He, Paul, drunk after attending his father’s funeral, knocked once on the window. his brother was on the couch of course, smoking, he could see, playing with a plastic baggie full of pills, his fingers trembling, searching by feel like crustaceans, for whatever combination of pharmaceuticals he was taking at the moment, as if his fingers knew more than his mind, or what was left of it, what to feed his brain: Zyprexa, Atavan, some others. His voice was muddy when he spoke, too many over the years, anti-psychotics, over the years. God knows what his brain will bequeath to science. Mush.
“Then again, mine won’t look all that much better,” thought Paul, his own history with pharmaceuticals and his history of hitting himself in the temple when he got angry, coming to mind. “Too many through. years, jazz and cocktails,” he thought irrelevantly, of Billy Strayhorn. “I used to …”
“Hey, Fletch. Where’s Grace? She here?”
“Um…”
He could hear her – Grace – in the bedroom. on the phone. Talking to someone. Snippets of conversation:
“…Cause he dont want me back. And my daddy don’t either, and that’s just fine… he thinks I’m sellin and I’m not…jail…again…money…Cash money.”
Paul ignored that, focusing on the baggie of pills. “What do you have there.”
“Where”
“The bag? What are those pills?
“Uh.” Fletch looked straight at Paul, as his fingers, utterly autonomous, thinking organisms, rifles through the pills to find an answer, a response to Paul’s actual question.
“Atavan” (he holds one up). “Zyprexa.” holds it up. “Klonipin.” holds it up. “and this one is for my COPD.”
“Your what?”
“For my breathing.”
“Can I try one?”
Fletch seemed to focus in on Paul, as if seeing him for the first time, as if he, Fletch, were an arboreal creature slowly considering what he had decided was an interloper on his private branch, Fletch being so perfused with tranqs one might, in other circumstances, in other clothes, mistake him for stately, but for those ancient, stained jeans, that body melting like ice cream, fake leather, vinyl lethereen belt peeling like siding. His Zyprexa gaze, fat concentrated entirely around his midsection, rotting teeth and his cyborg skin and deceased right eye, a consequence of years and decades of chain smoking Winstons that had caused a sagging ocular degeneration.
“You want one of my pills?”
“Yeah, what’s that one?”
Paul pointed to an almond shaped capsule, the color of a Christmas ornament. “May I have that one, I like the color.”
“No. I don’t think you should. It’s a prescription drug. It’s my prescription drug.”
“Just one. I’ll pay you for it.”
Or maybe that one…that little light tan number, small, like a seed.
“Mertazipan. It’s for…I’m not sure.”
“Let me try that. I want to see what it does. Been taking them for years. my turn.”
Fletcher gave Paul the pill. Paul chewed it and washed it down with one of the dozen or so open, empty, half empty, partially empty plastic bottles of Coca Cola, standing like an outsider’s creative expression of temporal despair all over Fletch’s all-purposed half burned coffee table.
Grace now makes her entrance. From the bedroom, the room her brother had never once used for himself.
“Sorry Fletcher’s brother, we’re really sorry about your dad.” Unctuous, how she said “sorry” really stretching it out, like “sorrryyyyy.” Mocking. And then the royal “We.” And then the “Fletcher’s brother,” as if she didn’t know his name.
“We?” said Paul, flatly.
“Yeah,” derisively, he thought, though you couldn’t tell with whether it was derision or her ramped up neurotransmitter meth dance, or what.
“Yeah,” lightly now. A light, mocking tone for sure. “We. We are sorry.” God he wanted to slap her. “Really sorry about your dad. Youre father was a good man, wasn’t he Fletcher?”
“Yeah. Dad was. A good man,” said the husk of Paul’s brother. “a Good man,” he said. “A very good man,” staring at nothing on the table in particular. “I’m sorry, Paul, that I couldn’t make his funeral.”
“Grace,” said Paul, shifting his gaze to her. “Have you done much crystal meth, lately? Turned tricks lately back there in Fletcher’s room?”
Grace, perfidous liar that Paul was sure she was …
[seeing her now, in his mind’s eye, turning tricks in a room of a house part-owned by Paul, something he knew she had done, and could read the proof of it it in her face, which one could see was getting screwed up for a vicious retort of some kind, a petulant “so what” look that presaged some act of violence, because Fletcher, on Paul’s last visit to this forsaken, broke, mendacious street of poor white crackers, alligators and sclapel grass had said as much: “Grace has friends who come. Friends. Yeah,” he’s d said, ruefully.
“Friends?”
“Her. Friends.”
Fletch had never had irony in his wicket, couldn’t speak but the truth, but Paul knew he’d discovered it somehow. “Friends.”]
… and gave paul an icy stare. “We. Don’t. Do. Drugs. in this house,” she said, emphasising each word with a little punctilious hip whip, as if pretending to be Vanna White in Jesus land. Sure as shit she picked up an ashtray and wildly threw it in Paul’s general direction. Paul ducked, but got it in the face, ashes and butts spilling down his dress shirt, worn for the father’s funeral, and noted, in the midst of all this, that she had NOT said she was NOT turning tricks.
Drugs? That, to be clear, was a direct reference to Paul’s prior visit, when his stemother had asked him to figure out a way to get this wench out of Fletcher’s life, because she was a leech, using Fletcher’s cash money to take Uber everywhere, including to the damned Circle K across U.S. 1, and buy fake Christmas trees in August to sprice up the atmosphere at 15 Phonecia street.
“$600 a moth is what they are spending on Uber,” she’d in formed Paul. “We Don’t know what to do. And she’s accusing the neighbors of selling drugs.”
“But isn’t she the one selling drugs?”
“We don’t know. We think so. We don’t have proof, but we have our suspicions.”
“What kinds.”
“Of drugs?”
“Of suspicions.”
“We have them, don’t worry. And did you know that when we moved Fletcher over here from Gainesville we found three guns in his house?”
That was new, not un-disturbing news.
“A revolver, a semi automatic and something black with a long barrel.”
How did he get guns? From her?
“He got them at Five Points on Prather Street.”
They had been loaded. Fletcher, who for forty years had had more psychiatric pharmaceuticals in his arteries than blood, who had lost use of his drivers license to actually drive because he was too full of tranquilizers, and his sagging eye ruined his parallax, yet had not had an ounce of trouble traipsing , or staggering more accurately, into Five Points Oyster Bar, Guns and Tackle and picking up a 30.06, a Glock and a Blackhawk. He knew because after this convo with his stepmother, Paul had asked Grace point-blank, so to speak, in a phone call: Where did Fletcher get the guns.
That bit of drama had been back in 2014, by the way. Since then they — mostly his stepmom — had arrranged to have the local police liaison come over now and then, although, to be honest, this social services person came to Fletcher’s place more “then” than “now.” They were supposed to bring him meals, too, which he would refuse to take because he thought vegetables were unhealthy. He preferred hamburgers and coke. God knows how he has managed not to die of cancer when you take the cigs into consideration and the fact that he spent entire days on that decrepit, urine stained couch, like a man on a life raft.
So, long story short, and getting back to the whoring, when Paul had asked Fletch if anyone from law enforcement had ever, ever dropped by, and Paul could, in fact, hear Grace talking to a man in her, actually HIS, bedroom. And not on the phone.
“Who’s that?””
“a Friend.” Ironically.
Back to the present, cigarette butts and ash on a clean new shirt, on Paul’s face, as Grace, with way too much nervous energy going, spun around like a deranged Sufi, did a kind of port de bras with a spastic battement toward the door, turning to speak before her exit.
“Mr. Fletch, I’m going to Publix to get cigarettes and coke, want anything?”
“Why don’t you just walk to Circle K,” Paul said, not done by a mile. “It’s right across the highway. It’s called walking and it doesn’t cost you, I mean me, anything.”
“WHAT IS YOUR FUCKIN PROBLEM?” she screamed and threw a Coke bottle at his face, this time he ducked. “Punk ass.”
Fletcher’s hands, meanwhile, with lives of their own, like blind crustaceans, scuttling on rocks felt about autonomously for something, found his wallet, under an electric an enigmatic pile of paper, billls? with dry soda rings on them.
“How much you need,” he said.
“Thirty five probably.”
“Wait a minute,” said Paul. “You aren’t giving her money…”
“She said she needs it,” said Fletch.
“And you,” to her. “You don’t you make enough in the back room to pay for cigs at this point? Really.What do you of all people need thirty-five dollars for?”
“I do make money,” she noted. “It’s sixteen round trip in Uber, a cigs are fucking expensive,” she drew out the expensive like saying it for a long time would make it more expensive than it already was.
“Why don’t you quit then? Consider this an opportunity for self improvement.”
She walks out, shooting him a bird made all the more truculent due to her long, boney middle finger, making that finger seem like something she could actually impale him with.
“God what a piece of work,” Paul sinks to the ground, Fletch stares at him, vacantly, his fingers still fishing around in that baggie for pills as if they were rooting for truffles.
“Here,” he hacks, “try this,” handing Paul a handful of pills, in all colors, like Zots.
It has been years, no, decades, since I have been to the St. Marks lighthouse south of Tallahassee, Florida, on the Gulf Coast, within the borders of what people, probably visitors, used to call the ‘Redneck Riviera.’ I grew up in Tallahassee, having moved there when I was five or so, to what was then a redoubt on rolling hills against a landscape of sinkholes, swamps, water moccasins, alligators, water bugs, enormous wolf spiders on cypress tress, ferociously metastasizing carpets of kudzu, ferric mud, red as old blood in stab-wounds of ditches and berms, and miles of scrub pine. Tallahassee, as I recall, was built deliberately between Jacksonville and Pensacola on the geological coccyx of the rockies, a spinal column rising north through Georgia, the Carolinas, all the way up to Cadillac Mountain in Maine, presumably.
We wound up there because my father had taken a position in the biology department at Florida State University, whose president at that time had made it his mission to as quickly as possible elevate what had been a college for women into a world class academic center by importing Ivy League scientists and scholars. Dad, who had done his PhD work at Harvard before taking an assistant professorship at the University of Illinois, apparently fit the bill. He was an invertebrate zoologist and biochemist, which pretty much meant that, technically, he was a marine biologist. His work took him into marshes in knee-high gaiters, to collect mollusks, which he would carry back to the lab and vivisect, stringing their hearts up in vials for in vitro experiments involving obscure neurotransmitters.
Dad hated to swim, hated the ocean, and didn’t much care for nature, but his field trips with grad students took him into the wetlands within the St. Marks Wildlife refuge, and sometimes he brought my brothers and me along to collect sand worms, clams, sea urchins, and other invertebrates, which we would dump like pirate’s booty at the marine lab in Panacea, a stark, cinderblock building full of big fiberglass tanks in which horseshoe crabs scuttled, and fish of various types darted about.
I think we visited the lighthouse two or three times. I don’t recall very much at all about that, though I have very fond memories of a restaurant called The Oaks, located, at that time, just at the foot of the bridge crossing the bay to Alligator Point, west of the the wildlife refuge.
I now live in Brooklyn, NY, and have for the past thirty years. When I think about Tallahassee these days it is usually with some degree of chagrin, and usually during a recitation of my childhood to one of the many psychologists I’ve seen over the years to help me deal with what happened to me down there, and during the years since. What happened down there pertained to my older brother, who died at age 35, and how I did nothing to stop what he’d had to endure one day — my brother, Peter, who went on to study math at Princeton and MIT before undergoing an odd change into a peripatetic academic hermit and wanderer who for years took posts at obscure universities here and abroad, settling finally in Grenoble, France where he was hit by a car and killed while riding a bicycle. He was anorexic, so it is just as likely he would have died from that.
It was Peter who, while we were kids in Tallahassee, introduced me to science fiction. Peter had, by anyone’s measure, the largest collection of science fiction and fantasy literature in town, maybe in North Florida, maybe in the entire State (and in my mind, maybe the world). He introduced me to The Hobbit, then moved on from there to Ray Bradbury, Larry Niven, Asimov, Clark, Silverberg, Philip Jose Farmer, Harlan Ellison, the incredible “The Stars My Destination” by Alfred Bester, Analog magazine, and so forth. I was not an avid fan back then. I read the odd book, but never cultivated much interest in the genre, per se, and as I grew older, I followed the typical reading list of disaffected, bored, and (in my case) clinically depressed victims/adherents of a restless anomie — characterized by a whimsical hunger for other places, far from home and a tendency to random acts of self abnegation usually lubricated by cheap whisky (one friend, a physics major, apotheosized himself by nearly martyring himself: drunk and overconfident of his comprehension of electrical transformer anatomy, he’d climbed the fence into a power sub-station to demonstrate his moxie, and wound up without a leg and an arm, bones fused, smoking and charred, hospitalized for months, after having touched what he’d taken for a dead power lead.)
Books of choice were tomes like “Look Homeward, Angel,” “On the Road,” Herman Melville’s great South Sea novels, “The Age of Reason,” and other works by other existentialists of various stripes whose characters take action against themselves and others deliberately, in contradistinction (in my mind) to the spasmodic involuntary acts of desperation to which we were prone — In my case these acts included steak knives to the forearm and, finally, and in direct homage to Sartre’s protagonist, a knife through the palm of my hand into the dinner table at a commune in which I lived some years later, in Boulder Colorado. One such act was, in fact, my departure from Tallahassee, since, unlike the characters in the books I so admired, I utterly lacked and still lack, the willpower to do things on my own. Something must be done to me to get me to move. Someone must open the door and push me through.
In the case of my move to Colorado it was a friend’s wedding in Denver. He had been my roommate in Tallahassee post dropping out of Emory University and embarking on a desultory passage through various academic disciplines at my hometown college: meteorology, biology, English and, finally, religion. All I’d wanted to do, ever, was leave. Get out of Tallahassee. I would take the elevator to the top of the absurdly phallic capitol building and stare into the distance, the impossibly flat wastes west of town, a shag carpet of scrub pine to infinity and imagine that, somewhere, there were mountains. Thus, when Mark, who along with most of my friends, had long since departed the city, invited me out to his wedding, I saw an opening, packed my Toyota and with Alan and Steve, headed west one day, taking a two week absence from a job I knew I would never return to.
I didn’t get back to speculative fiction until years later, when I was an actor doing summer stock and bored out of my skull. I think it was David Brin’s Uplift series. I stopped again for some years, and then, after years of working as a journalist I began borrowing a co-workers’ books, Wool, which hooked me in earnest. I started reading William Gibson, Ian Banks, the Hyperion novels, Dune (finally), which had been one of my brother’s favorites, but which I’d never attempted when I was younger, all of the future-soldier books: Old Man’s War, Forever War, Ender’s Game, and many others, some wonderful, some dreadful. My job gave me free admission to ComicCon, so I often got the latest novels, sometimes as galleys. Incredibly, I had a pre-publication version of The Martian, which I must have given away at some point. I found it unreadable at first, then circled back later, read it, found it to be a species of what someone had called ‘competency porn’, a term that applies to all bad science fiction that sacrifices any real character development for superficial gadget fetishism, something that is hard to avoid.
I read Jeff Vandermeer’s Veniss some months ago and loved it, and then discovered, in notes I’d written to myself based on a friend’s recommendation, that I should read the Southern Reach books. At the same time I stumbled upon an online trailer for the forthcoming movie “Annihilation” a filmic version of the first book in the trilogy. I picked up the book and read it.
In a strange, metatextual encroachment upon my own thoughts of the frightening, silent landscape of the novel itself, I found myself too familiar with the fearsome landscape of Area X, the prescient, taunting, deadly place that is both beautiful and grotesque: strangely anxious, chilled even, a strange familiarity with Area X, the same sense of the same eerie encounter with which Vandermeer imbues the world of the novel like the vapors of swamp and gulf coast, all so familiar to me. I read this story in which people seem to know things they can’t speak of, where things are rotting in towers, in weeds, in the underbrush, things I myself saw when I was a child in Tallahassee, when the town was still a remote place encroached upon on all sides by layer upon layer of old and ancient and fantastically aggressive plants: endless woods, through which we would wander, discovering once a Model T rusting in the woods, slave quarters from old plantations, inexplicable clues in piles of refuse dumped there in the 40’s, piles of rotting pornography, wildly bizarre insects such as the immense albino spider we once found splayed across the trunk of a pine tree, utterly still, like a hand, the cat we found dying of cancer, a redwing blackbird we once saw nailed to a tree.
I looked him up, then, online, and discovered to my great relief that he lives in my home town, a place to which I hope never to return, and to which I know I no longer have a reason to visit now that my brother, the surviving brother, has moved East to St. Augustine.
I have a new policy. If I lose or misplace something, I have to throw five things away. My goal: to throw every fucking thing I own away and end up with fucking nothing. That’s what my brother did. He lived in an apartment in Grenoble when he was teaching there at L’Institut Fourier, and he lived with a bed and a crate with something on top for a table. My house is cluttered. As I get older I am misplacing things. sometimes for a few hours, sometimes forever, sometimes for five minutes. I finally realized that if my belongings don’t exist it will be rather difficult for me to misplace things. they will stand out the way one person on the field of an empty stadium is obvious; can’t be missed.
Anyway, my program when I misplace or lose things: five things at random. I throw away. I don’t even think about what they are. The rule is, if I misplace or lose something, I grab five things and take them outside and place them on the sidewalk. If I’m angry, I open the door and hurl them outside. Once I did that and hit a man. He beat me up. I thanked him. But usually I put them outside on the ground, and usually within an hour they’re gone because frequently they’re valuable. but so what? I fucked up, I lose. Fuck me.
For example. just an hour ago I misplaced my glasses. Somehow, between the basement and the first floor I misplaced them. I was enraged, but I applied a salve: calmly following the game plan. I took five things — in this case they happened to be all of my clippings from the past twenty years because that’s the first of the five things I grabbed, then four valuable books, one a signed edition — and placed them outside on the sidewalk. I don’t even care. It’s all crap to me. let someone else love them up. fuck them, too.
when I say it’s a salve, I mean it allows me to slowly rid myself of encumbrances. You know how people like Warren Buffet (my first thought was “Jimmy Buffet”) said, when I die I’ll leave nothing behind. Maybe it was someone else. Probably some self-help guru making millions filling people with crap and the false idea that they can realize their wildest dreams if they just figure what that dream is — which is crap because if everyone realized their dreams there would be no waiters, lawyers, (who the fuck really wants to be a lawyer, I mean REALLY), clerks, delivery people, undertakers, Java coders, various managers, mid-level apparatchiks, clerks, copy machine repairmen, millions of delivery people of various kinds, even some doctors, airline pilots, and probably your congressman, of course millions of factotums with Dickensian and Kafkaesque jobs, but jobs that are necessary to lubricate the engine of modern society, such as it is.
What was I even saying? Oh, yes, self help gurus: these people, really unique to the United States, who, apparently, have realized their own dreams, i.e., to be charlatans who make millions as succubuses stupidifying people into thinking they can reach their loftiest goals, which of course they probably cannot (acting teachers, for example, who could not possibly make enough money to pay rent unless 99.9% of their students were simply not going to try acting for more than six weeks before heading into some other career, because it’s unlikely in the extreme – impossible, in fact, because there are only so many jobs for actors, especially now that coders can create actors out of software, unlikely in the extreme, I say, to be the next (put name of overpaid, cross-promoted, self branding, charismatic, industry-favored, industry-manufactured, self manufactured, startling — even frighteningly confident, dentally enhanced — star, of which their are exactly ten who earn 99% of the cash available to the profession, leaving 99% of the talent [and many are actually very talented, meaning talent alone has not a fucking thing to do with success], sharing the one percent of salary remaining, [which is the precise mirror of American society in toto]; or simply doomed to spend their lives waiting tables at Appleby’s hoping beyond fucking hope that, I don’t know, John Cassavetes will rise from the grave with a ravenous hunger, suddenly for soylent green designed to look like food, stumble zombie-like into Appleby’s realize ___ is a star, not a waiter/waitress and the rest is fantastic history).
Where was I? Oh the idea that one should — and it probably actually WASN”T a self-help guru — die with nothing left, no BIG CASH cache. That’s what I’m talking about. Except instead of spending it on chalets in Vail — as if I could, or would, do something so godawful, though I know, and have seen, such things in my peripatetic life — I would simply throw it out on the stoop.
And in the end, when it’s really all gone, there will be one thing, maybe a toothbrush, and that one thing I also misplace, I finally will throw myself out on the stoop, and someone will take me, too, mistaking me for some leftover prop from some “jeux s’habiller”, maybe an artist or some such, who takes me to a shithole in Williamsburg (as if he/she could afford even that) and paint me some shade of chartreuse, and turn me into his/her oeuvrage, and then put me out on the street, as a work of art chained to a “no parking” sign outside a cafe with a name like “Shaggy Pastor Coffee Pad”. Then, I simply evanesce and vanish into that place where I my glasses went, which I misplaced an hour ago.
June 25
Pain. I don’t mean pain that lasts five minutes, but continuous, even low grade pain; pain that doesn’t vary, consumers its sufferer. It could be — and probably usually is — a kind of throbbing that spikes with every heart beat. It’s the kind of pain one usually associates with an infection to which the body responds by attacking the area and thereby inflaming it. This, as a long-term experience, is remarkably challenging, ultimately enervating, and something to which one would go to any lengths to placate. And placate is really what it is: it becomes an angry, vengeful pursuer; it forces you to think about nothing else. You trying not to sink into it, desperately and fecklessly trying not so much to overcome it but to carry on.
It demands that one stop and recline into it. One sits and drowns in it as if in a nearly meditative, vegetative state wherein nothing else exists and nobody, no pursuit, no external life, schedule, plans, or people matter. It’s as if the pain is the only thing that’s real and everything else is an illusion, which is really kind of a de facto meditative, trance-like condition. It is actually, at some point, the opposite side, the negative of a spiritual experience achieved through the deliberate practice of meditation; It’s dark brother. I know this because I’ve have this now — though I won’t go into the particulars, not because it’s unpalatable (though that’s a good adjective given where the problem resides), but because it’s not really relevant. Okay, maybe it is, since a dental infection is incredibly painful and unrelenting. But really it could be anywhere at all. I recall having an infection on my finger, the very tip of my finger next to the nail. Again, as ridiculous as it seems on the surface, the discomfort was all-consuming. I remember attending a Broadway show during this, and being utterly incapable of enjoying it, or even seeing what I was watching, because of the horrible, throbbing pain. On the tip of my finger, idiotically enough. Having this experience, one can understand completely why people undergo chemotherapy and radiation not just to treat cancer, but to ameliorate the pain it causes, which would be, I imagine, far worse than anything I’ve experienced. Though maybe it’s — to resort to a cliche — all relative. I think the difference between moderate and severe, or even excruciating pain is entirely subjective. No, I take that back. I recall my wife telling me about her mother’s decline, which I really won’t go into, but which reduced her to a kind of infancy. The good part about all of this is that pain makes you stop worrying about the rest of your life, which itself constitutes a kind of pain. Not being able to sleep because of pain is, in my experience, actually not as bad as not being able to sleep because of simple insomnia driven by worry or depression because pain tends to efface the considerable, sometimes agonizing discomfort of not having slept enough. If anything helps with pain, it’s perspective. Given what 90% of the population of the world goes through every day, who am I to complain about pain? My thoughts go to prisoners caught in a net, for example, forced — with no salvation possible — to spend live in confinement with savage retribution for infractions around every corner, whether it’s Norfolk Island, Devil’s Island, prisons of various kinds or guantanamo. Or just about anywhere — the Congo, North Korea, you name it. Even in the U.S. under some conditions. Enough, I’m in pain. I’m going to take something and start my day.
I have great news for those willing to act. But first, let me present you with a scenario: you’ve tipped your hat to your doorman and set out for…A Lovely Sunday Afternoon Stroll Along Fifth Avenue And 86th Street. Within a minute or two you happen upon a man lying on the cobblestones along the park, near death, perhaps — perhaps he’s tripped, perhaps he’s ill — do you walk right past him like the “coward and the meek who see the world’s great anguish and its wrong, and dare not speak”? Or do you stop, kneel at his side, turn up his collar against the wind, so he at least looks fashionable and is less likely to catch cold? Do you make sure he’s utterly insensate before riffling his pockets for wallet, and valuables, perhaps punctuating the act with a swift kick to the kidneys to get his lymph circulating again?
And would you care enough about this perfect stranger — and, by extension, about your neighbors — to make a mental note as you extract cash and credit cards, and toss the empty wallet aside — to talk to the parks service about sidewalk cleanliness and uneven flagstones?
At this juncture if what you have just read offends some sentimental idea of propriety, or if you’re simply of the passive stripe, one who would walk right past this fellow without even making a note on your iPhone to bring up safety to the coop board, the type to whom Albert Einstein referred when he wrote “The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it,” then read no further. The exit is to your left. Don’t slam the door on the way out.
Ah, now we’re alone, we men and women of action. My little story gave you that little tingle of self recognition down near your coccyx, no? Because you, my friend, understand that fearlessness precedes profit: you win when certain opportunities arise, because the fastidious shrink. Opportunities, I mean, that might seem distasteful to the weaker among us who habitually shrink with fear and moral repugnance from opportunities fit only for the brave, only for, as one might say, pecuniary Knights Templar. Yes, my friend, you and you alone must march right now, right down to the nearest B&N and purchase “The Wall Street Journal Guide to Investing In the Apocalypse (Make Money by Seeing Opportunity Where Others See Peril).” One of the authors, James Altucher, is a hedge fund manager; the other, Doug Sease, is, or has been, editor of the Journal’s money and investing section. Though if he were to take his own advice he’d be living perhaps in Sao Paolo with a helicopter in his garage and a bazooka in his bed. Yes, girls, this book is very real!
Now, here’s what Ms. Rose D’Angelo, who runs the Wall Street Journal book imprint, writes in a release about this guide: “The investor who knows how to anticipate significant or earth-shattering events—and is prepared to act when others are frozen with fear—will have the advantage. The Wall Street Journal Guide to Investing in the Apocalypse helps investors measure the risks and consequences of events, ranging from pandemics to financial crashes, and take advantage of opportunities that arise. While the authors’ investing advice will help readers protect themselves from panic, these same strategies can also pay huge dividends under more mundane circumstances.”
Rose, however, is being timid, careful, a bit too fastidious. You’ll notice that “risks and consequences” refers to pandemics and financial crashes, while “take advantage of opportunities that arise” refers to, well, actually it refers to nothing — nothing specific. Rose! Courage! Clarity! I think I’ll take a moment to help, to be honest, in a way Messrs. Altucher and Sease would approve of, pr demand! I haven’t read the book, but I’m assuming that the authors would agree that “catastrophe investing” doesn’t mean passivity; it doesn’t mean simply waiting for disaster to strike before investing. “Oh, how awful, Mobutu is killing millions and nationalizing the mines, let’s sell short on cobalt.” Sorry, you’re already late. Because — and I’m sure Altucher, gazing into his matrix of flowing numbers, would agree here — if you have to wait for bad things to happen you’re already behind the 8 ball. You have to be active.
Here’s what I mean:
Pandemics: let’s say, I don’t know, the bubonic plague suddenly returns to Europe. How can you profit from that and still feel your oats? Invest in companies making antibiotics? That’s so last year. Let’s think big here: Why not hold off and first invest in companies that charge premiums to those desperate enough to give everything they have to get out. That will both provide a windfall and create larger markets by spreading the contagion. Look, it will all be good later because with the money you’ve made you can invest in companies developing new, faster acting antibiotics. It’s all good!
How about revolution: Yes, I know my silver investments did well when there was revolution in Egypt, but look here, why not be proactive? How about this: See Brad. See Brad invest in U.S.-based arms, aerospace and military hardware companies selling hardware to unsavory or recalcitrant regimes with “president for life” type setups. See Brad hire a lobbyist to get Congress to take a pass on bill to review covert opps aimed at fomenting revolution in said countries. Chaos? Sure, but you’re on top of the game because your actions have destabilized the region, and gold prices are now sky high. And, both to profit and fuel markets, invest in KBR, or Xe, or whomever. After all, since the U.S. has also perfused itself into whichever horror show you are now profitably involved in, private security needs to keep the hoi polloi in line. AND gold, is going sky high because people want out of plunging stocks.
Heck why speculate. Here are some very real antecedents: The Nazi war machine? Remember that one? If so, know of a better place for lusty returns at the back end of the Great Depression? Neither did the Dulles family, the Bushes and Walkers. Great Britain’s money clans invested; Oswald Mosley was a man about town there, black and tan and arm held high…
And students, all of the above clung to those investments as German’s Czech neighbors got thrown under the bus. Poland got invaded, but look closely to see if US investors burned their investment books in moral outrage at that juncture. I hope not! Onward, onward!
well, I have finally managed to create new url for this blog, http://www.karlsfluoroscope.wordpress.com, which I’ll try to populate with some older posts, though that might actually be a useless exercise. It is, in any case, hard to write anything on a computer connected to the internet because the web beckons, always, with promises of anything you could possibly see or read. I, for example, had a root canal done a few days ago, and am now getting the occasional and rather surprisingly frightening electric jolt in the tooth. I go online, which is of course a terrible mistake when you are worried about any malady you think you might have. So I go onlne and type “sharp pain after root canal.” up comes those usual sites with one person describing their horrible predicament: “my tooth is sheer agony, pain radiating now up my face to my eye, which is now sightless and down through my jaw to my right hand, which has begun twitiching uncontrollably while beginning to show obvious signs of gangrene. My face? unrecognizable since the abscess, having essentially eaten away all visible flesh, has left me, essentially, with only my skeleton as a face. Children scream and run away. Any suggestions?
Answer: don’t worry, this is a very typical, and short-term reaction to the novocaine and should wear off with the next three years. As for the face, that can be easily remedied with a visit to a cosmetic-effects expert at a major studio or a phantom-of-the-opera style mask. Good luck!
I am bored. I have no idea why. Well, I do. I’m clearly not doing enough. And there are immense fans on the restaurant down the street that you can hear everywhere around here and that is having a soporific effect on me. I can’t think, I feel that awful sense of needing to act but not knowing what to act on. So I sit here moving my knees back and forth like someone on meth. Dear God WHAT ARE THOSE FANS? They are form the restaurant down the street. If the restaurant were any good I would tolerate it as a unfortunate trade-off for good food when I’m too lazy to cook. But the food there — it’s a third rate diner — is awful. You know what I mean: it’s New York Diner Food, which means everything on everyone’s plate is yellow or brown: meat, potatoes, eggs, toast, coffee, buns, bad chocolate mouse, hot dogs, sauce of some indeterminate flavor. All brown all the time. And this restaurant makes especially bad brown food. And food of any other color? inedible. I tried a salad there and the lettuce, which clearly had been delivered to the place when Ed Koch was mayor, has the taste and consistency of toilet paper. The dressing tasted like Mobil 1. And now? I have to listen to this droning ventilation fan. This is why I don’t like New York any more. It’s a city with no decorum. I recently got back from LA, having flown there on business (but really to see a friend, crash on his couch — literally — and have him show me around the city and outlying places like Catalina Island. He lives in part of the Santa Monica municipality at the foot of Griffith Park. He lives near restaurants, the restaurants are good, the food is cheap and their ventilation fans are, presumably, in Brooklyn. They are probably near my house. New york, like every other place, has its myths about every other place. One is that every other place is inferior to this place. Especially Los Angeles, which is New York’s cultural antipode. You could choose just about any quality and the two are exact opposites. New York has two smells: bad and worse, while Los Angeles has thousands of smells, most of which should be called fragrances: sage, wood, flowers, etc. Perhaps it’s the dryer air, but the city, at least where my friend lives, which is one of the Brooklyn-like areas, smells wonderful. New York has mass transit of course and LA does too, and it’s version is horrible and I don’t mean the feckless attempt at trains. As long as we’re talking about driving, even with horrid traffic and the overwhelming feeling of guilt one feels driving in LA, and even with the traffic, driving in LA is sometimes not bad because the city was designed for high speed car movement. And on so-called surface roads one passes…oh, but this is boring and a topic that everyone’s hashed out. Griffith Park has incredible hiking trails and nature on the West Coast is dramatic and sere. Here it’s soft and verdant. I can’t think of anything else on this topic because the felafel place has also activated its ventilation system, and when the prevailing winds reverse, the air is redolent of babaganoush. I’m going back to bed.
I suspect that I’m on the leading edge of a trend, a social movement, if you will. I don’t have a name for it, but it occurred to me when I did a story recently about Clear Channel’s program to sell ad space on airport bathroom mirrors.
The idea also came to me when I began to notice that I had begun walking around with my eyes on the cracks in the sidewalk because I didn’t want to see another advertisement. Of course I live in New York where advertising and branding is pretty unavoidable. Still, I was driving in New Jersey this weekend and experienced the same thing: eyes on the road in front of me as I drove along a gauntlet of strip malls flanked by gigantic billboards and come-hither signage and ads for familiar brands. My brother in law wanted to stop at a Dunkin’ Donuts and there, too, I had a hard time not seeing cross-branding messages, every single menu item bearing some kind of tag line. I took a stroll over to the ice cream freezer and there, too, every flavor of ice cream was it’s own brand sometimes cross-branded with other brands, like Reese’s.
So I have an idea, not that this would ever happen, but as an elaboration of a growing discontent with branding in general: a fanatical religious sect arises where people actually blind themselves so they don’t have to look at ads.
I’m not sure how original this idea is, and since I haven’t read all of William Gibson’s dystrophic novels I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s already used it (if anyone saw what the Internet could become it was Gibson). If he has, then the story would have to have the opposite: even more branding — branding of personal spaces that hitherto have been relatively sacrosanct, or instance. Wait, we’ve already seen this starting in schools with companies like Channel 1, and via by brands offering ailing school systems cash in exchange for advertising real estate on corridor walls, access for vending machines, etc. “Students, settle down, settle down. Now today’s class on isoceles triangles is sponsored by Doritos….um (teacher fumbles for a big bag of Doritos) uh…’a crispy snap in every bite’…(bites Dorito)”
Also, people in the story would actually themselves be branded. They wouldn’t just be wearing T-shirts with brands on them, they would be tattooed with, say, health insurance company logos because there arises such a state of crises in the U.S. that health insurance companies start offering to pay for medical procedures if the people getting them are willing to be branded — literally — with messages like “My Large Colon Is Now A Bicycle Inner Tube! Thanks Cigna!”
Of course, knowing where Gibson has gone with books like Mona Lisa Overdrive (see, branding is even showing up here!) he would probably go even further: in his world people’s very thoughts would be branded. Companies would pay you to have a microsoft (he coined the term, by the way. In his books it’s not the company we know, but the software card people insert into their heads to download, say, fluency in a language they don’t know) inserted that would frame each of your thoughts with advertising. “Man, that bartender’s an idiot. ‘Say, Phil, why not take out your rage at Freely’s Putt Putt Golf on Rt. 34.'”
Now if I were the great speculative fiction writer Alfred Bester, whom few people remember now, but whose novel “The Stars My Destination” is considered by most to be the among the top five science fiction books ever written (more branding), I’d write a book where health insurance companies branch off into the business of running work places that are incredibly dangerous, involving work nobody in their right mind would ever want to do…unless they had no choice. Bester would make such places off-world mining operations somewhere in the Pleiades. But the mines would be run by health insurance companies. That’s because scientists would have developed treatments — but not cures — for things like cancer. The miners, who would all volunteer for the work because they have a fatal condition that could be rendered chronic, if treated, are paid in medication instead of cash.
The worlds in such stories could be driven socially by something one might call “The New Feudalism,” which is a state of affairs Eric Schlosser suggests already exists in his book “Fast Food Nation.” The New Feudalism will reverse the notion that the consumer “owns” the brand – which is a disingenuous, highly spurious and probably morally suspect proposal to begin with – and instead will constitute a social order out of what is probably implicit anyway: brands will own consumers, and collude with each-other to decide who owns which consumers and at what price.
One thing you realize fast in LA is that in a strange way car culture makes sense. Yes, there’s the story about streetcars in LA, about public transportation, murdered by Detroit and the tire industry in the 1920s, but when you come to LA what you realize is that because of climate and the worldview, public transportation doesn’t jibe with the vibe there. It couldn’t work there. Remember, this is a city that, by all rights, shouldn’t exist at all. It’s a place that will resolve itself one day back into the sand. As far as I can tell when I visit there, the only permanent things there are the La Brea tar pits and Arnold Schwarzenegger. What do they put on postcards of Los Angeles? An immense two-dimensional sign on a hill: “Hollywood”, as if it that sign weren’t there the place wouldn’t even exist.
Trains and buses? They don’t belong in such an ephemeral land where not enough of an idea of a city even exists to have generated any real gravity required for its design. LA is written in longhand with no outline. And, an important, no critical point for automobiles, it’s a place where sheet metal never rusts. Consider the weather by itself; it’s dry as Bonneville but temperate enough to keep motor oil at optimal temperature. LA is where good cars go when they die. When I’m there I see VW buses that look like new. Mint condition. It might have been 1958, judging by the condition of vintage cars I have seen tooling along the 405. . Why, you don’t see that on the east coast, where rain rusts metal, and winter salt-pours torture the roads into flayed sheets of asphalt full of ruts, where each pothole fills with corrosive soup after each drizzle.
In Los Angeles, it’s not enough to say that the city is designed around the car. The truth of the matter is – for anyone who has been there knows this – there is no such thing as Los Angeles. Yes, there’s a chaos of roads, highways, boulevards, a sprawling ganglia of streets, cul-de-sacs, and turnpikes, and yes, they have buildings, houses, museums, gas stations, and of course tar pits, attached. But in LA – and in Dallas, to be fair — they build the roads first and figure out what to hang upon them second. But the road is the thing, while the buildings and houses are the ephemeral items.
If in New York City buildings are landmarks, in Los Angeles it’s the 405. It’s the Pacific Coast Highway. In New York “The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down.” But in places like LA, there’s no up or down, just directions. Directions are so important in LA that directions aren’t printed on maps, In LA, driving is a religion that, prior to the godsend of GPS, even had its own holy trinity: George Coupland Thomas and his two brothers, and their bible: the Thomas Guide, an advanced Grey’s Anatomy of asphalt.
Downtown LA, with its titular city hall and high rises standing like empty filing cabinets, is something that whizzes by – assuming you miss the jam – when you’re on the your way to somewhere else. Los Angeles, greater, and surrounding counties are destinations, places on streets, places to park. It’s not enough to say that in LA, more land is paved than anywhere else in the US, or perhaps the world. That’s not the gist of it. If New Yorkers never sleep, Los Angelinos never stop driving, even when they aren’t driving. Los Angeles is the automotive equivalent of the floating markets of Bangkok. That’s partly, I’m convinced, because LA is floating, on a sea of shifting tectonic plates, so there’s something ephemeral about the land itself, made more so, in spite of the perfect temperature, by the somnolent inhospitality of the place.
Yes, the car craze on the left coast is, besides being encouraged by LA’s preservative meteorology, is also defined, or driven by teleological considerations: a weltanschauung informed by the fundamental tectonic instability of a place that every so often shrugs off any human attempt at permanence with a tremor or full-bore quake.
So why stay put in the face of that, since there isn’t a “put” in which to stay. No, better to keep moving, to get in the car and drive. Why plan for the long haul, when at any moment the ground you’re on could end up closer to Papeete than San Diego. To my thinking, after having actually been there and seeing the land that defines the place, blaming the overabundance of cars there on urban sprawl is like blaming nuclear proliferation on the invention of missile silos.
Then there’s the stickier issue of manifest destiny. The automobile, one might argue, extends the metaphor, taking over where physical land runs out. The human argument there is for individual ventures, not communal ones. The individual thirst for distance and that drove people there in the first place hasn’t halted, it’s momentum continues, and like a geologic force that meets another one – the end of the land itself – is driven underground and extruded by force in another direction: cars, individual mobility, ten lane highways, driving, driving driving. Always going somewhere.
People who like the news for its own sake have a problem. Most reporters, honest ones, are creatively bereft. They stick to the truth because they don’t have the imagination to make something up. Unlike me. I’m either dishonest or imaginative; I regularly make things up and pass them off as truth at the magazine I work for. I’ve gotten in trouble doing it, nearly destroyed lives. If I need an expert opinion I write the opinion and put it in quotes. “Said an analyst.”
I did that all the time at the chemical market reporter, where I was a journalist and knew nothing about chemicals, and used to make shit up and say an analyst, or industry observer said it. “I was responsible for a week where prastic bag prices skyrocketed.
I love the news, and the more sensational, the less relevant it is to me personally, the more I love it, and the more opinionated I am about it. Especially if it involves celebrities. Like most people, though, I have no idea who represents me in city council, who my State senator is, where my tap water comes from, where my waste goes when I flush it or where the garbage goes when the truck picks it up, now that the Fresh Kills Landfill is closed. The closer the news is to me, the less I seem to care. Why? Because the local news, the news that actually matters is also really boring because it doesn’t involve sexy stars,
The fabulously wealthy and their pets, mass murder, bombs going off, and disasters. It’s also something that I could do something about if I weren’t so lazy, and uninformed, so it’s also source of self recrimination because it proves how woefully ignorant I am about the machinery of my own democracy and therefore, how unworthy I am to live in it, if that’s what it is, though I have my doubts.
I realize, of course, I’m not alone in this. I think most people are better qualified to argue the merits of someone’s ass than where soft money comes from, or whether the comptroller is qualified to be on the board of ed. Who is Ed anyway? Why is he bored? Doesn’t he watch Total Request Live?
I don’t entirely blame myself for the soporific effect the really important news, the news that concerns me – has on me. That’s because, as a well-trained consumer, I don’t spend too much time thinking about relations between things, or, like, ideas. Thinking has the unfortunate propensity to estrange one from commerce. Time spent thinking is time away from Target, TV, being what they call in the marketing world, a consumer. It’s time away from being entertained, and entertainment is another form of advertising. After all, the thing that pumps the siphon of commerce is marketing, and to make that work, people need to be trained to receive marketing messages, not to think about things. Spinoza isn’t a philosopher, it’s a new feature on my Maytag dishwasher.
So, local politics are not sexy. I don’t mean sexy in that metaphoric way people in PR use it – you know, “this issue isn’t sexy” – I mean local politics are literally, not sexy, like (name pubescent movie star here). I mean if you want to get more than 2.3% of New Yorkers, interested in, say, district rezoning, villainous developers with friends in City Hall, the city council position on developing the railyards, you’d have to offer lap dances at press conferences. Or free videos of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes bickering. Or Paris Hilton forcing herself to vomit after a meal. I read somewhere that three times as many people play Lotto as vote. So, if we really want to increase turnout at the polls, make the booth a one-armed bandit. Which, I suppose it is.
Meanwhile, I’ll keep making up the news I write. And if someone tries to fire me I’ll say it’s marketing.
Karl's Fluoroscope 