happy birthday, Lydia Davis (a day late)

spending hours

staring

out a window, observing

a neighbor’s cows

tossing french verbs

at the ceiling

seeing what sticks

even the smallest thing will be observed

how a word sounds

and

how a word sounds when

there are different words around it

jury duty

At first, she felt prepared. Even sophisticated. Ah yes, I am someone who reports for jury duty with my coffee in a thermos. No need to try to dash across the street, in the spittle-like rain, to wait in line for a cup of too-hot brown water, then scramble to arrive on time. 

She opened the thermos and coffee splashed everywhere, on the table, on her skirt. Undeterred, she took out some tissues and began sopping it up from the tabletop. She got a stain-remover pen out of her purse and applied it to her skirt. I am prepared for this contingency, she thought, I am someone who is ready, I am someone who has a plan, even when the coffee thermos has a leak.  

After all, she thought, it's not as thought I knew it had a leak. I borrowed it this morning. I do not own a coffee thermos. I'm someone who has a borrowed coffee thermos. I'm someone who has borrowed a leaky coffee thermos. I'm someone who knows the kind of people who own leaky coffee thermoses and lend them out willy-nilly. I'm someone who is already so used to the possibility of spilling and making a mess – did this stain my skirt? no way!! – that I'm already prepared to clean up the mess I know I'll eventually make. And yes it's true I forgot to clean out my purse before I came and I had to go outside in the rain and hide my Swiss Army knife under a bush and I just have to hope it'll still be there later because I'm not, of course I'm not allowed to bring it in the building and yes it said that in the jury summons but I forgot, I simply forgot until I was standing in line for the metal detector and by then it was too late, although it's true that even when I realized it was too late, I refused to accept it, and when my bag had gone through the scanner and set off all the alarms and they asked me nicely was there a knife or anything in my bag I tried to bluff, I tried suggesting it might have been my key chain, my wine bottle opener which I'd also forgotten to take out of my bag, my bike multi-tool, and, no? Well, oh, dear, how embarrassing, I forgot about my pocket knife, I'm so sorry and now it's under a bush, if it's even still there, if someone hasn't found it already, it's probably rusting, it's probably gone.

I am someone who is accustomed to dealing with my own incompetence.

unrulyidiom productions proudly presents

Laugh Track from unruly idiom on Vimeo.
Yes, it is our new film. We call it "Laugh Track."

the better part of valor

I should have known better because I did. Long before I met you, I said to myself: Indiscreet use of charm is a dangerous thing. 

I think about how careless you are with yours, to leave it lying around like so many suddenly unnecessary and summarily discarded sweaters. And when we, happy for an excuse, called you to return them, with hope in our throats you said oh, don’t bother, I’ve got another one. And even your rejection was charming, your ways charm us still, but we are crushed like so much ice, like a small and poorly planned uprising, like crocuses in a late snow.

We try to find out whether we can breathe underwater and look! We can. It is difficult, very difficult, and if you asked us we’d probably admit that we don’t actually like it, and yet we don’t admit it, we don’t think about that, we are instead proud of our ability, we are practically crowing, we are sure now that we can follow you to the bottom of the sea and we try to, we follow you down to where it’s very dark and we try to see but we can’t. By now we are very strong swimmers so we say, just wait a second, please, and we swim back up to the surface, strap flashlights to our heads, and plunge back into the darkness again, breathing as always with extreme difficulty. But it is dark, and you did not wait, and you are gone, and even though we look for a long time, we cannot find you.

Oh, I would reach for the moon and drown in a pool, I know. That’s the only way I’ve ever known how to be.

stuff and nonsense

If I were in love with Me (and I would, how could I not be?), I would send Me cute funny text messages all the time. I would send Me distracting funny YouTube videos at work that are so short it will only take a minute! I would have really nice flowers delivered to Me, too, but probably only once because I is not rich. Not roses because roses are boring or orchids which are too serious or daisies which are too silly. Maybe wildflowers because that is very romantic or maybe ornamental kale because that is funny! I would pay a lot of attention to Me because Me is so funny and interesting and smart and I would laugh at all of Me’s jokes and I would make jokes and Me would laugh too, ha ha. I and Me would get bored with traditional romance very quickly though of course because we are too interesting and different and strange and Me would suggest we move to Central America and live in the trees and eat bananas like monkeys and I would agree. I would say, "Me and I should fling our poop at people’s heads and shriek loudly" and Me would laugh and laugh in a shrieking monkey voice.

I would not have wasted time asking Me on a date. Well, I imagine that once I had met Me, I would be excited and a little confused (because Me can be confusing!) but because I am persistent I would have started trying to get close to Me, to talk to Me frequently, and to persuade I's friends to say subtle but flattering things about I to Me so that Me would want to talk to I, too. As Me would. I am a catch. So is Me. We will catch each other! This is a new game. I will score 100 points and so will Me and we will both win. Yippee! Me would make eyes at I and I would be so blushing, oh my! Flip flop and hip hop and skip the heart through the jump rope, please. Me would chat up I so coy and sly I would not know which way was up and would say so only to have Me reply, “Don’t be so normative, please.” Oh Me, oh my.

I would call Me regularly and we would talk and pretty soon I would be calling Me everyday or Me would be calling I because hello Me is not passive but one day Me might say “Me am very busy. Me cannot talk to I everyday. Me have to work!” and this is when we would leave to go live with the monkeys. After that we would go live with the fishes in the Caribbean and sometimes we would be fishes and sometimes we would be beautiful mermaids who lived in an underwater sandcastle and we would be so pretty and I would say to all the fishes “Look at Me! Look at Me!” and Me would smile and hold up a mirror to I's face and I and Me would laugh and laugh.

And Me and I are very happy and have lots of sex but no babies because we are the same gender! And this is why sex with the same gender is the safest sex: Babies are very dangerous! But we decide we want to be dangerous, we are wild and wacky, and so we both get artificially inseminated and have two little babies, Myself and Me Too, and we sing songs all day, hooray! We sing in four-part harmony, I, Me, Myself, and Me Too, we are in love and we are so happy we cry and our tears make rainbows in the sky and then we bake cupcakes and don’t even burn them because we are so good at baking cupcakes and we put lots of frosting on top. I would spoil Me rotten, and Myself, and Me Too. All of our teeth would fall out and we could only eat mush but then our friends the oysters would make us new teeth out of pearls and we would blow them bubble kisses and they would wink back so flirty and say, ooh, your pearly whites! And we would take very good care of our new teeth and eat our vegetables and maybe even live above ground again for a while and send Myself and Me Too to preschool where they could learn important things like counting and coloring inside the lines and then when they got home we would tell them they are only allowed to count backwards and to color outside the lines.

I was telling this story and someone said to I, “But wait! But wait! There’s no You.”

And I said, "That’s true."

A love letter, sort of

Before you end up married and buying a house in the Berkeley hills, before you become respected and a fixture of your community and successful at your profession, before you take your daughter to kindergarten, having played trucks and bulldozers with her for years because you’re so progressive and you’re such a great dad, and before you have a dinner party where you and your wife cook together and she’s not even boring or unattractive in fact I kind of like her, I quite like her, she’s funny in a subtle way and like you she has a good career, a graphic designer, I think, or maybe a psychiatrist, and sure you have your ups and downs sometimes it’s hard, even, but you love one another and you love your daughter and you’re talking about maybe having a second child and you’re fun, you’re fun people, you do strange things and you have costume parties still and in a lot of ways you’re grown up but in other ways you’re still quite raucous, in fact I think she must be a graphic designer or maybe a programmer, freelance, anyway, like you, because even though you’re not rich you still pick up and move from time to time, those three months you spent in Maine house-sitting and clam-digging and that long month in Uruguay where you stayed with friends and the internet connection was poor and you got a lot of writing done, and anyway you’ve decided to buy this house in Berkeley, reasonably close to all of the grandparents and a community garden and when you get up in the morning you usually feel pretty good, at least once you have some coffee, before all of that, before all of that, I’m saying, I’d like to take you out, I’d like to take you out now, when you have a lot of options and let’s face it probably a lot of offers but a lot of things have happened to you already and I think a lot will continue to and all I’m asking is please, before anything else happens, can we please go out. And after that, anything.