In Fact

The children’s book author is a bitter ass
The ingénue polishes her ten-year plan
We put the money in but none came out


Funny man is a shambling wreckage
Beautiful flower, poisonous gills
Goofy cub bites unprovoked



Extraordinary flavors burst from the humble turd-root
Feelings shoulder past numbness
Hey, that stooge is a lot smarter than we thought



CEO schedules tie-up and paddle
Tiny tyrant turns out easy to appease
Tearful devotion in fact perishable

The Eight Bigs

H. calls me. He is agitated, his voice jumping on one foot.

He says he realized he has acquired six of the “Eight Bigs”: A color TV; a camera; a telephone; a refrigerator; a DVD player; and a set of furniture.

The only things he is missing now is a car and a washing machine. And he is not sure he needs a washing machine, given the laundry facilities in his building. He says he is thinking of switching the washing machine out for a wife as the eighth “big.” If he should be fortunate enough to acquire a washing machine later in life, he’ll go back to the traditional list. He says his wife will never know the difference.

In June

J. is mortified by the reflexive fatuity with which he associates everything he encounters with some aspect of pop culture. That is, it is as though he is unable to experience anything in its purity, in the exactness of the moment, without mediating it through a system manufactured for television viewing, pop culture at its most degraded and insistent.

W. avoided movies for years because he said he didn’t like the feeling of having his emotions manipulated.

I welcome the assault, a relief from the central narrative, as it were.

But insofar as our own universe become impoverished by comparison, the chicken thawing in a bowl of water in the sink at home when we have just witnessed the resistance fighter share a heel of bread with a smudged, speechless orphan.

J. and I were talking about this after stumbling across the Boathouse in Central Park. It was my first time there, yet as we crossed the threshold into the dining room overlooking the lake and the bank of small wooden boats, I recognized it immediately from a rerun I had seen of “Sex and City,” the one where the heroine and her paramour fall into the water.

So was I robbed somehow, of my experience, by seeing it on television? It would not have been the same if I had read about the Boathouse in a book. Seeing does the greatest damage.

There is nothing that hasn’t been already been seen by someone. On the Internet we can see most things before we experience it, to decide whether or not it is “worth it.” A special effort must be made to avoid knowledge of a particular place, as with the sex of a fetus.

Seeing can be undone by thrusting ourselves upon the landscape.

The Boathouse, then, locked in my mind with a conversation with J. about the tyranny of memory: we don’t choose it; memory chooses us. And so we might title this piece, “In Praise of Repression”: our ability to submerge memory, hold its face down in a bucket of water, torturer reversed.

A less salubrious and more accurate analogy: forcing a balloon to assume a new shape, which results in the swift outgrowth of a frog throat, an angry eruption from an unexpected extremity.

I thought about this a few days later, face down at the Tui Na joint on Mott Street as a Chinese woman mounted me and dug her knees into my buttocks.

What's Wrong?

The question you ask is, “What’s wrong?” Or, “Is anything wrong?”

How a person answers this question is the “tell” for whether he or she suffers from a fear of rejection, a fear of abandonment, or a fear of feeling worthless.

D. learned this at a seminar taught by a Vietnamese monk, which feels more legitimate somehow, than if it were taught by a white person at the Learning Annex.

We are looking at his notes, which include his drawings of three human outlines that look like depressed Keith Haring figures or sock monkeys with the stuffing leaked out of them. Each figure is decorated with concentric circles marked differently, A for abandonment, R for rejection and W for worthlessness. There is one figure with a mental condition that spells out RAW.

I’ve been asked this question several times now. The second time I answered, “With who?”

Pico Iyer once characterized the difference between Californians and New Yorkers as “being” and “doing.”

Watching TV is doing nothing.

If you read too much, that, too, after awhile, can feel like another form of consuming without producing.

In my twenties I had a greater capacity for “hanging out,” which, in retrospect, seems even more impressive seeing as how I don’t drink.

The W Type, one who fears feeling worthless, imagines doing something is the solution.

A cultural portmanteau series we call “The Asian American Experience.”

Later, standing in line at the market for cat food, I find a frayed slip from a fortune cookie that I’ve been carrying in my wallet for what, a year:

“Idleness is the holiday of fools.”