e-mail to jim

2005-12-14T01:49:00.000-05:00

sent 18 august 2005
brooklyn, new york

Alfred and Hudson:

"I came across a tribe of natives with hearts outside
of their skin; their women did the hunting while the
men played word-association games around the communal
fire. One elder, a medicine man with a bird feather
through his nose, would not let me leave, announcing
to the tribe that I was "one of them", some kind of
long lost kindred soul. The power of the
hallucinegenic powder we ingested cannot be compared
to anything you've ever encountered. Have you ever
seen a double rainbow, Hudson?"

"In fact I have," I said. "It covered half the sky. It
grew out of the top of the Sony Building on Madison
and ended abruptly at the feet of my then girlfriend,
Beatrice. She was crying (for I had just told her I
was dying of planter's warts) and a tear rolled off
her face, landing at the foot of that glorious double
rainbow. We watched the tear evaporate; we must have
stood there for hours..."

Our back and forth exchange continued on into the
night, neither one of us feeling the least bit
inclined to leave the table, to move at all. When the
bottle ran out we sipped upon the melted ice in our
glasses. I know I've never had a more honest
conversation with anyone in my life. When I told
him this, he said "Goodzuntight!"

Love & Thanks,
Mark

letter to ---

2005-12-12T19:44:00.000-05:00

sent 9 sept., 2005
brooklyn, new york

Dear ---,

I climbed the stairs of the subway station and
stepped into a hollow darkness that surprised me.
See, when I left Manhattan I was reeling from the most
spectacular sunset, the horizon swathed in the deepest
shades of lilac, saffron and witch hazel, so wistful
and plaintive that I felt like I’d been kicked in the
solar plexus; I fully expected to greet the last
remaining glint of it when I reached Brooklyn but as I
say, when I emerged from the tunnel all was dark - either
a new moon, I thought, or one obscured by the old fat
trees or the clouds, but no moon in sight and not a
single star. Of course I was zooming in the train
toward the east, away from the sight and deep
underground - But what if I was headed to New Jersey in a
bus or something? Might I have had another couple of
minutes under its warmth and beauty?

Nonetheless…they’ll be other ones, right? Right?

I remember chasing the sun as it set at the far end of
the highway, some western highway somewhere out at the
far end of the country, bouncing on bad shocks and
rotten wheels but feeling wistful and plaintive - at
least we were in motion and headed towards something,
even if it was merely towards the fleeting colors of a
fantastical horizon…

---! In that dark walk home I composed in my head all
the things I would write to you, all the strange and
brilliant (?) portraits I would paint for you ever so
adeptly with words, nothing like the grunts and
stammers that make up the majority of my dialogue with
the rest of the world. I was really churning it over
on the way home, tilling the gray soil of my mind, in
the darkness (and no street lights on Clinton Av.),
with the full intention of providing you with not only
the flowers and fruits cultivated, but also the worms
and weeds, because they’re often more pure and quite
often more fun. Like I was gonna tell you about my day
and the profundity of the discoveries I’d made in the
midst of it and how it’s so ridiculous that I feel,
all within a few minutes, profound sadness followed by
profound happiness and maybe back again, the lifespan
of mayfly, within a single cigarette, profound this
and profound that, utter this and utter that, emotions
pinging around in my head like hopped-up protons. I
always laugh when I take a moment to breath and
realize that my great and all-consuming worries are
not profound at all, in the sense that they possess
depth or lasting importance. My worries reflect my
life; my life is transient, peripatetic, itinerant,
purposeless, directionless, piffle and dust, but I say
this with peace of mind and a relaxed forehead. It’s
okay, I say, because this is the modern human
condition and those who do establish roots, who follow
firm and structured agendas, who dig in with both feet
to the “real” world’s supposed terra firma do so
because to not do so is to face the most frightening
of all possibilities: That life for us is no more
meaningful and possesses no greater purpose than the
life of the goddamn mayfly, that the sum of our
plights and highs, our deeds and actions, our relative
successes and failures, our loves and passions in the
end add up to nil, nil to nil like an exciting but
long forgotten soccer match. But there is comfort to
be taken in this knowledge. I just don’t know if in
this age, in this country, one can truly rejoice in
it…And I’m not saying everything is a waste of time or
that nothing is worth doing or saying or feeling. I
just wish more people would openly acknowledge the
absurdity of it all…that even one person would lean
over to me in the subway train and say “I know, Mark,
I know…" On the F train the other day a man in my car
died three times in his sleep before being
resuscitated by the stench of urine wafting in through
the door as it opened to let on two German tourists, a
Puerto Rican teenager wearing a shirt that read “100%
Negro” and a blind woman w/ a one-eyed seeing eye dog
at Borough Hall. It was the first morning I was on time for work
all of last week. See what I mean!

I was gonna write all this and more and maybe make
inroads with this theory (take heart in
meaninglessness) and somehow make connections to
better understand my surroundings and these confusing
times and this complex world and this frustrating
culture, and all with a lyrical panache and subtlety
and wit and good humour, but it played out so
differently in my mind as I walked to my room under
the dark and moonless, starless sky. Let’s just say
that I had it mostly figured out before I sat down
here.

But more importantly, I want to tell you that I was
not just making small talk when on the phone the other
night I complimented you on the beauty of your hands.
I suppose I could spend hours waxing upon the beauty
of each one of your parts and of the whole of you put
together, but I started with the hands so I’ll not
change horses in mid-stream…Your hands, yes, of
course, but more precisely your fingers. Honestly, I
can’t recall a more wonderful sight (damn the sunset!)
than watching your fingers on your right hand dangle
ever so close to the ground and then proceed to tap
out a rhythm on it that I could not hear but only
feel, the concrete mystically reverberating with every
tap of each successive finger like a rumbling
thundercloud, sending pulses of heat up my spine
through the lounge chair, making waves in the water
and spilling the CIA men’s drinks right out of their
plastic cups. I bet you could pluck a harp like
(insert renown harp player here)…

Alas, alas, alas…(such an antiquated and pedantic word
“alas”, yet it is one of my favorite words in all the
English language. I think I utter it in my sleep.) I’m
sitting here in front of my laptop computer, given to
me by a friend of mine, J------, who like many friends
in my life had provided a couch and shower and much
more when I needed it. He’s a writer who upgraded to a
Mac with wireless and had no use for the thing so gave
it to me so I could write manuscript critiques and so
I sat on his couch and wrote and finally made enough
dough to where I could rent my own room and he let me
keep the damn thing. Since it has no internet
capabilities, I use it like a word processor, saving
shit to a floppy disk and humping over to Kinko’s to
send ‘em off via e-mail. I’ll save this letter and
send it the same way. For letters like this, though, I
prefer the thhhuunnkkk and thhwacckkk of typing real
letters on real paper with my typewriter and stuffing
it in an envelope and sending it off to be delivered
through rain and sleet and snow by a real mailman with
real worries of his own, but he has a job to do, you
understand. This letter would read much better if it
had time to simmer in the stew of some mailbag
somewhere. There is no need for the immediacy of
e-mail where letters of this nature are concerned.
Besides, with a real letter on real paper you could
get a true sense of the girth and weight (or lack
thereof) of the sentiments expressed within, the
characters and symbols and such that make them up.
Letters received and letters sent are the only
evidence I consider to justify reality on any level.
E-mail is so theoretical. But I don’t know your home
address…

It’s weird. It’s Saturday night, not even midnight.
I’ve been up since 6:30am and worked all day for J--
in the capacity of production assistant on a
commercial she was hired to shoot for MTV. There is no
way to accurately describe the kind of artistic
double-think and rationalizations I used to make it
through the day without setting fire to myself. The
spot promotes a contest where the prize is that the
lucky winner gets to go on tour with Shakira. Ugh! I
was paid for it, naturally. And I truly love J-- and I
know she likes to give me work and treat me well and
pay me and feed me. She also can trust me completely,
and that is more important than almost anything. I’m
rather good at the job, which amounts to gophering
around and climbing ladders to hanging shit and going
to the store to fetch things, but I’m level-headed and
can accomplish tasks without complaining or hassling
them so that’s that. After the shoot, six of us went
out to dinner and really had a feast…cheese plate
(sheep cheese, strong and flavorful, starts with an
m…), cold salmon platter with shrimp and scallops,
ossobucco, all kinds of olives, porterhouse steaks,
striped bass, anchovies and sun-dried tomatoes on good
bread, beer, wine…the spread reminded me of a meal
Henry Miller would describe in one of his books, sans
the philosophical ruminations over aperitifs and the
inevitable post-dinner jaunt to a fine whore-house on
the Rue de Balzac or something like that.

I think I’ll abruptly wrap this up by saying that I
look forward very much to seeing you very soon. I know
that you will be visiting your sister but I hope that
we might spend a moment or two together…and if those
moments happen to be spent in a locked cemetery at
night, so much the better.

Sincerely,
Mark

Land of Amnesia

e-mail to jim

letter to ---