too much. I'll say that straight out because it doesn't take much. I'll start up a perfectly innocent conversation with someone, perhaps in a bar, lighting a cigarette and giving the ice in my Bushmills a chance to warm up, just being friendly, or at least pretending to be friendly because I'm in a bar and I hate it when people just sit there like drunks stewing over some clownish inner turmoil which they make up in their own minds to appear artistic and tortured.
"What do you think about the sea swells on the north coast of Madeira this time of year?"
She'll say something studiously unwitty like, "I didn't know Polacks drank whiskey" or, "Why do you smoke filterless cigarettes? Don't you know how unhealthy that is?" I know she thinks I'm Polish because of the name tag on my janitor service shirt. How she comes to the conclusion I'm a Polack however, I don't grasp.
"Polacks are people too. They drink all kinds of things. Beer, vodka, sewage treatment overflow, the blood of virgins....as for the filterless cigarettes, I'll tell you what someone once told me and perhaps you will understand: I don't smoke cigarettes with filters for the same reason I don't drink my whiskey through a dish rag." Then she continues standing there, staring at me as though waiting for a punch line, as if she doesn't understand it still. "Would you like to come to my apartment and listen to old Rembetika music?" (you see, I'm one of those clandestine hipsters, the kind tackling the obscure while the rest of you are still teething on esoteric sitcom references and comparing notes on the vagueries of time travel.)
Of course, she doesn't want to come to my apartment to listen to anything. I don't even want to. The conversation is going no where but we're the only people in the bar so far and the bartender has disappeared to take stock of his disappearing wine cellar or stand in front of the bathroom mirror rubbing his face and staring into his tired eyes asking himself where he went wrong.
"Is that what you do for a living?" she snorts condescendingly, pointing at the name tag on my janitor services shirt which has "Blepko Janitorial Services" emblazoned on the right chest plate in fancy cyrillic-looking lettering. "You're a janitor?"
You see, this is the kind of conversations you get with women when you aren't busy pretending to have some fascinating tip on the brewing Belgian beers or arguing what a load of crap Plato's "Republic" is. You must come armed with bullshit. No one likes an unpretty truth. They prefer you lie to them. I could lie through my teeth but then you get scraps of lies between them like small chunks of rotting meatloaf that went unbrushed for days. I'm not even sure I'd know what the truth is anymore regardless. I prefer lying unconvincingly.
"I bought this shirt at the Salvation Army because I have dependency imbalances and all sorts of emotional diseases and I thought this shirt would bring it all to an instictive and subconscious conclusion. Sort of the opposite of feigning wealth and intelligence while mocking bystanders in an unemployment line."
"I don't think you're clever. I know you think you're clever and that making fun of my judgemental line of questioning is some strange way you have of pretending you are clever, but I think between you and I, standing here alone at this bar, we can speak in black and white. You are not clever. My manicurist is more clever than you in fact and she doesn't even speak English. The only reason I continue standing here is because I'm waiting for a friend of mine and it amuses me to watch you try and amuse yourself with your own delusional sense of intelligence."
Funny enough, the friend never shows up. Other people show up and every time the door opens bringing in the cold from the outdoors, letting in a few flakes of snow and bluster, we both look to see who it is and then I watch with increasing amusement as her anticipation inflates and then deflates like a irritable zit getting popped leaving an angry red blotch in it's place. Instead, we drink alot. Everyone comes in as couples, adopts tables to sit by candlelight, converse loudly, over the jukebox music and ignore us. I buy us drinks over and over again. The bartender is amused, watching the transgression.
"This one's on me" he smiles slyly, pushing my Bushmills over to me and her Amstel Light to her. Eventually, she makes me roll a cigarette for her and then eventually, because I'm chain smoking myself and then she starts to as well, I feel the beginnings of a repitition strain injury aching in my fingers, a youthful yet arthritic pain which can only be anesthetized by more Bushmills and more cigarettes until everything, the conversation, her hair, the chattering teeth outside waiting for a cab, the fumbled disrobing later on, the snores and even breakfast the next day becomes a blur. A dissheveled dream that slowly eases into a nightmare that involves my having to call her every day thereafter for a week to find out how she's doing and what her job is like and cooking dinners or eating out all boiling up, building to a crescendo of a romantic indigestion.
6:26 PM
The Diaries of Witold Kazersamski, cahier 53:
Solution: 1 c8(B) b3 2 Bg4 b2 3 Bd1 Kxb1 4 Bb3 mate.
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(from Subcommandante Marcos)
Nada, que el sistema político mexicano es como ese gajo de árbol que cuelga encima de tu cabeza dice Durito y yo brinco y miro hacia arriba y veo
que, en efecto, hay un gajo que pende amenazante sobre mi hamaca. Me cambio de lugar mientras Durito sigue hablando: el sistema político mexicano apenas si está prendido a la realidad con pedazos de ramas muy frágiles. Bastará un buen viento para que se venga abajo. Claro que, al caer, va a pasar a llevar
otras ramas y cuidado el que esté bajo su sombra cuando se desplome!¿Y si no hay viento? pregunto mientras pruebo si la hamaca quedó bien amarrada.
****
Barks like a duck. Waddles like a beer.
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early mid-evening following Ukraine diner cabbage swill, indigestion, runny intestines, contemplating pools young models who have grown old and heroin scarred and smell like stale cigarette smoke:
"I frown into a plate of boiled fat. My fingernails feel too tight. I pick at my teeth with the pronk of the fork which is layered with an egg yolk from the breakfast before and wonder where I will go to have something further to drink. All around me, bathed in a urine-stain colored light are other drunks. They are all with someone else and I am alone. The solitude rings in my ears with each snatch of conversation that wafts toward me smelling like a rotten egg or perhaps a clandestine fart that escaped from these over-lipsticked faces, these meat and sweaty grimaces faking talk show smiles and laughter about nothing. They can't be human. They mustn't be human. For if they are, if these creatures are the population's highlights, I will find an apartment to crawl into and spend the rest of my life decomposing.
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The cold is outside this fantasy world of a flat. Inside, I understand they call a man's home his castle. The dog, Poznania, is my subject, the cat, Farfalla, is my subject, the snake (unnamed) in the closet and the occasional cockroach (refugee and also unnamed) is my subject. I am the head of this fiefdom and they are on board for any changes, no objections allowed, the dog, if he dares protest, gets a kick in the ribs and no dinner. The cat will be locked in his litter box. Yes, I know, this is a cruel autocracy. The dog, I've come to believe, is a Cossack intellectual who tries to communicate with other dogs whenever I take him out for a walk: I can tell he's faking it, that when he's sniffing another's dog's asshole what he's really doing is whispering samizdat transcripts of protest: He can whisper all he wants about these brutal conditions but he will only make it worse for himself when we are out of the public eye, back in my fiefdom, when the food supply is dwindling and I sit back in my arm chair laughing at him as I light my pipe: "It is much too cold to go out to the butcher's for a slab of raw marrow Poznania. I have my food already. Where's yours?" -- He growls at me sometimes but then I lock him in the closet until I memorize another ode by Mikhailo Vasilevich Lomonosov. He emerges later with his ears down, eyes cast to floor, repentent and hungry. "Now who's the boss?" I exclaim, doing a little dance as I put more rye in the toaster.
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4:53 PM
23.12.02
*****For Immediate Release******
For some inexplicable reason I was reminded today of a new album being released, a hip-hop musical version of Karl Popper's _The Logic of Scientific Discovery_ by a group called the American Nihilistic Theology Society (ANTS) which has filled auditoriums with frenzied, berserk teenagers all around Scandanavia for the last several months. Most of the songs are typified by hi-hats struck only on the offbeats, a big bass drum played with a mallet, and lost waltz beats. The lyrics are loosely based upon a postmodern formulist's so-called "Tanka-Rap" style and the album is entitled "Sgt. Popper's Lonely Falsificationist's Club Band". The group will be touring American college campuses sometime after President's Day. Below is the songlist:
Sergeant Popper's Lonely Falsificationist's Club Band
1. Sergeant Popper's Lonely Falsificationist's Club Band
2. With a Little Help From My Speculative Atomism Friends
3. Lucy In The Sky With Unjustifiable Scientific Statements
4. Getting Better (But Still Irrelevant To The Logical Analysis of Scientific Knowledge)
5. Fixing a Hole In The Creative Imagination
6. She's Leaving Home For the Vienna Circle
7. Being For the Benefit of Mr. Freud
8. Within You Without Moritz Schlick
9. When I'm Sixty Four I Still Won't Believe in Logical Positivism
10. Lovely Unverifiable Rita
11. Good Morning Good Morning Until a Better Hypothesis Comes Along
12. A Day In The Life of Emperical Generalizations
12:18 PM
22.12.02
We wake up to a Fiat giving birth to painful horn honking, a determined bastard on the road outside presses down on the horn with the kind of persistent hand motion he could only have mastered in his pimply teenage years staring and drooling over back issues of garage sale Playboys. I raise my head and peer over the sprawl of bodies and limbs, the snores of hedonism so entrenched in the subconscious that even the dreams are haunted by strobe light scattered images of the previous night's piecemeal memory. No one else's sleep is even faintly disturbed. With a strychnine jointed grimace, I gather myself off of the floor, reassembled in a standing position, and take a sniper's peak out the front window to the annoyances below.
A very disturbed sophomore twitches and fiddles with varying degrees of urgency at his coat lapel, his nose, the side of his face, right pant leg, greasy hair. He looks like a fidgity third base coach giving bunt signals to a batter who has just stepped out of the box to adjust his cup. He looks hungover, or like a cat who just escaped from a washing machine. I can feel the fraying of his nerves from the window and the honking has only grown more urgent.
I open the front door and edge my head out, feeling the cold air tweezer its way through my nostrils giving me a mild headache like the kind you get from eating ice cream too fast. "Hey!" I yell inventively, gesturing an empty stab of malice. "What the fuck is going on?"
The honking stops immediately and the Fiat guy fixes his desperate, bugging eyeballs in my direction. He rushes across the lawn as though he were tossed from a moving vehicle and quickly arrives in front of me, reeking with the urgency of a man with overactive bowels. He flails out a sentence, which I can't understand because it isn't in English and looks at me expectantly. I shrug my shoulders. "Veronica" he clarifies suddenly as though speaking to an embassy bureaucrat. "Where is Veronica?"
Veronica is half clad under a pile of parkas somewhere left of the kitchen, perhaps under the dining room table but I'm not going to tell this guy that unless I know a little more about him. The fact that he uses a car horn as a means of communication is not a good starting point. I squint at him suddenly, my memory comes back to me at high speed from around a sharp curve on two wheels and his face becomes vaguely evocative of some idiot's conversation I stumbled over somwhere in the post-twister trailer park of last night's festivities. Veronica's face had parked itself somewhere in that memory, seated at a table where a half dozen of us had congealed, braying over each other with intoxicated opinions on over valued art and and the rise of the Euro. This guy had played a large role in the braying, his foreign service accented English constructing sentences of non-sequiturs and mangled inferences with such a lack of charm and dexterity that I couldn't now see how it were possible I'd have forgotten him, even for a few moments.
2:28 PM
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