I saw a cockroach last night. Not an unusual occurrence, right? Well, it was on my pillow. Given that my pillow sits on a futon that sits directly on my floor, this incursion isn’t wholly unexpected. It’s New York. Cockroaches. But how do you squash one when it’s on the damn pillow?
This was worked out, in due course. I assure myself that each time I see one that it is “rare.” I guess. Someone needs to make a little javalet deal where we all log our roach sightings on a web site (a new Google Maps mashup, perhaps?) so we can aggregate some wide distribution notion of “normal” (yeah, all you suburban types chuckling at our having to calculate how many roach sightings are normal — I can go find a drunk and oily Ryan Adams slouched over an East Village bar any night of the week!). It was a little logy, as most of them are when exposed to light, my mammalian, soft, intellect rationalizing that the nonexistent spraying from my entirely absent management company is having an effect, rather than a far more primitive insect mind realizing I was just catching the very rare example of the laggard, gimped up and failing.
Because that’s what we all don’t want to be someday. It’s a fear of exposure — the light comes on, and we are cast as the fraud, the failure. The sound of the claws scurrying down the lath I excuse as gurgling pipes is another form of present mind delusion. I have a rodent problem, as we all do, here in New York (one in four homes, we are cheerfully informed!), and, as we all do in the meantime, we pretend, or live in anxious detente. I have a rodent problem — but as long as it is contained by the scurrying between the walls, I can live in denial. Even though I have been here months, I’m still expecting exposure — to turn an impossible corner of an apartment that I inhabit almost obsessively, to find myself staring into the beady eyes of an alien and dominant culture, a squadron of vermin waiting to evict me, not so much forcibly; instead, I simply turn and run in fear, not wanting to imagine the scope off the battle I am about to engage, since I doubt I can triumph.
I live in a rental, a term of derision and futility, wedged in the dense agglutination of million dollar homes, nothing I do seeming to make headway. We’re just waiting for that light, waiting to be squashed. So what is it that makes living here so unique, so special? It is the relentless pounding fear that never abates. You see it at the edges of everyone’s eyes, in the smiles that aren’t really smiles, but a fractured rictus, shadowing the gleam behind the eyes, a desperate wanting to reach out, wanting any sliver of reassurance. And we guard against that, oh, we hoard that bit of kindness, dangling it just out of reach and dance merrily away, floating on our moment of superiority, all while looking about omni-presently, grabbing every which way for the same.
This is our sport, this is our distraction. We gird ourselves with layers of irony and intellectual pabulum, tearing at every story, dissecting it and reassembling so it coordinates with our manic self-interest, wrapped in a smile and carefully deposited bon mot.
Except this city — and sure, it’s just not this city, we sit atop such a stinking mess of hatred that here we only get to see the most elegantly constructed horrors, those with Lifetime-ready narratives. We have no time for the workaday indignities; we demand more. And this city. This city teaches its children to turn on each other. This city has taught a child a lesson that thousands of years of civilizing effort and labor sought to repress, to create what we hoped was an unimaginable gap, one closed so quickly, as awfully as the effective rodents on Winston, who came so dearly to understand what betrayal was, what the absolute diminution of care is: “Do it to her.”
Do it to her. We have taught children that the means to survival is by sacrificing the weaker among us, a lesson that some smart fuck holding a bottle of Cristal at Bungalow 8 is likely rhapsodizing about this very instant, conflating his pushing of buttons on a keyboard with the acts of heroes, and entirely unawares of the distant suffering it causes, or, as we learned so thoroughly this week, what this grinding battle does to the minds less able. And what, then, happens to their children.
Do it to her. And now the wringing of hands, the rending of garments, breasts will be beaten on the pages of tabloids, our $84 million mayor will gravidly intone reform, some sad sack who has spent the past twenty years trying to stop something just like this but chose to pick the wrong sheet of paper to worry about while the rest of us were distracting ourselves with that useless fuck James Frey, who, had he a thousand fucking years to think about it, couldn’t actually understand what suffering is, that person will get fired, and maybe a few others who deserve it no more than any of us, who look at the strollers littering our hallways with an inward disgust that the nuisance parenthood has brought down on our drinking schedules.
We will try to excuse our ghoulish retelling of facts, wherein details are doled out, necessary to salt the story with just enough Law & Order-quality detail, so we can make certain we have the correct degree of outrage. We won’t think too hard about how quickly the person, the tiny life that we are condemned to rationalizing is finally safe, has become flattened into a useful narrative of many parts. No, we a protecting her, finally, right? After months. Months. Years. Try that. Try remembering this story tomorrow. And the day after that. And the one after that. Do that for a hundred days. Two. Then, then if the tabloid vampires were really acting because they care about people, and were willing to post the same image over and over, again and again, for two hundred days, we could get a sense of how long this city stood by. Idly? Maliciously? It’s all true.
But instead, we try to paint the image of evil on a single person. Make that the final betrayal. To declaim loudly that it wasn’t my fault. It was someone’s, to be sure. But not mine. I sure do want to take the steps necessary to make sure it doesn’t happen again. It wasn’t my fault, but I want to do what I can. How can I help? Just tell me what I need to do; the perfect phrase of the self-absorbed New Yorker who mouths fealty to humanism.
Do it to her. I saw a cockroach on my pillow last night. I will rest my head on it tonight, fortunate in ways I can’t begin to imagine.
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Do it to her.
I saw a cockroach last night. Not an unusual occurrence, right? Well, it was on my pillow. Given that my pillow sits on a futon that sits directly on my floor, this incursion isn’t wholly unexpected. It’s New York. Cockroaches. But how do you squash one when it’s on the damn pillow?
This was worked out, in due course. I assure myself that each time I see one that it is “rare.” I guess. Someone needs to make a little javalet deal where we all log our roach sightings on a web site (a new Google Maps mashup, perhaps?) so we can aggregate some wide distribution notion of “normal” (yeah, all you suburban types chuckling at our having to calculate how many roach sightings are normal — I can go find a drunk and oily Ryan Adams slouched over an East Village bar any night of the week!). It was a little logy, as most of them are when exposed to light, my mammalian, soft, intellect rationalizing that the nonexistent spraying from my entirely absent management company is having an effect, rather than a far more primitive insect mind realizing I was just catching the very rare example of the laggard, gimped up and failing.
Because that’s what we all don’t want to be someday. It’s a fear of exposure — the light comes on, and we are cast as the fraud, the failure. The sound of the claws scurrying down the lath I excuse as gurgling pipes is another form of present mind delusion. I have a rodent problem, as we all do, here in New York (one in four homes, we are cheerfully informed!), and, as we all do in the meantime, we pretend, or live in anxious detente. I have a rodent problem — but as long as it is contained by the scurrying between the walls, I can live in denial. Even though I have been here months, I’m still expecting exposure — to turn an impossible corner of an apartment that I inhabit almost obsessively, to find myself staring into the beady eyes of an alien and dominant culture, a squadron of vermin waiting to evict me, not so much forcibly; instead, I simply turn and run in fear, not wanting to imagine the scope off the battle I am about to engage, since I doubt I can triumph.
I live in a rental, a term of derision and futility, wedged in the dense agglutination of million dollar homes, nothing I do seeming to make headway. We’re just waiting for that light, waiting to be squashed. So what is it that makes living here so unique, so special? It is the relentless pounding fear that never abates. You see it at the edges of everyone’s eyes, in the smiles that aren’t really smiles, but a fractured rictus, shadowing the gleam behind the eyes, a desperate wanting to reach out, wanting any sliver of reassurance. And we guard against that, oh, we hoard that bit of kindness, dangling it just out of reach and dance merrily away, floating on our moment of superiority, all while looking about omni-presently, grabbing every which way for the same.
This is our sport, this is our distraction. We gird ourselves with layers of irony and intellectual pabulum, tearing at every story, dissecting it and reassembling so it coordinates with our manic self-interest, wrapped in a smile and carefully deposited bon mot.
Except this city — and sure, it’s just not this city, we sit atop such a stinking mess of hatred that here we only get to see the most elegantly constructed horrors, those with Lifetime-ready narratives. We have no time for the workaday indignities; we demand more. And this city. This city teaches its children to turn on each other. This city has taught a child a lesson that thousands of years of civilizing effort and labor sought to repress, to create what we hoped was an unimaginable gap, one closed so quickly, as awfully as the effective rodents on Winston, who came so dearly to understand what betrayal was, what the absolute diminution of care is: “Do it to her.”
Do it to her. We have taught children that the means to survival is by sacrificing the weaker among us, a lesson that some smart fuck holding a bottle of Cristal at Bungalow 8 is likely rhapsodizing about this very instant, conflating his pushing of buttons on a keyboard with the acts of heroes, and entirely unawares of the distant suffering it causes, or, as we learned so thoroughly this week, what this grinding battle does to the minds less able. And what, then, happens to their children.
Do it to her. And now the wringing of hands, the rending of garments, breasts will be beaten on the pages of tabloids, our $84 million mayor will gravidly intone reform, some sad sack who has spent the past twenty years trying to stop something just like this but chose to pick the wrong sheet of paper to worry about while the rest of us were distracting ourselves with that useless fuck James Frey, who, had he a thousand fucking years to think about it, couldn’t actually understand what suffering is, that person will get fired, and maybe a few others who deserve it no more than any of us, who look at the strollers littering our hallways with an inward disgust that the nuisance parenthood has brought down on our drinking schedules.
We will try to excuse our ghoulish retelling of facts, wherein details are doled out, necessary to salt the story with just enough Law & Order-quality detail, so we can make certain we have the correct degree of outrage. We won’t think too hard about how quickly the person, the tiny life that we are condemned to rationalizing is finally safe, has become flattened into a useful narrative of many parts. No, we a protecting her, finally, right? After months. Months. Years. Try that. Try remembering this story tomorrow. And the day after that. And the one after that. Do that for a hundred days. Two. Then, then if the tabloid vampires were really acting because they care about people, and were willing to post the same image over and over, again and again, for two hundred days, we could get a sense of how long this city stood by. Idly? Maliciously? It’s all true.
But instead, we try to paint the image of evil on a single person. Make that the final betrayal. To declaim loudly that it wasn’t my fault. It was someone’s, to be sure. But not mine. I sure do want to take the steps necessary to make sure it doesn’t happen again. It wasn’t my fault, but I want to do what I can. How can I help? Just tell me what I need to do; the perfect phrase of the self-absorbed New Yorker who mouths fealty to humanism.
Do it to her. I saw a cockroach on my pillow last night. I will rest my head on it tonight, fortunate in ways I can’t begin to imagine.