one of my hats writes a song.

some bucks a day have come
and lured, then collared me away
from native greenery and peace
i miss color
my drab environs are confusing and new
lines drawn thickly around me, ink still wet
like fitzgerald said, the dew's
still on her
i must cut away from what looks sharp
or stark, with the light atop the dark;
these ribs won't keep this heart at bay
much longer.

mwhua ha ha mwhuntsman.

this is an email to my coworker matt, a designer i work with a lot. he fly, he cool. why it is that blogging an email is all i've got in me today is evidenced by the email itself. pretty goddam strongly, i think.

from where i sit, here on this friday, some things are apparent to me.

- i can still sleep for 4h and function properly at work the next day

- but doing that 3 nights in a row is really pushing it, @ this point

- seriously, if my eyes could open enough for me to see in the mirror, they’d be demon eyes, i’ll bet—

- like this, [see image at top] only smaller

- your email handle, “maguila”, when you say it aloud, sounds like

o the name of a little-known foreign tennis player who overcomes the odds, or

o the name of a dwarf or witch from Harry Potter, or

o how the teletubbies pronounce “gorilla”

- “mhuntsman” looks okay on paper, but when you say it aloud, as one word like with yours, it comes out sounding like

o count chocula has a crush on me, or

o a warm-weather bacteria that causes swelling and genital discomfort, or

o the noise maria sharapova makes when she hits a forehand, plus the word “man”

- each of our names gets a tennis reference, good for us and our names

- i don’t remember at all how i feel about the copy for the 4 email creatives i sent you eod thursday. are they any good.

-isms in my opinion are not good.

here : another email i wrote. this one to lotta; it was a reply to her rather fierce comments on the list i clipped from amazon (see 2 posts ago, about dawkins' book getting shelled by harry and oprah).

the sad thing about dawkins is that he's a good scientist. the selfish gene is, from the excerpts i've read and accounts i've heard, tremendous, and played a big part in helping to change the genomic game. just this weekend i had my brilliant scientist friend recount this to me and demand that i memorize it (this is the dude who's taught or pointed me to most everything i know about evolution, also a brilliant christian (by which i mean not that he proselytizes, but that his spirit is effervescent, his cup doth run over)) so it's just dumb to have dawkins fall of the edge like that. i don't get why he chose that route.

were we ever to take up a legit point-counterpoint stance, though, the core of my response would be similar to my complaint with christopher hitchens, which itself would read something like,

dear ladydawkins : you're not allowed to assault the objectivity of something without being objective. maybe when you're out for a fag, but not in an even slightly formal critique; not at book length. you're just not. and you know this—fuck, man, let's stop fooling and announce that you know or once knew it better than i know it. and you're not the forgetful type. so you're a fucktard, one who's been swallowed in the fleshy wet lips of his own ego, and now whenever i hear your name i'll have to quash the mental picture of one of those molly-mouth fake vagina deals they sell at the porn store. nice work.

ok, so the similarity with what i'd say to you ends after the 1^st sentence. how i'd continue, though, is to point to gw bush. the man is as good a face as any for the current-day regime of people and policies and –isms that make me not want to call myself a christian, or not want to state it as such. and christ surely knows that i've got my own struggles with trying to square my shoulders and heart up to him; i'm not in a position to be defending the retardedness of anyone else. so we don't have to call me a christian; call me a dude who's trying to follow christ. who despises everything focus on the family has done after about 1986. who thinks christian politics should be confined to the church (since she is the one best equipped to carry out the single verse in the new testament that explicitly describes the conduct of christian society (from early in james): take care of the orphans and the sick; and try to have a noble heart). whose sense of mystery and wonder has increased with every revelation about neuroscience and evolution and physics.

that's the other thing about dawkins, the thing that perhaps irks me most: the incompatibility of faith and science is the terrain of the biblical literalists, for whom metaphor is deceitful – when, in fact, metaphor is the primary framework by which we approach higher truth. (that sounds didactic and i'm sorry; what with it being the subject of 2 recent essays for grad school, i jump to the task of defending metaphor, which is unnecessary and lame.) the dawkster hems himself in and tweezes himself down: he's a recently brilliant and skeptical scientific mind who has reduced himself to the level of the kansas school board.

don't fall for that shit. blame the organization, blame the –ism (as ferris, years ago, wisely gave us permission to do) blame the inevitability of humans in significant power becoming corrupt and doing hateful shit. but it's a band-aid of an argument to fault any faith of any credence for the (inevitably vast) sins of its members. humans in power do bad shit, and religion will always be a prime motivator for rallying the masses; it's perhaps the best way humans have to trick other humans into excusing their individual selves while they rape de horses and ride off on de women. but it's a human trick played on other humans. my personal faith (which, fetal-alcoholic and prone to holdups though it may be, i'll never desert, having felt god's love rest on my own head) didn't sign up to defend anybody's pope, or anybody's –ism. to discount the legitimacy of all faith at all levels is to discount most of the wisdom gained and given by most of the wise people we've ever had.

in the 1^st excerpt on slate, hitchens calls cs lewis dreary and absurd. "…religious apology … some of it is dreary and absurd—here one cannot avoid naming cs lewis…" it's crazy, but that was the lightest line in all the excerpted pages—that was hitchens being funny, smart and light and a leettle bit sassy. no, it's true, hitchens! one cannot avoid naming, can one! egads, the dreariness! if you do not desist i may chortle.

the fat lady is jesus.

this little bit is an email i wrote to meg, my floridian friend & co-student, who mentioned franny & zooey briefly. i have a very hard time being brief in this regard.

franny & zooey is a strange little book, there's almost no plot, and less action; you can stop reading now if you want 'cos i'm incapable of talking about this book in passing terms; franny has her "little green book" that she carries around with her throughout; for several years, this was my version of that; i called it my hip-pocket book. one of the tensest scenes happens w/zooey in the tub and his mother on the other side of the curtain. you get to see them try and have a conversation, each in turn trying to connect just as the other retreats, over this whole mountain of historical prejudice and mother-son expectation and learned roles. (it is perhaps my most-loved scrap of dialogue.) the whole book is centered on franny's college-aged crisis, her professors and favorites all seeming phony. she has this crisis and flees home. ultimately the story is zooey's as much as hers, 'cos it's him trying to help her, to talk to her in a way that is generous and not self-centered, and he's not good at it, in many respects, so he's figuring stuff out too. ...sorry, miss meg, i'm not at all meaning to go into a synopsis-style defense of it, here. all of that is context for the larger point, which is that you're right, zooey does come out with a christian thing near the end, recalling how seymour used to make him shine his shoes for the radio show they were on as kids, which didn't make any sense, and then they talk about the hypothetical fat lady who is christ (in a as-to-the-least-of-these-you-do-unto-me kind of way). and sure, we can all chalk up seymour as a tremendous christ figure, and blah, blah blah that's exactly what my 11th-grade lit teacher taught us to look for. yay for us, we see that seymour is a christ figure, only he killed himself instead of being killed, how ironical. (i actually do love that christ-figure element, but it's more robustly centered in other glass family stories; i especially like raise high the roofbeam, carpenters.) here, seymour's burden is only superficially the point---it's pointing to the point. the point is franny's little green book, the pilgrim's way, which is about a nameless, lame, 14th-century russian wanderer who is trying to do as st. paul instructs (in ephesians or somewhere), and learn to pray without ceasing. franny is so taken with this idea; she wants to do this. she's...christ, she's halfway through college: she's bright and beautiful, has just dumped her boyfriend, and is positively doubtful of her ability to love, to honestly care for anyone, about anything. she wants to sacrifice herself to this noble abstract: pray without ceasing. franny's at a point that i experienced at exactly that time in life, in college but with graduation in sight. the sum effect is to be absolutely insecure about herself and absolutely cynical of the skills and ideas of others. she's lost and skeptical of all the intellects and influences she so recently trusted, and so she has the book with her in the very first scene when she gets off the train; and also in that beautiful scene where she has lunch with her hatefully conceited college boyfriend, where she takes it with her into the bathroom stall, sets it on her lap, and has a panic attack severe enough that she passes out. and later, as she recuperates at home, where zooey sees it, and he speaks of it knowingly but somewhat caustically--enough that she's quietly very affronted. zooey, at least with his sister and mother, is sophisticated without being tactful. but that's when the book begins to come down off the pedestal for franny, and it's the set-up for the fat lady/christ thing. i too remember being disjointed by the ending, the first time through it, and even still a little bit the 2nd. but the entire story serves to make it's last point; or, no, rather, as i've come to perceive it, the ending serves to point my eyes backwards over the story i've just read: love is all that's left. without love, the ability to pray without ceasing has little point, and none that christ cares about; without love, seymour's suicide remains too selfish to see how lonely he was, too selfish to be forgiven; without love, the idiosyncratic neediness of your family is enough to suffocate you. ...that's my franny & zooey ramble, part I. you don't have to like it, i promise. after i recommended it for the reading list last year, my professor trashed it to me---without demonstrating that he'd ascertained anything, or even that he'd finished it---and i had to work a bit to retain my opinion of him. but i did, and now i'm fine.

richard dawkins fights the lonely fight.

Certain items on amazon's topseller list caught my attenti on today. it's fun to discover themes on amazon, like a found poetry sort of thing. But what the list currently offers is not found poetry so much as found decade's worth of shit to be worked over in psychotherapy for richard dawkins.

1. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7)
by J. K. Rowling
2. Little Green Book of Getting Your Way: How to Speak, Write, Present, Persuade, Influence, and Sell Your Point of View to Others
by Jeffrey Gitomer
4. The Secret
by Rhonda Byrne
9. Do You!: 12 Laws to Access the Power in You to Achieve Happiness and Success
by Russell Simmons
12. Little Gold Book of YES! Attitude: How to Find, Build and Keep a YES! Attitude for a Lifetime of SUCCESS
by Jeffrey Gitomer
13. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7) (Deluxe Edition)
by J. K. Rowling
17. The Intention Experiment: Using Your Thoughts to Change Your Life and the World
by Lynne McTaggart
18. Law of Attraction: The Science of Attracting More of What You Want and Less of What You Don't
by Michael Losier
20. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
by J.K. Rowling
21/ The God Delusion
by Richard Dawkins

poor dawkins. he knows perfectly well that he overshoots the conclusions of evolutionary theory by about 100 yards; he's briefly interesting in the way he does it; but he knows goddam well he's set himself up for the hand-wringing and the anger and the gay-sex-on-south park episodes. And grabbing your ankles for harry, along with whoever's momentarily suckling at oprah's golden tit (cormac mccarthy), those are givens of circumstance. but still, he has standards for himself, expectations. and this list has to be just demoralizing. doesn't it? harry takes him behind the shed no less than 3 times; and oprah's grasp has, via the bleeding loudness of the secret¸ constricted the public's attention such that they're reading 6 books with the exact same thesis (think happy while you shop!) before they even think to pay money for his poor little bumper sticker disguised as a book. i mean, russell simmons, for fuck's sake.

deep in my heart i am warrior.

(here is another bit i wrote elsewise, posted here just to give apsi a half-reviving half-breath. things are busy and don’t look to get less so for some time. (i got a job, a writing job, with an actual desk, and a laptop and a salary and responsibilities. also the job has artwork on my desk, 3 big pieces, placed there by the “senior vice president of non-value-added activities” which will remain there until someone else gets hired, probably a few months out. Among these pieces is an 18” x 24” full-color glossy tour book, entitled Bette Midler - Da Tour, and it is breathtaking---is proud and joyful and relentless in its celebration of mid-80s bette. even as i type she lurks, just beyond my monitor, primping her short perm, cooing at me, staring at me with those salacious eyes, equal parts manatee and sucubus. it's a good job.))

The first bits I really connected with in brief interviews with hideous men the title stories, of which there are several installments, and are structurally similar in that one (hideous) man talks and another party’s queries go unstated:

Q.

‘It wouldn’t be so embarrassing if it wasn’t so totally fucking weird. If I had any clue about what it was about. You know?’

Q….

‘God, now I’m embarrassed as hell.’

Q.

My initial fascination was so strong because it related to me: the opening pages of my story Dear Fat Kid, employ a similar device when Hal, the narrator, is on the phone with his father, who speaks only in em dashes. Most of the interviews are short, less than five pages, and the longer ones began to lose me. As a whole I felt the interviews came up short, not for their context-free nature but because any one interview was weighed down by the context of the interviews on either side of it—these are not happy or joyful dudes, and with the exception of the one guy who involuntarily shouts “Victory for the Forces of Democratic Freedom!” every time he comes, they’re pretty hateable. But they’re interesting has hell.

This is because David Foster Wallace is a goddam virtuoso. In the end, that’s much of what I have to say about these pieces as a whole: he vamps with a mixture of ambition and clarity and ethic that brings to mind Charlie Parker or Miles Davis (both of whom I’ve been pretty newly introduced to, and whose structural expertise is so strongly if implicitly at the base of their improvisations that I’ve been playfully but recurringly taken with the idea of the framework that must underlie any significant creative work), and though almost every time I pick up Wallace’s writing I regret that he sets the bar for connecting with his work as high as he does, when the time comes to put the book down I don’t want to—the connection has formed (given his penchant for medical analogy, Wallace might say metastasized. Given my own penchant for picking up an analogy and wringing every last bit of life out of it, I’ll note that Miles Davis has become a staple accompaniment in my intellectual life—some of his work, that is. Kind of Blue and Live at the Plugged Nickel and Birth of the Cool have tirelessly sustained my attention, but I can’t listen to Bitches Brew while I’m writing, or reading, or riding on the rackety city bus—the sounds are unrelenting, fully harsh, and require not just focus but an acclimation period, a willingness to throw my hat in the ring and sit till I’m ready).

As taken as I was by the Brief Interviews stories, the mountaintop moment of the book came for me in Octet, a series of five bits of “belletristric fiction” each labeled as a Pop Quiz, in which a scenario is related to me, the reader, and at the end a question is asked (eg, “Q:(A) Is she a good mother. (B)(optional) Explain whether and how receipt of the information that the lady had herself grown up in an environment of unbelievably desperate poverty would affect your response to (A).) It’s in the final part of this piece, PQ9, that he does two alarming structural things: he goes off the deep end in terms of “S.O.P. metatext”—it has 17 footnotes; and he puts you in his shoes—the first line is “You are, unfortunately, a fiction writer.” It’s a crazy and difficult piece, and it caused me to start taking notes before I’d read its (seemingly) modest 12 pages through for the first time. Not until after I’d digested it some did I see the neatest trick of the whole bit: Wallace actually succeeded not just in getting me to care about the central human theme of Octet, nor just to sympathize with his struggles in writing the piece, but too he successfully put me in his mind at the time of writing more than any writer has ever done—more than Lamott with boy and her birds, more than Dillard with her squirrels and trees and windowless rooms. I’m excited to dig in to his essays when I get the opportunity.

i said i don’t need this; i do really well

so i wrote a poem the other day. it is very beautiful.

i had a dream this morning
insurance was adequate
contact was documented
surveillance was adequate
heart was heart
that the know about
you might get screwed on this thing
code cobra was employed
to see what they were doing
and after two years i go,
and like i said, and, yeah,
i’m pretty good,
i can go sit on my hill somewhere
and really zoom in on my work projects
the sun’s zooming in behind me
(people are in public places)
and you’re not assuming privacy
(and you’re looking into someone’s shower)
in idaho you can even assume that a reasonable
expectation of privacy is still a headache,
a gray area, not useful
the biggest one in the world is in las vegas
you’re not gonna get a fix if it breaks like another one
do you think you’re a good read of people
the thing is i’ve realized
there’s enough transcendental-ish reports, 560 dollars,
it’s gonna be hard enough to document,
you’re still going to have a hard enough time,
all those things –
probably they still see themselves
(in bushes)
well, yeah, and the next day the safety comes out,
and the next day in his backyard the hole comes out
and the guy says he’s, ya know,
nobody’s wife wants to say he’s disabled
he is partially paralyzed, but
that’s just it, you know, i don’t like going back
and forth – i’ve had a girlfriend for a while but in the next
few days we're going to alaska
but a year ago i went to career-ab-holding
and there not very many
huge companies, and they tried to have me farm…
to cut me short, and have me clip me 12 years ago, so,
i said i don’t need this; i do really well
we don’t charge for an hourly rate,
so fuck this,


with the exception of the truncated final line, which in full would read something like -- so fuck this, beer before liquor and the answer is none ... none more blacker -- i'm happy with it. see, it was my first day off in forever; b.mac and i ate a late breakfast, played pool, drank a few pitchers; and it was great. then i went to bernard's, downtown, where i remember drinking two happy hour martinis, which were only $2.25 each, were not a good idea,

you might get screwed on this thing

but still were better than the ones i had after that, of which i have no memory. poor, poor etling had an f'ing task getting me out of there and home

code cobra was employed, to see what they were doing

one of the only things i remember is pulling my hand away from etling's so as to point to the black ice she should watch out for, on which i then immediately fell, hard enough that she claims to have felt the reverberations through her shoes.

i can go sit on a hill somewhere, and really zoom in on my work projects

but no sooner was i there than i began to spin myself in circles, crying, wee! spin-spin disco time!

in idaho you can even assume that a reasonable expectation of privacy is still a headache

i don't remember are getting home, sitting down on the floor and hugging the corner of the bed frame; not eating my tacos; not watching the debut of 24; and passing out at 7:30. but that's what i did,

the thing is i’ve realized there’s enough transcendental-ish reports, 560 dollars, it’s gonna be hard enough to document

apparently when etling joined me at the bar, she'd told me of half-waking me that morning and asking me if i was dreaming. i said, "i am a garden vegetable." and how is that going? she inquired. "well, it was pretty rough for a while, but, now we have a few customers." so this is the emotional crux of what i set out, there at the bar, to evoke through poetry. now, a day later, the matter is simpler yet hopelessly more blacker than before.

all those things – probably they still see themselves (in bushes)

the dystopic redundancy of my blacking out one line into the composition of a poem inspired by a dream wherein i'm an organic cucumber nobody wants to buy is not lost on me, and if it is lost on you, well then, no hard feelings, you can stop reading and go ahead to the green room, where elmo and david lynch are making bumperstickers out of recycled hymen, and i'll see you there in a minute.

and the guy says he’s, ya know, nobody’s wife wants to say he’s disabled

when i was well into my poem and etling was actively conversing with the dude next to her, i grabbed her arm, swung her chair around, and told her (she says) that i was "99.9 percent sure you are really really going to love it." but then my laptop battery died.

i do really well, we don’t charge for an hourly rate, so fuck this.

what is small with what is large, what is near with what is distant.

Having previously read one book of Berger’s, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, and that slender book having made a lasting impact on me, I was pretty keen to dig into Pig Earth. It’s effects on me were strikingly similar. I mean “lasting impact” in the expansive sense, not just for the gorgeous ideas but also for the way those ideas are transmitted: never have I read observations of life and the world that so cleanly, so concisely point to the higher truths surrounding them; nor, conversely, have I encountered philosophy so rooted in the visual. And so, in the space of one sentence, I’ve spilled my two primary trails of thought about this hard and lovely writer, for Berger’s tightly bound formula of observation and revelation makes for a kind of critical examination by itself, such that anything I might want to say about it seems hopelessly secondary and relative, and therefore just barely-but-yes interesting enough for me to say.

Coping is funny—it may be understandable, and rarely are its motivations very complex; but never, in my experience, anyway, does coping come from or lead directly to any kind of knowledge or surrender that is admirable. What I'm doing now is something else, something i am good at --- radiating context: I can be an awful and disconnected shit, can go around acting all crammed by my own inertia, and that’s truthfully where I was when I picked up this book. Another true thing is that Berger made me read all the way to page six before changing the rest of my week:

In any case experience folds upon itself, refers backwards and forwards to itself through the referents of hope and fear; and, by the use of metaphor, which is at the origin of language, it is continually comparing like with unlike, what is small with what is large, what is near with what is distant.

My fall quarter’s critical paper was about metaphor, as will be next quarter’s, and though I’d been researching and reading for weeks and had the firm start of an outline, inertia had swallowed my enjoyment of it, as it had most else in my life. And there, in the space of one goddam sentence, is Berger not only tossing off the core of my thesis but also pointing me to the balance point in my self-made pathos. The fall introduced me to a new saint, Simone Weil, and now here in the winter, in Berger, I’ve been handed some candles and sat down at the altar of another.

i just want to say hi to my girlfriend, ok? yo, adrian! it's me, rocky.

I was sick the other day, and so in the middle of the afternoon found myself under a pile of blankets, drinking decaf and watching Rocky. The broadcast was intermitted by commentators – a high-pitched brunette and two dudes who talked loosely about the movie while playing poker – for reasons never explained but nonetheless obvious. Being a long-time fan of Rocky (ie, a hetero-normative male who grew up loving sports and with a youth pastor whose favorite analogous reference to the love of Jesus Christ was the bull-headed persistence of Rocky Balboa during his training) I knew some things about the film. i knew that one of the best, most fiery and true and romantically charged exchanges of all time went like this.

[Adrian is trying to get to Rocky in the ring]
Rocky: Adrian!
Adrian: Rocky!
Rocky: Adrian!
Adrian: Rocky!
Rocky: Adrian.
Adrian: Rocky.

Also I knew that Sylvester Stallone had shot the film on a super-constricted budget over a period of 28 days. But the card-playing cable hosts did impart something new to me: Stallone wrote the Rocky screenplay in three days. Inspired by having watched Ali beat the snot out of some little-known white dude, he sat down and in three days had a completed script. The idea of writing at that pace did not take my breath away. What came closer to doing so, however, was the thought of re-imagining a here-and-gone event, a transitory happening in the career of one of the world’s least definable athletes, and creating something that entirely new. And, in the pantheon of film, utterly lasting. After Rocky I had a nap, switched directions on the couch, and read Once in Europa. My mind, metaphorically prone as it is, soon drew on two things: holding John Berger’s book up against the three days that yielded Rocky, I realized it was pretty impossible to accurately imagine the pace at which Berger wrote, but it felt like he got maybe two sentences per week, by which I mean that the truths his work elucidate seem so big that they’d only come sufficiently into focus for the eye of a guy who’d honed his attentiveness and learned extraordinary patience, like a Buddhist monk; and, second, it struck me that Stallone’s shift of focus from Apollo Creed (the character parallel to Ali) to the shambled life of the underdog, with his reclusive girlfriend and her alcoholic brother, is near-exactly the kind of storyline Berger would be drawn to. This turned out to be a fun line of thought, for how different would the story of Rocky Balboa look if relayed to us by John Berger, if he’d spent a summer sleeping on the matted trundle bed of Rocky’s couch, working 12-hour shifts flaying beef at the processing plant where Balboa came to train and punch the hanging carcasses?

He was standing motionless in the garden in front of his house. Across his body he was holding a spade. He had been like that for ten minutes. He was looking at the earth just ahead of his boots. Not a grain of soil stirred. [from The Accordion Player]

This passage is evocative in the most patient of ways: a long shot setting up the scene, with a stillness that promises the movement to come. And it captures something that Berger’s work fairly demands of the reader. A willing patience.

It seems the overall themes of Berger’s writing in the first two parts of his trilogy come gradually but more comprehensively into focus of the course of Once in Europa. And there is at least one noteworthy thematic parallel to the story of Rocky Balboa, for that movie defined American movie-land’s fixation with the underdog. Berger portrays so acutely the story of the small town, the village and its decline, the gradual breaking apart of traditions – both holy and habitual – and within that picture the capacity, over just a few generations, to succumb to the pressures of a modern life, and in doing so yield the immensely more personal smallness of the old village world for the bigger fault lines of the new.

i'll be your substitute for the day.

apsi tends to be ignored when i've stuff due for school, as is the case right now. so here's a throwaway clip from my story, dear fat kid. speaking here is the narrator, whose name is hal.

Today I spent 45 minutes looking in vain for a way to permanently turn off the Microsoft Word Help Wizard, the dude who automatically pops up in a little box every time I sit down to write you. “Dear Fat Kid,” I write; then I hit Return, then I hit Tab, and up pops Wizard! right in the middle of the f’ing page: “It looks like you’re writing a letter!” Wizard announces through his pixilated gray beard and enormous hands, his starry blue robe flowing. I need the Wizard to help me with a letter? Is there any written anything a person should need less help with? It’s just retarded. You write, “Dear Blankety-blank,” then you write, “Sincerely, Me”—and then you write whatever the f you want in between. Done. Of course it’d be awesome if I were to start to write a research paper, get one line into my draft, and have the Wizard pop up and say, “It looks like you’re writing about land wars in Asia!” That’s too much to expect, probably, but there’s something about the Wiz’s predictions of the perfectly obvious that make him not just annoying but demoralizing—in some ways it’s worse than having him insult me. If I were to write Things to Get at the top of the page, hit Enter, and the Wiz popped up and not just observed what I’m writing—“It looks like you need to Get Some Things!”—but also told me how I should proceed—“Ambition! Girlfriend! Class!”—it would piss me off, sure, but honestly, the rhetorical observations are a buzz-kill because they point to something I’ve refused to admit. When we used to talk about girls or money or my scholarship-loss I hated when you went into Plato mode and would just ask questions for an hour; but later I’d feel better about where I stood and wouldn’t have much residual hate toward you, just a little bit because of the way you’d look at me during those conversations, unblinking eyes and a face so straight it seemed to me a subterranean smirk. Dr. Phil at the free-throw line, I think I used to call it. Ugh—the visual memory of it creeps me out. While we’re on visuals, another thing I hate about Mr. Wizard is his animation. I begin typing my letter, not asking for anything except perhaps a sense of humor about my life situation, and hooray! Help is here! Wearing a gown, and waving at me. This morning, before this standoff with the Wizard of Helpfulness, I’d been so looking forward to a very small, very contained piece of solace; still in your pajamas, I went out to your porch with an ashtray, a big mug of coffee and my laptop. Without a thought, I wrote the words, “Dear Fat Kid.” I lit a cigarette and stared at the thin line of ocean for a bit. Soon enough I looked down, saw the Wiz, and I lost it. Not, like, angry lost it. But I spoke to him like he could hear me; with very enunciated tones and only the thinnest thread of patience, like how the bicycle cop talks to the old bearded homeless man he’s already told to move twice that day.

“Gee,” I said. “I am writing a letter. And I’m so glad you’re here to help, Wiz. I’m worried that when I fill in the edges of my informal letter to my absent friend with casual introspection, it’ll ring hollow!” I believe they’ve done away with the Wizard in the newer versions of MS Word, but I won’t escape him for quite a while, as my next paycheck, however imaginary it may be, will not go to an upgrade. A software upgrade, I mean. I spent 45 minutes searching for some command to make the Wiz go away, ending with me madly pressing random combinations of keys until I hit the one to make my machine go into hibernation. I began to think about my mother.