Zombies are the new vampires...

I CAN HAZ ZOMBIE?

Today, there's so much news of a certain kind that it's hard to understand how the human race has been saved from extinction. This heaving plethora of Bad Ideas has made me wonder if only a tiny minority of people have rotten ideas but a lot of flashy publicity, or if a great number of us are lumbering around harboring disastrous thoughts, but keeping our sucky notions to ourselves. And what saves us? Are there just a few smart people in the avant garde who warn us not to have sex with couches ? (...about which, more later.) Or does the phenomenon of the great hive brain take over, suggesting en mass that we not make a raincoat from our own hair? Make A-list movies starring zombies? Have sex with a church banister?

Greater minds than mine are surely on this. At least I hope so.

Today I read that no less a publication than Time magazine is declaring that our love of vampires is so last year. Zombies are the new biggie. Diablo Cody, she of Juno scriptwriting fame, is hard at work on a zombie flick, so that settles it. My husband and I had an intense discussion and agreed that Diablo Cody is full of shit, as is anyone who'd switch from vampire love to the undead. For one thing, my hub and I noted, zombies can't carry a picture. Hell, they can't even play second bananas. The best you can hope from zombies is background. As a group, they can stagger through New York City, ripping the arms off passers-by and gnawing entrails on the sidewalks, but that's about it. Plus, they have no fashion sense, chunks of them are always dropping off, and they smell godawful. Whereas vampires generally look pretty terrific, if you don't mind that deathly bluish-pale skin. They wear great clothes, can fly through the air, nibble on hot-looking humans and live forever. What's not to like?

Purusing my news sources, I've also come across an account of a Romanian woman who has woven an entire wardrobe from her own hair. She notes proudly, “I have nine items – a hat, a shawl, a skirt, a blouse, a raincoat, a purse, a handbag and a pair of gloves." She went on to say, "I did this because I wanted to show how practical human hair is. The clothes are warm and comfortable – and the materials are free.” She's right as far as she goes, but I think she's a little disingenuous in overlooking the yuck factor.

Marching on, last I came across a sexual preference I hadn't known anything about. Not that I'm a drooling libertine, but I fancy I'm as worldly as the next, however I'd never run across objectum sexuality. OS people, as they prefer to be called, are not in least attracted to people, squirrels, or blow-up dolls. Rather, they fall in love with fences, couches and roller-coasters and feel that the object of their desire reciprocates through telepathic communication. The only real difference between male and female OSers, is that men mostly want to have sex with their La-Z-Boy recliner, whereas the women want to marry it.

So what's your preference today? Zombies or vampires?

Or that sexy microwave oven?

The twitter tweets...

Tweety Deconstructed 2009

From time to time, I work with a management consultant on a book about relationships. He's the author and I edit, although he generously allows me to toss in my two pennies on the content. We've hit a disagreement, though, in what constitutes a relationship. He maintains a relationship is a physical I am here and so are you relationship. I say a relationship can exist between a couple of bloggers, Tweeters, or Facebookers, one in New Jersey and one in Kathmandu.

Today, on the XX blog in Slate magazine, the subject of Twitter, Facebook and the like arose:

An Oxford neuroscientist is suggesting that social networking and the hours kids spend doing it is rewiring their brains so that we are at risk of raising a generation of solipsists. Dr. Susan Greenfield fears this exposure is permanently "infantalizing" young brains, leaving them with truncated attention spans and the inability to interact face-to-face with other human beings...

The blog goes on to say: but wasn't it ever so? When TV was adopted in a mass fashion, the this-will-rot-your-brain arguments quickly switched from comic books to television, only to switch again when rock n' roll was popularized. Actually, you can trudge back through all of human history and find lots of this-will-rot-your-brain opinions. When (thanks to the Van Eyck brothers) oil painting supplanted tempera as the most widespread artistic medium, rot-your-brain groans were heard throughout Europe. Now, with oils, any dope could paint, the opinionmeisters declared. After the printing press was developed the same brand of moaning was heard: books would destroy all need for the human memory. But I think at the bottom of all rot-your-brain statements is the notion that anyone can do it, whatever the it may be. And ::poof:: goes the need for mastery or artistry. Or that enjoyable sense of superiority.

And so, there's now a forest of experts announcing that since the roiling dumb-butt masses can now Tweet, email, or IM at will, there's no need for the Rude Generation to do much except punch out their ur-messages of marginal interest: My mom sux. Urz 2? WTF?

As one who is more comfortable writing than speaking, I greeted email with unqualified delight, and blogging with an even bigger gush of welcome. Twitter? Not so much. The Tweeting I do is more in the spirit of experimentation, wondering WTF the big deal is in recording one's most trivial thoughts and actions. I never Tweet about my non-belief in original sin, say, or the possibilities of free will, or my fictional use of an unreliable narrator. My Tweets are always uninspired blurbs about small dull chores: Sorting my husband's sox.

Then too, every so often I get a post from some stranger announcing that they are now "following" my Tweets. Their reasons for doing so are completely opaque to me, but I will note that many of them are writers engaged in Goth, vampire and/or zombie fiction...a factoid I avoid thinking about. Their interest would seem akin to cyberstalking, except that they have no further interest in me except as another being to bombard with their specific dwarfish thoughts: Watching a True Blood rerun. How-how!

But then, Twitter-wise, maybe I just don't get it. Any day now, one of my zombie-loving-Goth-writing-graphic-novel-reading followers will surely Tweet me:

Tweeting. Ur doin it wrong.

Apres les Oscars...

It's always struck me that Hollywood and academia have a lot in common: a closed, deluded society, self-anointed big cheeses, and an unseemly love of awards. Consider the Oscars, as everyone seems to be doing today. About the Academy Awards, Marlene Dietrich once snarled, "What's wrong with these people? Are they children, that they have to be given prizes?" And the answer, of course, is yes, they are children. They have to be given prizes, not to mention a lot of anticipation,and special clothes as a build-up to the big prize-giving day. It's not unlike the university, which awards tenure, endowed chairs, and, yes, prizes, with the same bloated build-up and accompanying hoohah on the days the tenure committee meets. Except that the university eschews sparkly gowns and dance numbers. I put it down to a failure of the imagination.

Don't get me wrong. There are two bloody dripping chunks of popular culture I never miss: the Oscars, and the Super Bowl commercials. The Super Bowl has a more legitimate claim on my attention, since it's the groundwork for advertising trends that inky-stained copywriters like me will be forced to contend with, react against, or copy during the following year. Whereas I have no excuse for watching the Oscars. Year after year, they're generally as dull and boring as they were the preceding year. But I'm a film buff and so is my husband and, I suppose, we could count ourselves as having brushed up against the industry from time to time.

Now that the economy is turned to a progressively slurping quicksand, and now that we, in our slow ::duh:: American way are becoming both angry and populist, it might be time to initiate Oscars for Everyone! Think of of it: an Oscar for the best supermarket checker! An Oscar for the speediest gal at the McDonald's drive up window! An Oscar for the top Frisbee-playing dog! An Oscar for the fastest car detailing guy! You get the idea. And with it, of course, I propose a full orchestra, rented tuxes for everyone, a gigantic audience, and a 45 sec. limit on acceptance speeches.

Great idea, or what? Or maybe it's just the cold I've had for a week. Cold medicine puts me into a weird Carlos Castaneda-land. I start to imagine things.

Or could you tell?

Completely irrelevant cuteness...

St. Valentine's Day porker...

The porker in question

Maybe you've gotten used to my snarky ways. Maybe you were thinking this whole post would be an ill-tempered screed against Valentine's Day. Maybe you were hotly anticipating some mean-ass prose, decrying the corruption of love.

And just maybe you were wrong.

Actually, Valentine's Day is one of my favorite holidays, even though its origins go back only to the 19th c., the industrial revolution, and the sugar-coating of nearly every aspect of our culture (kids, pets, death, marriage, love, war, prison etc). Also forget every "historical" (aka religious) explanation of some fabled St. Valentine. It's a sketchy notion at best. Until 1964, the Catholic church acknowledged eleven St. Valentine's saints' days, all of them suspect, and none of them having squat to do with romance.

Never mind. I think you've gotta love any holiday commemorating the mysteries of the heart, even if it's sometimes celebrated in weird, creepy ways. God knows, we do our best. I've just gotten back from Walgreen's Drug Store. I mostly went just to get cigarettes and a new lipstick. Once there I was confounded by the sight of bewildered men thumbing through cards and hefting candy boxes. "Yeah," my husband said, when I reported back, "it's the one holiday you gotta sweat."

When Valentine's Day fell on a work day, I was often in Albertson's supermarket around 6 PM. Not wanting to miss a lick or a dollar, Albertson's goes for Valentine's big time. This year they've dedicated two full store-length aisles to crap of all things Valentine's: teddy bears, heart-shaped things, candy, mylar balloons et. al. It only shows how ignorant a soulless corporation can be. Men always put off doing anything about Valentine's until the very last possible minute, when everything is limp, grimy, and nothing you'd give to anyone. Back then, I was often waylaid by some frightened guy holding a wilted plant, wanting to know, "Is this is okay?"

Well, obviously not.

Since we were already in a supermarket, I'd suggest, "How 'bout a nice brisket?" Something I knew I'd like.

But then, I'm not a romantic.

A valentine in questionable taste any time at all

Gratuitous cuteness on Friday the 13th...

Extraneous cuteness courtesy of Cute Overload

With the Republicans acting out over the stimulus bill, I've once more taken refuge in cuteness. I'm not proud of it. My grandmother used to take to her bed on Friday the 13th, and while I don't do that, I still get a little jumpy. Hence the pix of a hamster about to eat something the size of its head.

La la land

Move-in ready w' kitch, 3 bdroms

During the Nixon, Ford and the Carter years, unemployment rose to 9% with inflation rising to 11%. Me? I didn't keep track of such things and rarely read the newspaper, except for art and book reviews. I lived in a factless and imaginary La La Land--something solemn grown-ups often pointed out to me.

In those years, as a nation, we discovered the president lied, Vietnam was a rotting deception, the Manson family were murdering thugs, and Haight-Ashbery was dissolving in a welter of crime and speed. My father dropped dead in the Pentagon at age 49, and thinking, why the hell not? I resigned from a secure teaching job and went to a distant art school that offered no financial aid. I lived in a series of improbable places and often held three jobs, while painting in my unheated studio over the WeeWashit Laundromat, and stayed a citizen of La La Land.

In the past few weeks, some friends from that time have contacted me. One of them sent me Google map coordinates so I can see where he plans to hole up apres le deluge. There's a large barn-like structure in which, my friend informs me, he has built a library, a stashroom full of dry food and seeds, plus guns. There are workshops where he can weld things, and labs so he can keep his business going. Back in the day, I remember, he was always puttering on a shelter, in which he planned to seal himself and his daughter, come the revolution.

In my more befuddled past, had I known of this concept, I would have informed my old friend that he's experiencing a world destruction fantasy, so he really doesn't need to go to the barricades. But back then, I mostly shouted and threw things. I had a very low tolerance for fruitcake notions. I thought things were already loony enough.

The outlook is dire right now and it's tempting just to go nuts, but there have been other crazy, dire times, and we'll make it. As the writer Frank McCord points out, there are stories that would break your heart, which weren't too bad to live through.

Even so, you might want to plant a garden.

La La Land can always use the greenery.

When crap was crap...

The Notebooks of Susan Sontag have recently come out. Aside from being the outpourings of a really, really annoying person, they remind me that she (along with James Joyce, and, every so often, William Burroughs), was one of the very first high-flown intellectuals to examine crap and crap culture. She wrote her Notes on Camp in 1964, isolating just a small chunk of that terra incognita: garbage. I looked through the essay today and was struck by how she just dives right into it, never mentioning that camp was already a very developed gay sensibility.

Well, she wouldn't, would she? Things were different then, so why risk getting your ass kicked? I remember that Notes on Camp made a big stir, mostly a big angry bee-like stir. At the time, a very sharp division existed between a serious intellectual life and cultural crap. Teachers and parents warned that if you read comic books, went to horror movies, watched TV all the time, and listened to rock n' roll, YOUR BRAIN WOULD ROT. Then Pop artists started doing paintings using cartoons as a direct subject matter, rock n' roll made it onto the college campuses, and Terry Southern got a few things published. All this was good news to those of us who had been busily reading, viewing, and listening to crap all along.

I was in art school at the time, and remember the long, sad looks on my teachers' faces as they warned us that the barbarians were at the gate. God only knew where this crap-acceptance would end up. Well, it ended up right here: With Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and I, for one, kind of, sort of welcome it. If I sound lukewarm, it's because this sweaty cultural embrace of crap has also given us Real Housewives of Orange County, a translation of the Bible into LOLCat-speak, and a female desire for tattoos and really huge lips. And, as the Hag-Mags continually demonstrate, no one has any taste at all.

But, hey, it's fun. And that's the whole point.

Or so I'm told.

But why stop at twelve...?

Family of twelve, 1960's style

About this woman who's just had a litter of eight, adding to the six already at home. "I just always wanted to be a mother," she said during a very odd interview, although she had a hard time talking, given her abnormally large lips.

And what are we saying about this? From a hot mess standpoint, she doesn't measure up to Brittney S., but she's the best we've got in the early austere days of '09. We can yearn for those halcyon days of no panties, a flotilla of paparazzi, pink wigs, rotten boyfriends, deluded moms, and the seriously under-reported purple drank, however I think Nadya has her own charms. Those charms are now being minutely examined by that special cheesy press which, like God, lets no sparrow fall without a lot of speculation, pseudo-horrified gasps, and lotsa photos.

For those mystified by the government's hi-jinks, war, and a pig-greedy Wall Street, there's plenty to discuss about Nadya. "Why is her mouth so weird?" my husband asked, as we spent an alarming five minutes watching the evening news. Having checked out a full-face Nadya-view, I had also researched the weirdness of her tiny nose and big chipmunk cheeks. "She's a plastic surgery fruitcake," I told him. I'd already spent a tough couple of hours on the awfulplasticsurgery.com website, and was too enervated to say much more.

While Nadya may love the idea of birthing an entire classroom, my observation of huge families is that they're not the big jolly gathering, portrayed by movies. Not for the kids, at least. My maternal great-grand parents had fourteen kids, with twelve surviving. None of them particularly enjoyed their upbringing, although they understood why their parents considered a crowd of kids necessary. It was frontier Oklahoma; times were hard and mortality rates were high. Not one of those children grew up to have more than three children.

It's curious to me that although we love us some kids in America, we don't seem to care much about childhood...that strange, dreaming condition full of puzzles and bewildered adults.

The hag-mags hit it...

Standard Issue Hag-Mag

Yesssss. A fourteen year old on the cover, eyes Photoshopped so far apart she seems to have fetal-alcohol syndrome, thighs the size of my arms, and plenty of idiotic headers surrounding her (The earring makes a comeback!). Yesterday, I bought my hag-mag for the year, wondering if fashion had finally gotten the word on rich-is-no-longer-in-style and being someone's arm candy is out. I can safely report a resounding No! What's between the covers are tight skirts and five inch heels, all the better to cripple you, my dear, and blouses that cost $1,600.

One of the most depressing parts of The Second Sex by Simone DeBeauvoir, written in 1949, is a chapter where she exhaustingly iterates all the work that goes into the acceptable female appearance: the mending, the hand-washing, the shaving, the trimming, the plucking, the curling. DeBeauvoir listed all that crap sixty years ago and I just spent three hours today, doing exactly the same stuff. Of course, the argument could be made that I chose to do this. The second wave of feminism certainly gave me the right and freedom to go about my business with hairy legs, a furry upper lip and Frida Kahlo eyebrows, while smelling like a wet dog. But having seen the societal acceptance of women who actually did this, I "choose" not to.

Anyhow, my quarrel is with a consumer culture that creates images which, in turn, foster a lifestyle that would be sustainable only if we had four more planet earths just for us ugly, overweight, fur-draped, Manalo Blanik-wearing, beef-eating Americans. Of which, hag-mags are only symptomatic.

I once counseled a younger woman about life choices, on an on-going basis. She had a college degree but seemed addicted to low-bottom office jobs. One night, she called me to report that she'd managed not to put a $2,600 designer suit on her credit card, but now she was weakening. It was a good investment she told me. No, I told her, it was not. Owning a suit like that would just make all her other clothes look like shit. She would be left with only unenviable choices. One, she could wear her fancy suit every day of her life. Two, she could wear her fancy suit only on the fanciest of occasions and be seen by perhaps twelve people, tops. Three, she could bankrupt herself getting the rest of her wardrobe up to snuff. She had already declared bankruptcy once. Why was she even thinking of charging this suit? Was she high?

No, she wasn't high. She was a hag-mag freak, who had tranced herself into believing that she was supposed to be wearing haut-couture clothes. And the belief that haut-couture was accessible to an eight dollar an hour office worker is a direct spin-off of a greed-head culture, that was never a reality.

And that's why I'm pissed at free-market Republicans tonight.

Makes sense to me.

Kluck 'em...

Kluckers

During the 1950's, in Burke, Virginia, school was dismissed on certain days so the kids could watch the Klan, along with the Daughters of The White Camellia parade down the middle of town. It was a big parade too. My mother taught school there and would tell us about it at dinner, her eyes the size of saucers. She knew that the parents of her students were Klansmen, although she didn't know how many. She lasted a year at that job as I recall, and often cried. But Burke was then known as a steamy little backwater, one where Southern-style barbarism was in full flower.

I've thought of this during the past few days, after reading about various Republican shenanigans during the debate on Obama's stimulus package. Thing is, there aren't many moderate Republicans in Congress any more, so we're down to the nut-jobs who survived the '06 elections, weren't indicted or jailed, and didn't retire to spend that vaunted time with their families. These bottom of the barrel Republicans have done nothing but obstruct critical legislation that's desperately needed to tackle this financial morass. To add on bitter insult, they are proposing cuts to childhood nutrition programs, Head Start, and food stamps among other programs, most of them benefiting women and children. That the Republicans have focused on such policies bespeaks a nasty contempt for our societal welfare.

So why is anyone still listening to them? Somewhere along the line, probably due to the Jerry Springer show, we decided that it was only fair "to listen to the other side". Except these guys aren't "the other side". They're extremists and their sell-by date was up in 1963. I propose that they be treated the way we'd treat any extremist hate group. Or used to treat them, I hasten to say. Now thugs, Nazis, racists, and David Duke can all be pretty sure of a spot on the nightly news, should they desire it.

Back in the day, Klansmen marched openly in the streets, sometimes holding the hands of their little Klanettes. Racists babbled about mud people and niggers; murders were not unknown. Thugs showed up at schools with ax handles to prevent six year old black kids from enrolling. And while attitudes are not quite as, um, blatant as they once were, I can't see that much has changed. The same hatred, cruelty, and callous disregard are in full flower among certain savages.

What has changed is the media's notional perception that fringe groups represent any sort of normalcy.

They do not. The lunatics among us are atavistic left-overs from a bygone age. They deserve only our studied indifference, our silence, and our revulsion.

These scrapings from the GOP barrel should be ignored by decent people, just as decent people once ignored the Klan.

So I say, Kluck 'em. It's time to pass the whole damned package now.

Mysteries....

A new anthology from The Sun

Even if I didn't have a piece in this, I'd buy it because I know what kind of stuff The Sun publishes. Their contributors write pieces that gallop, trot, or stroll without popular niceties or literary self-consciousness. If there's a unifying style, it comes in the form of actual speech, spoken in the untidy middle of life itself. This makes for startling admissions, blurted secrets, and the relief of recognition.

I haven't read this anthology yet. Hell, I haven't even read my own piece since I published it. I have to give The Sun a lot of credit for using this title: The Mysterious Life of the Heart. Normally, a title like that would send me running for the nearest graphic novel, just to get the taste out of my mouth. The title alone would clue me into the contents: chickish lit, sad break-up stories, and lotsa angst all around. But given that it's The Sun, all bets are off about what's inside. I feel almost tingly about getting my copy, knowing I'll come away with some real answers about the heart and its mysteries. Because what else is there beyond our longings, passions, and loves and what they weave together? Not much.

In some way, every story is a love story.

And sometimes an old friend will save your ass...

The Mad Hatter's Teaparty
Illus. by John Tenniel

On my blog, there's a postage-stamp sized image just below the section labeled About Me. It's the cover of an anthology I'm in, concerning the mysteries of the heart. My piece is about a time in my life marked by a recognition of raw facts, suddenly made crystalline and unavoidable. It was a time when I knew I had to leave my husband, and quickly too. The only mystery of the heart was why I'd stayed so long.

That I would leave was already a fact, settled stone-like in my mind. I'd dispensed with tormenting myself over my marriage's failure, my husband's opacity, and our inability to talk. Whether I'd tried hard enough, been unkind, had loved or not loved, none of it mattered. In truth, I was probably walking out on a big damned mess, much of it of my own making, but I didn't care. I'd absorbed one great lesson from David: I could just go.

I don't remember talking to David about leaving or divorcing, although perhaps I did. He wasn't uncomfortable with conversations like that, and later, more than once, I'd soak down his shirt, weeping idiotically over one boyfriend or another. But during my separation and subsequent divorce, I was suddenly too deep in real-life dilemmas to philosophize about whatever emotions I had or didn't have.

I had never lived alone, I had never managed my own money, I had never paid a bill, had never had a checking account, and my list of nevers seemed to run on without end. I was stuck in a small square brick house on a deer lease, several miles from Iowa City and away from anyone I knew. And, as we divied up our belongings, my-then husband and I, what I mostly thought about was the stuff we'd accrued. I wondered what I'd do with my half of the stuff, how I'd get the stuff to wherever I was going, and whether I'd have room to store my stuff.

In my memory, I can see myself sitting on the living room floor, piling stuff into a collection of liquor boxes I'd scrounged. Surely there were days between that night and the morning I recall most clearly, but there's only a blank spot. What I know next is that it was suddenly Saturday morning, the sun was shining, and David showed up with a truck, looking cheerful. In a matter of minutes, he had me packed up, settled into the truck cab, and we drove away. Much later, I wrote of that moment, And I left my husband forever, and that's true too.

Had he not shown up, I imagine I would have gotten through the hassle of moving somehow. But I don't think the day would have bloomed so brightly.

As he often did, David made the day worth celebrating.

As it surely was.

And old friends will be your parents...

Elvis Presley's Grandparents
Copyright by EP Music 1996-2009

I'd like to say there was never a harsh word between David and me. If I was slightly sentimental, I would. It might even be true, like certain brain-dead remarks: Kids are great! and Puppies are a handful! We never fought, he and I, but we had our moments, you might say. He worried about my boyfriends and my wild-child ways; I worried about his career, his health, and what I privately thought of as his silliness.

He was certainly the smartest guy at the Iowa School of Art and Art History, but he dawdled over his MA thesis on Samuel Palmer, then abandoned it, saying, But everyone's written better stuff than I ever could. When I wound up in Texas, teaching 18th c. visionary art, as I'd grub for Samuel Palmer-factoids, I'd think, goddamn it, David, because, in fact, no one had written anything better. He wouldn't go into Iowa's art history doctoral program either, but neither would I. He smoked too much, didn't get enough sleep, and stayed up late reading, but I was the same way, and we kept each other company during those endless insomniac nights.

Still, he had massive grand mal seizures, took heavy sedatives for them, and, against all Iowa vehicle laws, he drove. For him, a car was more necessary than breath. One winter, finally, he had a seizure on any icy road, wrecked his car, and banged himself up. Afterwards, I waited in the hospital, along with his brother, the two of us slumped in bright yellow plastic chairs, silently staring at our knees, scared to death. But David was okay.

His silliness, as I called it, was any uncharted Davidness I didn't get: his weird asshole roommate, his lack of a companion, the part-time teaching job at Coe and, later, his thirty year residence in the same apartment. But whenever I'd mention any of it, he brushed me off as benignly as a wayward ant.

His lack of a companion was something I almost understood. David was profoundly, deeply solitary. He was effortlessly charming, knew many more people than I did, and liked them all but, ultimately, he delighted in being alone. I liked being alone myself, and was always swapping out one boyfriend or another, trying to find a guy who'd put up with my sudden absences. But I was also in the throes of ending one long marriage and, not much later, would marry again. "Being alone is the ultimate existential position," David argued, when I told him about my plans. "Seeing another person's toothpaste in the sink is pretty existential too," I said. That we used the word existential about such things tells you how young we were, not long out of school.

I couldn't crack the weird-roommate-riddle though. Not for a long while. Ken, as we'll call him, was a narcissistic artist, with more compulsions than toes, who shared David's large apartment for three years, in a moldering Victorian mansion. Each morning, sitting bolt upright in bed, he loudly recited his latest dream into a video cam. The furniture was arranged in a nutty shin-scraping fashion, because Ken believed that furniture wanted to be in certain places. Whenever I stopped by the apartment, one of Ken's many depressed girls was always in the kitchen, moodily eating cornflakes, dressed in one of his t-shirts. They came and they went, these girls, and I never knew their names.

Ken was a performance artist, one who ran around on all fours, mimicking animal movement, wearing a black stretch suit, using self-invented shock absorbers so he could lope along easily, like a dog or coyote. He nagged David into photographing him outdoors, doing his thing, which David hated but always acquiesced. Inevitably, a fearful passerby would call the police to report a huge black ape loose on the streets. When the squad cars came, Ken refused to say anything. He'd just trot around aimlessly on all fours, while David tried to explain performance art to a bunch of cops.

Eventually, Ken disappeared into a Bowery studio, where he may be to this day, for all I know. For years, David maintained a near saintly patience with Ken's vagaries just because he liked him. At least that's what I believe because it's so David-like. It may even be true.

The closest David and I ever came to a fight was ten years ago. Just wanting to hear his voice, with its welcome flat Pennsylvania accent, I called. We chatted about this and that, innocuously I thought, and then David asked very quickly, "So how does it feel to be a corporate sell-out?" There was real anger in his voice, an anger I'd never ever heard, and I was speechless, then felt a dangerous hot answering anger in myself.

But the better angel of my nature, a smallish angel to be sure, recognized the innocence in his question. David didn't know squat about global business and why should he? Gently, unlike me, I explained I'd wanted to know how consumer products got dreamed up, created,and manufactured. I'd been curious and went adventuring and that was all. "Oh," David said, his voice lifting with something like surprise. And then we were okay.

Later I thought how old friends become our parents if we don't watch out. Bewildered by our later choices, they wonder out loud, But the man you divorced was so perfect. And then you threw away your whole career, moving to that crime-ridden city?

Exasperated, you want to smack them in the head. That man I divorced was crazy, my career was a big zero, and my home town was a cracked-out Springsteen rust belt.

Your friends' questions are as unanswerable as those of aging parents, shouted over too a far distance. But like our mothers and fathers, our old friends are only asking, Do you remember me?

Sometimes, we can holler back, loudly and truthfully: Yes! Yes! I see you! I see you as you were. I see you as you are. I loved you then. I love you now.

If we're lucky, lucky dogs, that's what we can say.

My old friend and the day he left...

Kill Mathew Barney by Jock McFadyen

I knew my friend David had once lived in Boston; it was one of those David-facts I filed away, like knowing how he tossed empty Styrofoam cups into the back of his car, until they boiled up over the seat. The how and the why of his being in Boston was something I didn't know. Probably I'd be just as ignorant today, if James McGarrell hadn't come to the University of Iowa. The university's scrawny painting and drawing faculty was fleshed out through guest artists, which is how McGarrell wound up there, scheduled for a talk.

Whenever there was a lecture, David and I always went. McGarrell was a figurative artist, whose work I knew and wasn't nuts about but then, I was abstract painter and an unforgivng one. Slouching into the auditorium that night, I settled in next to David, prepared for a dull hour. However, McGarrell knocked everyone's socks off, showing slides of paintings, all beautifully structured, with perfectly placed light and shadow. Even then, he was quite famous and, it turned out, he was also darkly good-looking, tweedily well-dressed, articulate, funny, and down to earth. It was unfair that heaven's bounty had been showered on just one guy, but by the end of the lecture I was madly in love with James McGarrell, along with most of the audience.

Afterwards, during our usual post-lecture coffee, David casually mentioned he'd met McGarrell at Ohio, during his MFA work. "You met him?" I squealed. "I never knew that. Did he like your work? What did he say to you?"

"He liked my work a lot," David said. "So I asked him what I should do, meaning with my whole life. I don't think he understood that's what I was really asking. Anyhow, he said I should go to Boston." David paused, and took a slurp of coffee. "He didn't give me any reason. I think Boston just popped into his head, and he told me to go. So I went."

"Just like that?" I asked. "You just went?" I was quietly impressed. Wow. How could you just go? I wondered, without a thought or a plan. That was Jack Kerouac territory.

Indeed. David just went. He drove to Boston at the end of the year, with his MFA, cloudy McGarrell-inspired hopes, and as much forethought as he could muster. Through a bulletin board or a newspaper ad, he'd arranged to share an apartment on Beacon Hill. Since he didn't know anything about Boston, he was ignorant of precisely how hurtfully high the rent would be, and that there would be no legal parking within miles. He'd never met his roommate either, who would turn out to be a slick-haired financial manager, one who was making a hefty salary and schemed to keep more of it: hence his desire to split the rent.

All David needed was a job, and he got one, working at a small unprofitable greeting card company. Tiny, cheerless and unprofitable though the company was, it delusionally viewed itself as direct competition to Hallmark. To this end, each employee specialized in a particular type of Hallmarkesque card: sappy condolence/birthday cards with floral bouquets rendered in drooly watercolor, kiddie birthday cards showing a kiddie clutching a giant number over his cute pot-bellied nakedness, fakey 19th century scenes of jolly coachmen and hounds that were cranked out for Christmas.

Of course, David was assigned the naked kid card.

His boss explained that for reasons of taste and propriety, the tot's nakedness was to be hidden by an immense number, signifying the birthday child's age. Since the company was poor, obviously it couldn't put out a separate boy and girl card, so David was instructed to paint a little androgen, who could be taken for either. Again, because the company was three steps from bankruptcy, it couldn't offer separate cards for little black, Hispanic, or Asian children. Still, the company was sensitive to race...and so David was told to shade his little androgynous tyke a tasteful coffee color, and to keep the hair and eyes a medium brown.

Off to one side, where David sat, were three twittering old ladies who painted the drooly watercolor cards and wrote the idiot verses inside. In order to sharpen their writing skills, one night a week, the biddies attended Robert Lowell's poetry workshops at Harvard to no obvious benefit. On David's other side, hunched the man David bitterly envied. He too was quite old, but he was allowed to render The Big Christmas Card. This was the fakey 19th century scene, complete with drifts of snow, stamping horses, shiny coach, jolly horn-tooting coachmen, red-faced burghers offering steamy tankards of cheer, excited swirling dogs etc. etc. And while it was a stupid and banal card, at least it was a complex one, and no toast-colored androgens were required.

And, David quickly learned, the card company paid next to nothing.

So, for the next year, David wandered out to his car each morning, peeling off the illegal-parking ticket he'd been given the night before; then he'd drive to his soul-killing job, and paint a little tan boy/girl mix for the next eight hours. After work, he'd stop on a street corner and panhandle passers-by, unleashing a volley of abuse. Once he'd begged for loose change, he'd cut through the Parker House restaurant, stealing rolls out of the bread baskets as he went. Even with the change and swiped bread, he wasn't making it.

And, back at the apartment, each night his fat-cat roommate would say, "If I'd only known you couldn't carry your weight...I gotta have someone who can pay his part of the goddamn rent."

The only friend he made was a girl about his age, who worked at the card factory too. She was a rich kid, whose bewildered dad had opened an account for her at a gourmet specialty shop. "She loved hors d'oerves," David said. "When she had me over for dinner, that's all we'd have, ordered from that shop. She'd eat something off a little piece of toast and say, 'Isn't this good?'" Privately I thought of my own weird friend, the one who ate salad with her hands.

By the end of that year, he told me, he owed $7500 in parking tickets.

"So what did you finally do?" I asked, morbidly fascinated.

"Well, one night I was lying in bed, and I thought, I can just leave... It hadn't occurred to me. I thought I had to stay and make everything work out, but I realized I couldn't. I'd just gotten promoted too. The old guy, the one who did The Big Christmas Card, died doing overtime, and they gave it to me. But I still wouldn't make enough money. I'd never make enough money there. So I got into my car in the dead of night and left. I never wrote the card company to resign, never wrote my roommate. I ran away."

"Damn," I said. It was quite a story. "Good for you," I added, and meant it. A useful bit of knowledge, I thought. One I might have occasion to use: Just leave.

"Yeah," David said, "It was the right thing to do. Of course, I can't go back to Boston for five more years. The parking ticket thing. That's when the statute of limitations is up. But that's okay, I can live with it."

"Hey," I said, "who needs to go to Boston anyway?"