Choire Sicha

Thursday, November 20

Actually, what I really wanted for my birthday was for 5000 of you to assemble in Times Square, singing the song to summon Mothra. It's my favorite song in the world. So why don't you learn it in preparation for next year?
[mp3: 1.6 MB. Mosura, ya Mosura! 1964, Godzilla vs. Mothra.] ⊕

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Tuesday, November 18

Today, Wednesday, is my birthday.

"Excuse me!" On Orchard Street late Tuesday night, three young men held up their hands for our attention and made a loud announcement. "Anyone seen a guy walking this way with two pit bulls?" We all looked quietly over our cigarettes. The three boys continued west, the shortest of them casually swinging his three feet of chain.

I saw them again a bit later, walking down Houston Street, still cruising the neighborhood to, perhaps, beat the shit out of this someone.

It's sunrise over in London as I write this. In the next few days, hundreds of thousands of people in England are expected to take time to march against our visiting President. It will make headlines, as it already has: the planned demonstrations are a lovely filmic foil for the President. A mass is a story, it must be reported upon. But nothing less than a unattainable totality is a danger to the people who run countries, and so by this logic the government at least will deride the protests -- but only very casually, softly. Actually the demonstrations do not matter.

But that won’t mean that it matters nothing to me.

This August I returned to my real home in New York City after a brief revelatory stay in California, the state where I turned 5, 11, 19, 23. I made some private promises to myself at that time – specifically, during the five hours and twenty minutes of flight time. They were strange promises: I promised myself to stay lonely, to have discipline, and to not be afraid of anything. I have succeeded in two of those things; the third is largely impossible, but trying, as with diets and fashionable outfits, counts at least for something. I also promised most of all that it was important that actual events remain true to their meaning as time passes, insomuch as a reality of natural narrative is possible to maintain, let alone interpret… or live comfortably with, when those events are one’s own.

Stories storm around the world at an untraceable speed. The people these stories are about condense to water beading down the outside of the narrative glass. In their mass these people make an unavoidable package for news. In single distinguished acts of violence or untruth or degradation, these people become dirtied cultural analogies for our times.

Someone somewhere on the Lower East Side either knows or doesn’t know that he is being pursued by three teenagers. Or maybe not at all. Maybe the pit bulls were stolen. Maybe a drunk uncle was to be brought home. Maybe a wedding party was being missed.

Over-famously, the line is repeated about telling ourselves stories in order to live. But more and more we allow people to tell us stories so that we don’t ourselves have to live.

Our stories suffer. Our times, I think, are sad -- always a foolish thing to say. But I think these times are sadder than others perhaps because there is just enough transparency to the operations of the world – thank the internet maybe, thank the eagerness of cultural consumption, thank the inability of people not to tell secrets (stories themselves, of course). With all that is visible we can see just enough to know things should be better, and it doesn’t matter, because they won’t be. ⊕

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Monday, November 17

I'm not running away from you, I'm running towards me. Yes, I am finally behind in my email correspondence. I'm a compulsive superfreak about returning emails. But once a full day passes, incoming email is way buried and gone, like a hairball under the bookcases. I can't find it but I can smell it, and I'm sure it's growing all musty and hairy and moist. Besides the sheer volume, a complicating factor is my (forcible) change of computers last week. Yes, I tried and failed to transfer the 10,000-email archive stored on my old computer's mail program. So if you had something to say recently and it wasn't psychotic raving, insults, or suggestions as to how I could be a better person -- please note, it's just not gonna fucking happen, my chickens -- be nice and say it twice. ⊕