Thursday

A week later, May 14, another Thursday in eternity, 

another drop in the oceanic,

in the absolute center of the Universe, 

Brooklyn, New York.

The day is still undefined and indeterminate,

except for the mere fact that it is 62 degrees Fahrenheit

and mostly sunny, and its name is Thursday. 

This Thursday afternoon is empty and I try to fill it with words.

Please.

No good?

You’re faking it. You know that.

Maybe I don’t have anything to say. Maybe I don’t have anything to say because there isn’t much to me.

No, there isn’t much to you, but there is SOMETHING. You could say SOMETHING. Something honest, I mean.

That is too hard.

What have you got there?

You mean this notebook?

Yes, that notebook. Read something from that notebook. Read what you last wrote, whatever it is, even if it’s a shopping list or, God Forbid, a dream account.

Ok, but this will probably be embarrassing.

Excellent! All the better!

He opens the spiral bound notebook and reads:

I am doing a high wire act. I have limited funds. Not enough money coming in as my financial resources, mainly one bank account, is slowly drained, drop by drop, and will probably be empty too soon. I am afraid of running out of money, not being able to pay rent, getting evicted, becoming homeless, etc., and I am afraid to look at the bank account that is my principle resource in the same way that someone walking on a high wire does not look down for fear that the sight of the ground far below will trigger vertigo and loss of balance and the fall.

Are you really going to run out of money “soon?” You were pretty frugal even before the enforced frugality of the quarantine and now you only buy essential groceries and never eat take out, and you cook for yourself. Can’t you keep at it for another year?

Maybe, but what then? I’ll be 67 and broke. 

So you’re afraid?

I want to live by faith, so that the purpose, the end I desire to attain is itself the means to attain that end — the end is realizing itself as a painting realizes itself in the attentive labor I put into it. I want that kind of vision, inspiration, and creation, to provide the way —I want to have faith, I want to believe —

Like Fox Mulder?

Eh! Go ahead and scoff. I believe, but unbelief still dogs me. I need courage, if not encouragement.  And I need a good sense of balance.

Are these your prayer requests?

Yes, Father. Bless me.

Who Am I? The Wizard of Oz?

If you were, would you say I already have what I’m asking for? Faith? Courage? Balance?

Remember what the chicken said when asked why it crossed the road.

What?

“Je suis Perdue.” 

May days

Old man, take a look at my life, I'm a lot like you.

I turn on the iMac I bought in 2002, my first computer. An alert pops up saying that the computer’s date and time are set for a date before March 24, 1970 and that this may cause some applications to behave erratically. My eighteen year old iMac is not connected to the internet, you see. It is out of touch. I am to go to System Preferences, click on date and time, and re-set, which I do, using my new iPhone’s clock as a reference. 

The phrase “to behave erratically” stands out for me, as does the peculiar date mentioned in the alert — “March 24, 1970” — not even the date to which the computer was set, but a date after the unnamed date. Maybe it was set on my birthday, which is March 19, and in 1970 I turned sixteen. If the date given was May 4, 1970, instead of March 24, the alert could be about a glitch in my own operating system and my own kind of erratic behavior since the events of May 4, 1970. 

Today is May 4, 2020 and 1970 is on my mind.

I look up the word “erratic” on my five year old MacBook and Merriam-Webster tells me “erratic” means: 

“having no fixed course: WANDERING” 

or “characterized by a lack of consistency, regularity, or uniformity”

or “deviating from what is ordinary or standard: ECCENTRIC”

or the archaic meaning: NOMADIC.” 

Related to  “erratic” is “err, error, errant.”

According to another dictionary, the term “erratic” is used in geology for a boulder that is different from the rocks surrounding it because it was probably “transported from an original resting place, especially by a glacier.”

I imagine “erratic” describes my “journey” from adolescence to seniority. Like a boulder pushed by some historical force at a glacial pace from my parents’ living room in Florida to my studio in New York.

May 4, 1970 is an important date for some, not all, in my generation, as December 7, 1941 is an important date for my parents’ generation. Pearl Harbor was attacked by a foreign power on December 7, and four students were killed by a domestic power on May 4. 

If December 7 summoned my parents’ generation to war against foreign powers, what did May 4 do to my generation? What did the events of May 1970 do to me to transport me from from childhood in Palm Beach Gardens to old age in Brooklyn?

“Who cares?” you could reasonably respond. How do the deaths of four white kids at Kent State, plus the two black kids in Jackson State killed eleven days later, compare to the uncounted thousands of black people killed by cops? Or the uncounted Asians bombed by Nixon’s B 52s? Or the uncounted indigenous people killed by European invaders? 

Kent State, for my generation, is analogous to Ferguson, Missouri to this generation. An act of official violence and point blank homicide shook people, some people, awake to the America history we had been taught to ignore, to keep out of mind. The history of genocide, slavery and imperialist war was hidden behind red, white, and blue bunting and drowned out by fireworks. 

The next day: May 5, Cinco de Mayo, and I’m reading what I wrote yesterday about May 4, when I was wallowing in a bitter pool of memory and history, and I delete most of it.

It is OK if May 4th has become Star Wars Day. Take a deep breath. It’s OK. Life goes on. Generation replaces generation.

Today is May 5, 2020 and the thing to keep in mind is

if you must go outside for essential tasks, wear a face covering and keep at least 6 feet of distance between yourself and others. A new poll indicates that only 22% of Americans “feel comfortable” eating out at a restaurant now, 33% feel comfortable going to a retail clothing store, and 56% feel comfortable going to a grocery store. I go to a grocery store once or twice a week, but I don’t feel comfortable when I do.

The same poll claims that 56% give Trump negative ratings for his response to the outbreak while 44% of Americans are out of their fucking minds. Many people in more rural areas seem to think the pandemic is a New York City problem, if they even think it is a real problem. They say that Covid 19 is being hyped by fake news, that the morgue trucks in my city are fake, that all the people I know who are sick aren’t really sick, that my friend Robin wasn’t really in the hospital for 43 days, and my friend Dean didn’t really die alone at home, that healthcare workers and transit workers and other essential workers aren’t really dying of the virus. These are the people who say I don’t know what I know because they saw some videos on Facebook that told them what they prefer to believe, that what is happening is not happening and if it is happening it is a “plandemic” designed to make Dear Leader look bad, or something.

This madness of the moment, when so many are in denial — the present Commander in Chief, for instance — this madness of the executive power and his followers reminds me of the madness of fifty years ago.

Fifty years ago I decided I would not go to war if I was drafted. I would become a conscientious objector, I’d move to Toronto. Or maybe a sympathetic doctor would say I have bone spurs. 

It would be hypocritical of me to criticize the decision Trump made when he was eighteen. We have had three Presidents who were faced with the draft during the Vietnam War era and in different ways all of them avoided combat. As Commanders-in-Chief they were authorized to send eighteen year olds to kill and die. I have protested their wars. 

The draft had in effect ended by the time I turned eighteen. Some general said we needed to change the color of the bodies, so the bombing was increased and the draft was put on hold. I was given 1-H status. American boys lived, Asians of all ages died, Nixon called this “peace,” and the American people re-elected him. Some of my friends voted for him and I found I never really knew them or their strange religion.

I walked out of the SAT and dropped out of high school. I could not imagine how I could possibly fit into this insane society, so I set off on my erratic course. I found that art was a good category for my kind of error, because no one is sure exactly what art is, least of all artists.

History, or some other force, has deposited me in Brooklyn, as a boulder is deposited by a glacier. This place feels like home, this place in which I shelter, even in this pandemic. As we slowly became aware that we were in a pandemic we had little real data. There were not enough tests to do enough testing, but we knew the virus was here. The virus had been far away in foreign lands and now it was here, maybe everywhere, and maybe I was already infected. In those days I considered the possibility I might soon get sick and die. I didn’t want to die in a hospital with a tube stuck down my windpipe. I wanted to die at home, if I’m fortunate enough to be given a choice.

Now that I am here, the path that brought me here no longer seems erratic, but a matter of trial and error. My art making is a series of trials and errors that I organize into some kind of order, some kind of meaning. I attempted to give some kind of meaning to a random date in a message on my old iMac, but the message was not really so oracular. It had been popping up every time I opened that computer, which wasn’t very often, and I ignored it until last Monday. Has my life really been erratic? It has often seemed glacial in its pace.

A friend posted an article about a comet named “Swan” that will appear in the sky soon. Supposed to be worth looking at. “My time has come,” I said. Am I like a boulder pushed by a glacier, or like a comet falling in space, drawing an arc in our sky? Neither, of course. 

On May 7, 2020, I’m where I belong, and I’m right on time

Years later and years later after that

There now is something called “The Freedom Tower” where the huge negative space used to be. It was stuck in the hole in the sky where the Old World Trade Center was.

They had to put something there because they were afraid of the vacuum, afraid it would suck them into it, and they would be lost forever.

So, another expensive, worthless, phallic symbol was erected in Lower Manhattan. I can’t see it at this moment, but I know it’s there in the fog, and when the fog clears I will see it out my window.

In those days, I often walked downtown to look at the big hole where the Trade Center had been and the emptiness was overwhelming. I used to wonder if I would ever again be able to enjoy a perfect September day, or any perfect blue day. But that was back when the pile was still burning. It burned into December while volunteers worked, with no protective gear, no respirators, not even the kind of pathetic homemade masks we wear now when we go out to get groceries. The workers weren’t warned that they were in danger of getting cancer or fatal respiratory illness from their sad labor of searching for tiny pieces of human remains. “Recovery,” it was called, for a “decent burial” that honored the dead.

We never know where to put the dead, even when there is a burial plot already paid for, or a bag of ashes. That Fall we inhaled the dead, their smoky ghosts, but we could never understand what we thought they demanded of us. We are never ready to lose our people and we never know how to fill the vacuum that takes the place they occupied in our lives, the big hole in the sky.

People were born after the towers fell and they grew up and graduated from high school and started college or went to work or became parents. I used to wonder about those people of the future for whom the towers were not an everyday sight, something you looked for when you got off the subway and needed to orient yourself. The towers are over there, so uptown is over here, and the East Side is to the right, etc. When the towers were gone we were often disoriented and had to find other ways to know where we were.

America was lost in the world, picking fights, blustering, and deceiving itself. America wasn’t prepared for the new viruses, its social safety net was torn, its constitution had been sabotaged, and the empire never fully recovered.

Years Later, others were born who grew up not knowing some things that were commonplace in 2019. Why would anyone ever eat THAT? Were they TRYING to kill themselves? Why the addiction to fossil fuels? Were they CRAZY? And so on. 

The people of the future — I call them “People of the Future” — never shake hands. Handshakes are disgusting. Bare hands are disgusting. Seeing someone without gloves turn a doorknob is like seeing someone pick their nose. Young people roll their eyes when I make these observations, so I try to hold my tongue — excuse the vulgarity — but since you asked… 

What else? she asked. What else was normal twenty years ago that is not normal in 2040?

We were also addicted to money. Dirty, bacteria—ridden cash. We thought we couldn’t live without it. 

People back then were so nasty, my great great niece said to me. They displayed their naked faces in real life. It was gross.

I tried to explain that we weren’t used to masking our faces all the time, because the 21st century viruses were unknown, and we didn’t need to protect ourselves so much.

That’s not even true, she says. You had the flu, you had  the common cold, you had AIDS, SARS, Ebola, measles…

People died from that shit.

She’s writing her dissertation on the history of modern pandemics. She’s not stupid, but to her generation, an old man’s naked face is a very unpleasant sight, and a young person’s bare mouth is either erotic or ridiculous. Now everyone is veiled and everyone’s veil is a unique fashion statement that shows the world how one wants to be seen. It has only been this way for a couple of decades. Nose, mouth, eyes, need to be protected from invisible enemies, everyone is taught that, but it took years for my generation to learn it. We didn’t know.

2020 was the year the new viruses discovered the human world, my great great niece says, and by 2025 the new viruses had colonized Earth. They are cruel rulers, but they also give us some good things. They unified the human community and they put a stop to global warming. People adapted. 

Yeah, we adapted, but I’m 86 years old and I remember how things were and I’m still amazed at how things changed.

What do you think is the best thing we have now that we didn’t have BV?

BV?

Before Virus, she says. We are making a new calendar. We have to, because Time has changed so much since your time and we need new ways to measure it.

Yes, my time. Well, the biggest thing, I’m not sure if it’s good or bad, but it is very big, is we finally found a place to put the dead. I passed into the Noosphere five years ago. The technology of transmigration was, I won’t say unthinkable, there were what we called science fiction stories, and there were myths of resurrection, but the more or less permanent storage of one’s essential data was a fantastic idea that most scientists thought was impossible. The next leap was the discovery that our data could continue to live and grow and merge with the data of others in the information afterlife. It is nice to visit you on this device and to have these zoom meetings — I’m surprised it’s still called that — but to leave the meeting and not be attached to my image, and let the soul evaporate into the cloud of witnesses is a rapture you never dreamed of.