Embarrassing Myself on Twitter is Not Enough

I’m listening to a cantankerous artist say that her work isn’t about anything, it’s only itself, and I’m driving on a highway winding in tandem with a river that figured in someone else’s dream that I have discussed at length with a friend and that, flood-full of mud and flotsam, like a shrimp vein, will disperse into the Pacific Ocean. The dream became an object of consideration by singling out one person and by the exclusion of other dreams–either forgotten, never recounted to me, or never recounted by me to someone else. The river is about something to me, but its rapids and eddies are hypnotic, drawing me in like the singularity of a nonmetaphoric work of art.

The artist is talking of her work as a capsule for her feelings, which she leaves behind in the work. Having not worked on anything, the house I’ve just left continues to disorient me. It still seems to be in the present tense.

I arrive to cooked, cleaned, split crabs. Their bodies are made up of many chambers of meat. I crack open a chamber, pick out and eat its meat, open the next chamber, etc. Before becoming acquainted or reacquainted with a group of people, everything they say is about something that they’re not aware of. I’m envious of people who can tell a story, but sometimes all I really want is to overhear a story in another room, so that I don’t have to have fidelity to its intended meaning. “Is this the one that you’re supposed to make yourself tall to? Or the one you’re supposed to run away from? Or the one you’re supposed to make loud noises at?” I overhear this, about an encounter with an animal of a species I didn’t catch, before I sit down with two half-strangers who are looking at their phones. Not knowing what to say, I give my attention to the dogs.

“When the 9.2 hits you won’t be able to move, everything’ll be shaking so hard you’ll be pinned to the floor. You’re gonna want to drive to high ground, because an earthquake like that’s going to create 100-foot tsunami waves.”

“How am I supposed to drive to high ground when I won’t be able to move?”

“After the quake ends. The waves won’t come immediately. You’ll have a while to get in your car and drive.”

Some of us go swimming, or rather, one of us goes swimming, and the other three watch the waves raised by the storm. From the lighthouse I see the swimmer stand hesitantly ankle-deep in the surf. We hear the foghorn, and one of us questions the information he heard about foghorns, that they sound every ten seconds. “That’s not ten seconds,” he says, counting, and then, at the end of his count, concedes that it is in fact ten seconds. Wielding cluelessness like criticality, we wonder what exactly the foghorn is supposed to do. It seems to us to be an alarm that fails to convey any useful information other than what would be obvious to anyone in the fog: that it is foggy. We wonder if mariners are or were capable of estimating how far away and in what direction they were from the horn, meaning from dangerous rocks. When we come down from the lighthouse, the swimmer is completely soaked, though due to the rain we don’t look much different. She describes what she did while I wasn’t looking: walked out until the swells were waist-high, and crouched to submerge herself entirely. It seemed too dangerous, she says, to go out any further. We all emphatically agree, having watched the waves pummel the rocks. She says that one of the reasons she wants to start a group of women who swim every morning is that she’s afraid she won’t be able to resist the desire to go swimming when she’s drunk one night. “I feel so good” she repeats for the next hour.

The next day passes quickly. I write a note to myself that I feel “as if battered by waves of company, I forget what my set of metaphors, train of thought, container for material was.” The one who got drunk the previous day to the point of becoming a communal story of extreme drunkenness asks us what he said while he was drunk. “You were really incoherent,” his friend says, and he asks how. I recount what this friend told me at the time. She said he went outside and she went looking for him, calling his name. She saw his silhouette in the rain. “I just want to stand outside in the rain, drink my wine, and pee,” I tell them I remember her saying he said. She adds that she was glad they live in a quiet town, so that she didn’t have to worry about him getting hit by traffic. He wants more examples of his incoherence. I tell him that trying to remember incoherence is like trying to remember a dream. All I can remember is what’s already been rendered into a coherent story.

She tells us she wants to start a Twitter account with the name “word compost,” a term she attributes to me, where she would post “things that nobody in the history of the world has ever said before.” What it sounds like she means is a kind of non-multiple-choice Cards Against Humanity: all the utterances that, taken out of context, sound absurdly offensive or offensively absurd. I don’t see the point in being pedantic, and it seems too complicated of a story to say what I had really called “word compost” the previous day: Her friend had asked her “is that french toast on your pajamas?” No, it was a monkey, but I said I had thought that French Toast was the name of the cartoon monkey depicted on her pajamas, a character I was unfamiliar with, but that I assumed the two of them knew from childhood. As an in-joke, she continued to refer to the monkey on her pajamas as French Toast, and I said that the name was a kind of word compost. This bad term for the amusing result of a misunderstanding then became repurposed, like the name French Toast, to name an aesthetic of repurposing.

The house was once owned by a hoarder, and this renewed house came to be through the removal of all of his crap. His children wanted nothing to do with it. The only things these new inhabitants kept were stacked above the wood stove: Politically offensive books that they wanted the satisfaction of burning rather than giving away. In dispersing and destroying his archive, they became the flaky repositories of his boring story.

Sitting on the couch in this emptied-out house, I read in Shiv Kotecha’s The Split:

close your eyes and squeal up at me in a fit of anguish Shiva made me and Shiva will waste my gardens and my wives and Shiva is going to destroy me and all of the tiny fire I can make. You repeat it over and over.

We begin watching a documentary about a number of idiots who were lured by another idiot (who among us isn’t an idiot?) to an island that was not an island but was nonetheless on an island, and rather than partying, ended up surviving a storm in tents. “It’s really coming down,” one of us says, “the air is basically water at this point.” She mimes swimming, bulging out her cheeks to show that she’s holding her breath. We all laugh at the image, looking out the window at the image of the small pond that the back yard has become. Galoshes have become something that people borrow, fit becoming less important than water proofing. Someone introduced as as a writer appears to give us the second metaphor of the documentary, and one of us says, mockingly, “she likes metaphors.” A second points out that the writer is a writer, and writers like metaphors. A third manages not to say petulantly “is there anything that’s not a metaphor?”

My friend talks about making a documentary about the deer in the town I live in, or about the town’s troubled and histrionic relationship with the deer. There’s a fine for feeding the deer, and she points out that the deer population is way beyond the point that preventing a few people from feeding them is going to help. I had a neighbor who defiantly fed and left out bowls of water for the deer, and she wants to interview her, but my neighbor moved away long ago. She would also like to interview people whose pets have been attacked by deer, a phenomenon she finds irresistibly funny, if horrible. I vent about the various forms of masculinist “solutions” that bubble up in polite conversation, genocidal fantasies of, for example, people roaming the streets with bows and arrows, culling the excess deer once and for all. She’s sympathetic with what I’ve called fantasies. With annoyance I note to myself how quickly she moves to prescription, but also note that my descriptions are full of prescriptions for prescriptions, albeit only one: not this. The humor of the town’s deer situation to me is that it’s unavoidable, that despite tracking tags, endless discussions, violent urges, and ecological knowledge of the causes, deer will continue to be first world problem extraordinaire by crashing through storefronts, mauling and sometimes killing pets, and eating gardens. “Can the documentary propose a solution?” asks her friend.

This friend brings home a large houseplant that needs to be repotted. The tree is rootbound in its plastic pot, and the two of us try to pull it free. I hold onto the pot, and she pulls on the tree. As we struggle to get it out, the dog growls and goes for my neck. “What the hell?” I say, and push him away with my arm, and she scolds him. “Are you okay?” she asks, and I say, touching my neck, “yeah, I’m fine.” She switches to a more sensible method, using a knife to cut the pot away. I begin to notice an unidentified sensation in my neck, like it’s blooming. It dawns on me the dog must’ve bit me. I ask her something about my neck, and she tells me, laughing nervously, that the dog drew blood. We rehash what happened a few times over the rest of the day, and can’t understand what the dog reacted to. We joke that he was protecting her from what appeared to him to be something violent I was doing to her, but we can’t really understand how being on two ends of a potted tree looked like that to him. His owner hypothesizes that he realized his mistake, because he gave up so quickly, and appears–she admits she may be projecting–guilty. I joke that I find myself giving him more affection since he has attacked me, and ask what this says about me. I keep saying “it could’ve been way worse,” and they keep parroting my words back in a way that sounds knowing. I feel like I’m missing something about what they’re saying, but possibly what I’m missing is that they, just like me, are missing something about what I’m saying.

On a van routinely parked along one of the rat trails I take through the place I grew up, there’s a bumpersticker that reads “Catan: The Game of Our Generation.” I feel like I’ve met this person at a game night. He was drinking an IPA. Have you ever played the game of our generation? Do you remember playing Monopoly? I remember going to my uncle’s house to watch the game, which was as impossible as taking your eyes off of a screen on the back of the next row of seats on an airplane. The game was on, somewhere in the room, emitting the noises of whistles, the crowd, and the hypnotic or hypnotized voices of the commentators. The noises became one noise, and gave me the feeling that nothing was happening anywhere. If anyone is bored, it means their family is doing well. It means they’re doing well.

A game is an activity that a millennial can’t get enough of. In the sense that “millennial,” rather than indicating a generation, means “product of the American middle class,” or “product of the desire for the American middle class,” playing board games, the kind their parents’ played and had brought from their parents’ homes, evokes and is a scene of good times with family. Nobody has played them, in the sense that memories of Trivial Pursuit and Monopoly are memories of other memories of people on television playing those games. In the grip of nostalgia, millennials have dropped the boring games of their parents and sustain an expanding market of meticulously designed board games. “Interesting” is a term of praise for these games. The boredom of playing games that are so well-known it’s assumed everyone knows how to play has been exchanged for the boredom of reading the rules of novel games.

A game is a way of sustaining an investment in an activity. When millennials get together to play games, as they so often do, it’s to play a variety of games of playing a variety of games. Some pay little attention to the game, or seem not to, playing a game of aloofness, exhibiting how little they care in order that they can bear being a person who is there, playing a game. Many are not playing the game of winning the game, but of playing at someone who is playing to win. If they win, they feel the uncanny thrill of character and actor collapsing into each other. If they don’t win, they win at playing someone who wanted to win. Couples, especially married ones, are often playing at getting revenge on their spouses through the game, sometimes openly.

A game is a manipulation that, because, like everything else, it happens in a situation with others, is less than intentional in an absolute sense. It’s a less than controlled attempt to control someone else, that leaves one feeling out of control.

A game is an intent to mold another person, that for example a parent might have for a child.

A game is a desire for a shared memory. Barrelling fast toward a writing metaphor, “good” ideas of what to write always seem to occur to me right before going to work, probably for the same reason that parents look for evidence of their “good” effect on their children not in those children once grown, but in the young children of young parents. The mother of someone I wish I didn’t know met a ten-year-old who was reading a book with great interest, and whose mother is also a reader. My father has another strategy: He looks for his memories in my memories of childhood. “You remember the damnedest things,” he always says, on the stage of the scene he’s set, sifting through his memories of trips we took and asking me “do you remember that?” I’m always surpised he’s surpised we remember different things.

I feel like I was more well-adjusted in high school, when I, like everyone else, made mixtapes of songs I thought were cool. They were lightly cognizant of their audiences, and sometimes attempted to have aesthetic qualities such as balance, pacing, theme, or mood. Now I make playlists that comment on the life of or my feelings for a workplace crush, that I imagine playing on the speakers at work for maximum passive aggression, but I know at some level while making the playlist that I will never actually put it on. It’s as if the better the game, the more self-defeating.

I’m superstitious that in writing about games, I have invited games into my life. My airplane-flying engineer friends show up literally out of the blue, and invite me to a game store to pick a game to buy and then to play. They seem to have no game and thus I don’t know what game to play with them, and yet I see no choice but to play a board game with them. If I come out as being inamenable to board games, what will they propose instead? What greater horrors will I invite?

Is it possible to not scratch if one breaks out in hives? As kids, my friend and I used to concoct solutions from household chemicals and spray them at wasp nests. The wasps thrillingly came for us then, and we ran inside and shut the door. This same friend now keeps bees, and loves to talk about royal jelly, which makes a larva a queen. The worker bees produce this substance with the biological machinery of the hive of which they are a part. The gather round and make a queen. English feels that bee colonies are early industrial factories, less with the connotation of soot, exhaustion, and disease than of the mechanization of bodies. Insects seem to us to already be machines or machine-like; when we imagine nanotechnology we often imagine swarms of insects.

A cat with hives, having only claws to scratch with, breaks her skin and makes bleeding wounds and scabs. The word for human scratching instruments isn’t any less sharp, and nails can be used to wound, too. When we were children, there was a girl who played with my brother and I who sharpened her nails into points and cut open my brother’s arm. The Hale-Bopp comet was passing over, and it felt as if its bright spray was falling onto us at night. It was incredible that there was any of it left, its whole glamour being made by the dissolution of itself.

The cat scratches my chest, kneads it, his claws working through my shirt into my skin. I’m drinking a glass of milk, which he keeps sniffing, and I have to move the glass away from him to keep him from drinking it. He has a tendency, as I think all cats do, of treating parts of my body separately. He could be laying on top of my legs, and if my hand moves near him, he will bite it. I feel he’s attached to me, feeling erroneously that I am something. To him I’m large, but I don’t contain multitudes, because there’s no container.

At a cheese festival, multitudes clamor to get a position at long tables where morsels of cheese are doled out. “Some people really enjoy work involving face time, and some absolutely do not,” one of the booth workers says to one of the few drunken attendees whose eyes go to his eyes, which are up here. Eyes mostly stay down on the cheese, not even on the hands, the workers hands or their hands, which in concert move cheese into mouths. The mouths are in a certain sense on the table, but if they were in the usual sense, the four legs of the tables would sway under the weight of the mouths’ desire for cheese. Every year the festival has more booths of alcohol, creating for the mouth the inverse of the situation of the eyes: inhibitions go down and appetite goes up.

Every morning a cheesemaker’s cat walks on her chest, “a sensitive area.” The cheesemaker doesn’t understand people who keep reptiles. She knows someone who keeps a python, which, she says, could strangle you in your sleep. At night, her cat wraps herself around her neck, like an airplane pillow on the wrong side. Mechanical milking processes, she says, in their insensitivity to the flesh the machines milk, scratch and chafe the animal, causing her to bleed into the milk. Dairies adulterate bloody milk with a base to remove the pinkish cast. Articles and pronouns get strange here; it’s her milk but it’s a product, and even her lactation is a product, the result either of hormones introduced to her body by the dairy, or the result of compulsory copulations: The females who don’t get pregnant in their minglings with males are eventually slaughtered.

If they’re not jockeying for position at booths at the cheese festival, they’re mingling. Every group at the festival, every group everywhere, is made up of open mouths, teats, and eyes. Parts do not have to be parts to be parts. The mouths open to give off the exoskeletal glint of defensive amusicality. They sound certain because they are not. The mouths spew facts from the cultural ether; the mouths need. Pop science splits everything into its most banal components, and is deployed not for its truth, as its purveyors would have us believe, but for its neutral affect, its lack of drama. The purpose is to find the shortest line between mystery and explanation, trouble and solution, in hopes that nothing leaves a trace in the body. The mouths, in short, chew their food. The mouths want to consume the products of bodies with an etiology in order to feel that their bodies are without one–have no causes, no impurities, no mothers. Everything must be fixed. An individual must have only a “mental health crisis”, sensitive areas not spoken of, bodies covered, animals not cause more discomfort and pleasure than humans, holes in a story filled, wrong opinions–wrong only in the sense that they produce feeling–reeducated, gossip ignored, bad habits corrected or at least judged, story brought to stillness. The teeth bare and gnash, but let’s not pick on teeth. Not everything has to be sliced and mashed with the goal of removing its taste.