1. It's not raining, but the world is wet. And also, the ankles of my pants are wet, and I hate that. Growing up in California, I never became all that acquainted with rain. There was a drought until I moved away, and rain carried with it a certain novelty. A couple times the rain went on for days and we would lie in the gutters and let it wash over us. Today isn't like that, though, today is cloudy and dreary. Everyone is waiting for something that won't happen.
2. Reading over a short biography of William Wordsworth, one of the foremost British romantic poets of the nineteenth century, all it says regarding his time at college was that "he took his degree in 1791 without distinction." Yikes. I wonder if Wordsworth would have exerted himself more in college if he knew that two-hundred years later I'd be reading about his lack of distinction. I feel bad for Wordsworth. Though I don't like his writing.
3. A girl sitting next to me in class today smelled like peaches and a girl from my youth. More precisely, she smelled like a specific day of my life, spent with that girl, when I was sixteen years old. That was a great cloudy day--hunched down in the seat and kissing on the left side of a crowded bus. A lot of the details of that day came back to me this morning, sitting there in English Lit, and I wondered how much of my life will be an attempt to recreate how strongly I felt when I was sixteen. "Where are my women now, with their sweet wet words and ways, and the miraculous balls of hail popping in a green translucence in the yards?"
9.24.2002 I'd like to thank you if you're one of the fourteen people who called and left messages on my voice mail after my cell phone post (scroll down). But as the kind people at Amtrak have yet to find my phone, I'm stuck calling in to check my messages. So now it's less a cell phone, and more an expensive answering machine, to compliment the one I already have (this one is conveniently affixed to my desk--no travelling for you, little buddy).
If you were to call my cell phone, I wouldn't pick up, and after a few rings you'd delight in my monotonous reading of a mainstream pop song.
"This is from Jennifer Love Hewitt's new song, 'Barenaked:' 'You ever go downstairs to start your day, but your car's not there? Yeah, you know the joke's on you. You ever try your luck with a pickup line, but you just sucked? You tell yourself it wasn't you.' Leave me a message."
If you were to call my cell phone, that's what you'd hear--but again, I wouldn't pick up. I can't pick up. Because while I'm at home in New York, my phone is off romantically exploring the Northeast by train. Eyeing a kissing couple, amorously entwined in a coach car. Playing a game of snake amidst the food-encrusted seats of a dining car. Watching the sun set behind buildings that stand tall like giants in some crowded corner of Philadelphia. Washington DC. Richmond, VA. Or any of the other places routinely visited by Amtrak train #87.
"Are you sure you left it on the train? Have you checked inside all your carry-ons?"
"Yeah, I'm sure. I know exactly where I left it."
I would almost immediately regret telling the customer service rep that I knew the "exact" location of the phone, because further questioning would reveal that:
A. I didn't have even the vaguest idea of what row I had been seated in, and
B. I didn't even know what car I had been in.
The Amtrak rep pointed me toward a diagram of a train with eight cars, as if upon seeing a picture of a train I'd remember where I'd been sitting. As if I'd chosen my seat from the sky. I pointed at the four cars in the middle of the train.
"Four cars? Do you have any idea how many seats that is? All right, you know what--I've got an idea. You write down your cell phone number here, I'll call the phone, it'll ring, and somebody on the train'll pick it up."
I knew his plan wouldn't work. Having total disdain for cell phone culture, I hardly ever leave the ringer on, and certainly not while travelling. Somewhere on a train on its way to the nation's capital, the tiny yellow screen of my phone was lighting up as it received a call from a Pennsylvania customer service desk, and no one would see it. That's what I was imagining when the rep started laughing.
He chuckled at first as if someone was tickling his side, but that quickly gave way to a low, bellowing laugh that filled the small rectangular space of the office. I had to look up from my forms to behold it. He laughed loudly and slowly, as if he was reading aloud the sounds that made up his own laughter. HA. HA. HA. It took me a moment to realize what was so funny, and when I did I went back to my forms, embarrassed.
After what could have been half a form, he hung up the phone without ever having spoken into it, and his powerful laughter subsided. But when he looked up at me he started laughing again.
"'Barenaked,' man? That shit is funny. I can't believe you quoted that."
9.19.2002 I don't feel so good. I've only been sick a couple times at Bard, and the other time was much worse. But this isn't especially enjoyable either.
First of all, I no longer have the desire to eat. It's like I don't need food anymore, and the freedom is empowering. Now my day has two more hours. Not only have I completely stopped becoming hungry, but I actually find the idea of eating unappealing. This has persisted for the last three days or so, and I think I'm losing weight. I've been making a point to eat something every day (mostly because I'm terribly afraid of imploding), even though eating has become a relatively unenjoyable process.
Secondly, I'm just nauseous all the time. Granted, this could be from the whole "not eating" thing, but I think that's more of a confusion of cause and effect. At this point, it's most likely a combination of the two: the stomach flu and the dehabilitating starvation.
Thirdly, I'm completely out of it. A girl asked me this morning what I did last night, and I had to stand there thinking about it for two minutes as if it were final jeopardy. I find myself wanting to lie down all the time, and have regularly been doing so. My existentialism class was so packed that I could curl up in a ball on the floor without being noticed, and I did. Again, this could all be from the causeless hunger strike. However, I'm not a nutritionist, nor do I believe in nutrition.
"But Ben," you ask, "how exactly did the virus get inside of your cells?"
There are moments, and it is only a matter of five or six seconds, when you feel the presence of the eternal harmony...a terrible thing is the frightful clearness with which it manifests itself and the rapture with which it fills you. If this state were to last more than five seconds, the soul could not endure it and would have to disappear. During these five seconds I live a whole human existence, and for that I would give my whole life and not think I was paying to dearly.
- Dostoevsky
I entered a plane of being where nothing mattered, save the infusion of joy brewed within my body. What had begun as a delicious distention of my innermost roots became a glowing tingle which now had reached that state of absolute security, confidence and reliance not found elsewhere in conscious life.
- Nabokov
As one becomes more experienced, he gains in a way; for though one loses the sweet unrest of impatient longing, he gains ability in making the moment really beautiful.
- Kierkegaard
It’s not about me.
It’s about beauty,
relationships,
systems of patterns in a godless haze.
The way some things can remains beautiful,
making all too real, after their passage, the sense of loss
that will no doubt accompany our own passage to death.
9.16.2002 A note to those concerned with my welfare: Don't let me forget that on the night of September 25th, I need to appear in front of a judge in Rhinebeck, New York.
Apparently, according to some crazy New York laws, it's illegal to drive faster than the posted speed limit. Or so I learned tonight in Rhinebeck, New York -- the future location of me standing in front of a judge.
1. Yesterday was the one-year-and-three-days anniversary of September 11th. So of course I couldn't do any work. For me, the grieving process is a long and lazy one.
2. I stepped onto my first tack of the year only moments ago. Despite the life-wrenching pain, which after several failed attempts I've decided cannot be adequately expressed with words, the moment felt surpringly right, as if at last my room had become my own. Like a horribly painful ribbon-cutting ceremony.
3. My window faces an incredible plane of grass, sprinkled with people walking very seriously from place to place. Because the lawn is almost completely lined with dorms and windows, resting anywhere in the massive expanse is always accompanied by the definite sense of being watched. Most days there are at least a few people with no place to be, who linger in greener spots and pretend to be consumed by something worthwhile. Today the lawn is empty. A long morning rain pushed the pedestrians into their prospective places, and cleared the lawn for two girls who ran at each other from such a space as fifty yards, arms outstretched, to lock together in the embrace of a collision. Just to watch it felt incredible.
4. Barbara Fletcher of [placesforwriters] linked to me on her site, but linked to me as "asleep from friday." I don't know, my mind needs to make a metaphor out of everything, and I'm really struggling with this one.
5. I think I have a penchant for archetypal situations. I often feel like I'm the middle of the second act of a Greek tragedy. Anyway, I feel that way right now -- I feel like all of the dynamics of all of my friendships are adding up to some specific and tragically ironic end, and the sensation is not without its own sense of humor.
9.13.2002
Check out what I found at one of the Kingston liquor stores! I was infinitely pleased, as it was, in every sense, exactly what I had been looking for.
9.12.2002
Last night was the most players we've ever had at four square. For a while, the line was more than ninety people long, and the wait to play was fifteen minutes.
When I was a kid, playing four square on the blacktop of my elementary school, I wouldn't play on a court if there were even five people in line. The thought process was something like the fifth grade translation of "Five people? Fuck that! Why do I want to waste my life standing in line?" Last night I probably stood in line for a total of maybe two and a half hours. You have no idea how much I missed playing that game.
Next step: Team Vassar and the joy of a hippy rivalry.
9.11.2002
When I was a child, and up until the seventh grade, I wore my watch on my right wrist. Despite being right-handed and conscious of the appropriate fashion, it always felt wrong to wear the band on my left arm. But what I didn’t know, what I learned when I was twelve, was that I wore my watch on my right arm because I was gay. Or at least that’s what Stevie Lucero told me, one confusing day in seventh grade.
“Are you left-handed?” he asked me, to which I answered honestly. “But you wear your watch on your right arm? Oh, well, then you’re gay. It’s a fact, man--that’s a gay people thing. That’s something that gay people do.”
He told me with the confidence of a physician, and I had no choice but to believe him. I walked away from that conversation pale-faced and staring at my wrists. Had I really been gay all this time? Why had no one explained this to me? And why had I been wasting my time with girls? I spent the remainder of the day dreamily staring into the faces of my male classmates and wondering why, as a gay male, I wasn’t attracted to them.
If you love something, set it free.
If it comes back, it will always be yours.
If it doesn't come back, it was never yours to begin with.
But if it just sits in your living room, messes up your stuff, eats your food,
uses your telephone, takes your money, and doesn't appear to realize
that you had set it free,
1. Meet my new nemesis. I hate this lock. I hate this lock. The first night I was back, I was locked out of my room three times in less than two hours. Threetimes. And it's a single, mind you, at no point was my roommate going to show up with a key and rescue me from my own idiocy. Which brings us to the problem with this specific type of lock. It's self-locking. It locks itself. With a key--with a normal, run of the mill, half gram of metal with miniature teeth key--there's no way to lock your key inside the room. Doesn't that make sense? Well, I don't have a metal key now, I have a punk-ass little keycard, as if I live in a hotel or a library.
I don't like carrying a key around, which was fine in my last dorm, because I never really liked locking my door. And when I lost my key for weeks at a time, it never really mattered, because my door always remained unlocked. Like a good door. Which brings us back to my nemesis and the infamous night of lock-outs.
I never would've been locked out if I hadn't been painting my room.
"Wait, are we allowed to paint our rooms?"
That's not the point, and you're interrupting me. The first time was allowable. Who knew the doors did that? I left the room to wash my hands and the door shut behind me. Shut and locked behind me, which is what it does.
"Security."
"Hi, this is Ben Popik. I'm locked out of my room, could someone let me in?"
Again, that first time was allowable. Security eventually came and let me in, and I was relieved to be back inside. The first thing I did was put my key in my pocket, so I wouldn't be locked out again (or twice more, as was actually the case). But immediately after planting the key in my pocket, I changed out of those pants and into my allotted painting clothes. And again I left my room.
Imagine returning to your door to find it locked again. Imagine calling the security office twice in half an hour and telling the same tired woman that you'd locked yourself out of your room for the second time. Imagine she recognized your voice.
"Security."
"Hi, this is Ben Popik again. I feel really ridiculous. I mean, really ridiculous. I'm locked--"
"Wow. Wow. You should feel ridiculous."
She actually said that, and she was right. That's why I didn't even bother to call when it happened again, when a second changing of my pants found me searching for somewhere to sleep.
2. I wrote a kind letter to the people at the inside bard website, asking them to remove me from the index of student webpages. I've just had one too many freshmen come up to me and go, "Hey, I know you! You're that guy!" One girl asked me, "Hey, remember the time you delivered chinese food?" If you know vastly more about my life than I do about yours, maybe you just shouldn't tell me.
3. Three pounds later, I can conclusively say that so many jelly bean flavors are just no good at all. Some of them are downright disgusting. Buttered popcorn. Strawberry cheesecake. Nicotine patch. I'm considering writing the Jelly Belly people a letter.
