Embarrassing Myself on Twitter is Not Enough

If you’ve ever marinated meat in pineapple juice, this question will make sense: If you eat enough pineapple, does it digest you? Once, my friend (who had a soft belly) hugged our professor. He reported back: “His belly. It’s hard, like a walnut!”

When I talked about being depressed, he would insist that he was depressed, too. Another friend was proud of her curly hair. “Curly hair like mine,” I would say to her. “No, that’s wavy,” she would say, “you have wavy hair.” She tells me she likes her hair because it marks her as different.

Now, it’s hard to blame a different friend for saying that she, too, is rabid about politics. She demonstrates her rabidity to me. You don’t want this, I want to tell her. It’s ugly. I don’t want you to want this, in other words. I don’t want to screech at my relatives about capitalism. I don’t want everything I write to be in reference to a multitude of unnamed friends. The blood comes to the surface, this surface, here, and this is preferable to deleting it all, every friend.

I have a friend who went to film school who recently told me that she has has no visual memory. I remember her talking about how she wrote undergraduate film essays by keeping the DVD queued up, so she could skip around to find scenes.

I’ve just moved, and I’m looking for a couch. The free couches on craigslist, I tell her, are too ugly. She tells me to cover them with a pretty fabric. I look at a couch. I don’t want to imagine that washed-out 80s plaid underneath, I say. She says slipcovers exist for a reason. I used to have one on the couch I used to have. It was burgundy, and I wanted to remove its heavy corduroy from the soft yellow upholstery underneath, but its color hid a wine stain. “That was a borscht stain, that I left there,” she corrects me. (My mother had a dark red mark on her jaw.)

The place I’ve moved into is the place I was before, and before that, it was my childhood home. The bedroom is a loft where I used to sneak television alone. The ceiling is close to the bed, and the shapes in the drywall are familiar. I see the images I remember seeing, like clouds that never move. The drywall is white, and so is the carpet. There’s one spot on the carpet that intersects an intermittent line of ants marching up the wall, following each other, or following something else. The spot is covered in dead ants. I can remove them, but I think that different (indistinguishable) ones will come back.

Ever since I learned that Wordle’s answer words are predetermined, and saw with my own eyes the list sitting there in the source code, I’ve felt less supertitious about the game. Each morning I would do the Wordle and see in my guesses an omen for the day. One day my guesses were: horny, itchy, lumpy, pervy, and poopy. I imagined that a person chose the Wordle each day, and thus I considered most of my guesses bad guesses because I thought a person wouldn’t choose those words to have the world guess. Once I knew that the predetermined answer list was 2,315 words long, I knew that it had to have been randomly generated.

People who talk about wildlife as portents get on my nerves because I think the same way. Birds have a way of being carrier pigeons even when they’re not. Notice what people notice about a creature when it swoops into their attention. “It must’ve been hunting,” was what one of us said about the hawk that perched briefly in front of us. We saw it, I noticed, and then we very quickly had no comment.

Out my window is a peak that looks like two: like the upper edge of a bull’s head, but it’s called Grizzly Peak. In the morning, when the light is oblique, it looks more like a bowl that’s mostly hidden by its rim, which makes one peak look closer and smaller, and the other, larger and more distant. The rest of the day, the sun falls more or less along my line of sight onto the mountain, rendering everything flat. Sunset is a red curtain moving up its flanks, with few shadows.

I’ve been trying to create images of “alien landscapes” from satellite-captured elevation maps of Earth. The further into the process I get, the more I become concerned with certain kinds of fidelity to the source data. First I apply a color gradient devoid of earth tones. The next step is to create a hillshade, so that the terrain appears as if illuminated, or, put another way, to create the illusion of terrain with shading. One first picks a direction and angle of light, or several. Every position of the “sun” reveals some features and hides others. There’s a technique of layering multiple hillshades lit from different angles to produce a composite hillshade that reveals as much detail as possible. These lights can’t be complements; if you combine three hillshades lit 120 degrees from each other, the result will be destructive interference that produces almost no relief at all.

One morning, a bit of schmutz floated in my peripheral vision, which was actually a shadow moving on the window and becoming light, which was actually a murmuration of starlings, twisting over the foothills leading up to the double peak. There was some time I had no idea what I was looking at, and then I knew the kind of phenomenon I was watching, but it never became a recognizable shape, or became recognizably a type of object. One moment there was a collection of shifting black dots, the next, a glistening, waving surface. A certain kind of birder jokes about shooting enough starlings to make pie. As an “invasive species,” they collect the logic of anti-immigrant racism. Where H.P. Lovecraft sublimated his racist fear, birders are working in the other psychic direction, from birds that are rarely distinguished as individual birds, almost always appear as a large flock that moves like an organism, and whose voices are liquid and prone to mimickry. Even the octopus, while alien in its form, movement, and intelligence, is recognizably an individual.

There’s a theory that the appearance of the kind of alien who abducts in pop culture, and in abduction memories, is an infantile memory of the imprinted face, and looks so–what big eyes, what a terrible nonexistant mouth–because the peculiarities of an infant’s vision at that time make it impossible to focus on the face. An owl is another popular culprit for what the myth/memory is “really” representing.

Recently, I saw an especially large owl in the woods in the daylight. Its eyes, and so its head, followed us, looking at once forbidding and frightened. Its face looked like emanata signifying hypnosis. It was difficult to look away. We were on the way back down a muddy path. On the way up, people had warned us in ambiguous ways about how sticky and slippery it was. My friends were taking turns carrying their daughter with them in a backpack, and while they tried to avoid the mud that could easily bring them and the backpack crashing down, they weren’t turning around. On the return trip, one of my friends said to a group of people on their way up: “If you think you’ve gotten through the worst of it, you haven’t.” This was supposed to be a joke.

In The Sims, adult sims are all exactly the same height, but almost any object can scaled up or down at will. My Instagram profile picture is an oversized fish bowl. The fish bowl can be any size, but the fish stays the same size. The fish, in the picture, is so proportionally small that it’s obscured “inside” the castle submerged decoratively inside the fish bowl. This is a special kind of “inside” unique to 3D computer graphics, in which objects can “no clip” into each other. Nothing happens. The coordinates of one polygon’s faces merely intersect with the coordinates of the other polygon’s faces, which, being opaque, obscure part or all of the smaller polygon’s.

The fish bowl in question was in the subbasement of a house I had designed. From the house where the usual hedonic game loops took place, a stairway led down to a large, dark room that surrounded the above-ground pool. The walls of the pool were made of glass, so that its brightly-lit contents could be viewed. This revealed, instead of sims swimming, a quirk of the game in which sims swimming in the pool were invisible except for their shadows. Their shadows were visibly jerky, not like the smooth motion of the swimming sims seen from above the pool, but a “neutral” pose oriented in whichever cardinal direction they were swimming, as if they were mannequins being drowned in stop-motion. The shadow-gallery was surrounded by a fish-gallery of upscaled taxidermied fish mounted on the walls. (Once dead, fish could be resized.) The floor beneath this contained only the giant, apparently empty fish bowl.

The walls of my childhood room were blue. I can’t remember what the wallpaper pattern was, exactly, but the predominating color was blue. The bathroom had a pattern of sailboats. Inside my room was a shape the color of the negative image of the baby blue wallpaper background. It wasn’t the right shape. It was too dense, too complex, too convex, or too concave. I could feel the shape, and I was the wrong size. My limbs layed at the wrong angles, and touched in the wrong places.

Medicine is cinema. In a quiet room, a series of images are inserted into your mind, and some of them will dog you with ambiguity. The only “but the ending didn’t make any sense” criticism that’s not nonsense is of a diagnosis, because it would indeed be good if the diagnosis made sense. If a doctor tells you your inner ears are filling up with water, distending their tubular passages and causing your vertigo, it would be good if that doctor told you how the water could drain out.

A good half of my instagram photos are of water. I’m drawn to obscurity and reflection, to presences that are sensed in the ways they hide and distort other presences. Glass will also do, especially when fogged with moisture, but there is one photo that’s a tree reflected in the treated, slightly warped glass of a window, behind which is a smaller potted tree.

I have a minor cough that I sometimes suspect is caused by the mold I imagine growing in the walls of my trailer. There have been leaks in the roof that I’ve patched, but before the patches I know that water has gotten into places I can’t see, behind the superficial interior walls. There is visible water damage to the bottom of the wooden frame of the slide. The slide is the part that recedes and protrudes from the side of the trailer with the help of an electric motor. Even though I think the frame is decorative rather than structural, the way that the wood is bulging and delaminating where it meets the floor gives the impression that the slide is slowly collapsing, which, because it’s the part of the trailer that is most often leaking, could be cathartic.

Like a diagnosis made up of incomplete anatomical imagery, I don’t know how to tell a story, only how to toss various images about, hoping that they will agglomerate into more than the sum of their parts.