Halloween happens in cyberspace, too.

everything’s dying, and i skipped church again.
in the car, the light turned green but we just sat.
people started beeping but the weather
was arresting. that, and the shadows of our
individual thoughts dancing on the glass. it caused
a calm inertia. i could have sat there all day.

at the restaurant, in a trick of coincidence, you walked in with a new lady.
we said our awkward hellos and introduced our new significants
without acknowleging just how significant this event was,
as if we’d each gotten lost on different roads to neighboring cities and suddenly
were asking directions at the same gas station, nodding cool hellos.
thinking about it on the sidewalk later, the indian summer sun
bleeding over me, i felt the ache that comes from

letting hollow spaces stay empty: specifically, that our
story never had a moral so we let it end, quietly.

i remember the size of your back, and how it doesn’t matter now.
i’ve packed my affections in little brown boxes and
shipped them off to someone else,

and i’ll do it again, and i’ll do it again, maybe,
with — (yes, certainly) — regrets but also
with a warm jacket on and enough cookies to last me through this tired infant winter.

If Emerson College was good for anything, it was for their insistent curriculum which instructed that, in the entertainment industry, you must kill or be killed. Trust no one, but shmooze. Shmooze your face off. Exploit your contacts later. Networking is gold. Never forget that, people. Think only in terms of your own success, and step over anyone for it.

So it seems my old friend (and one-month sophomore year shmooching partner), Opus, is taking all of Emerson’s teachings to heart. What I find most hysterical about the following email he sent me, in addition to the fact that it’s a form letter he sent to everyone else, is that it serves as a reminder that I’m just as shameless as him, because he’s stolen my idea: Back in the 90s, I wanted to write a book entitled, “Kissing Opus Moreschi”. I thought it just sounded like a cool title. But the bloke has beat me to it:

Hey there,

Remember me? It’s Opus Moreschi. We had some manor of
romantic relationship in the past. I hope you remember,
otherwise, I am embarrassed for myself.

I’m currently meandering my way through a series of comic
essays that I hope to gather into a book called “My Life (In
Alphabetical Order)”. What I hope to work on now is chapter
G (girls) or possibly R (relationships) or S (sex). I have to
see how it all turns out.

With that in mind, I am taking a page from the book of
Broken Flowers and contacting some of my exes. I wanted
to ask you a few simple questions to get some material for
my essay. I won’t be using any real names and your
anonymity will be preserved.

If you could answer these following questions, I’d be very
appreciative. Make them as short or as detailed as you like.
Also, please be frank and brutally honest – I can take it.

1) How did we meet, and what was your first impression of
me? How was the wooing process?

2) How would you describe our sex life and/or sexual
encounters?

3) How did I handle the breakup? How was I after the
breakup?

Thanks in advance for your help. I’ll autograph you a copy of
the book if the damn thing ever gets finished.

–opus

PS – If you can get this to me by the end of the weekend, I
would greatly appreciate it.

We practised dying last night on the living room floor. We’d walk along like nothing was wrong, and then — BANG! — we’d be dead. It would be from a gunshot, or a flying knife in the back, or maybe the effect of poison. Whatever the cause, we’d collapse — or lunge down to the ground — or skid our limp flesh across the kitchen. The kids were much better at it than me. It also took me longer to get used to the morbidity of the game, although the kids seemed to love it. They died and died and died again. I wondered why.

Because this is something we don’t understand:

How someone could be here, then suddenly not here anymore ? If we turn it into a funny game, something tangible, something we can act out, then get up and walk away from — it makes it a little less scary.

gas leaks, broken bike brakes, a
doctor’s appointment,
the smell of fried anchovies;
last night,

i tried escaping. halfway up the street and
almost crying, i realized it was cold and the walk would be
too long. turned around and gave myself a talking to:
this is not constructive. this attitude won’t do.

now the flesh on my thighs is sticky
from where peppermint tea is seeping through my jeans.
the sky has been a warm, dense yellow for days and
i’ve hardly even noticed.

tonight we’ll have cider, and cookies,
and discuss none of this.

The thing about working on a human rights website is that, whenever there’s a natural disaster, you have to scramble to update all the articles about relief efforts on the site. And, since Armageddon has begun, there is no shortage of natural disasters in the world right now, hence no shortage of articles, hence my wrist hurts from typing all day, and everything is becoming blurry from staring at the computer screen.

Yes, saving the world is tedious, and totally doesn’t pay as much as, say, marketing candy bars or programming all the computers at the Pentagon (congrats, Brent; you will always be more successful than me).

But I don’t mind.

In other news, it rained really hard yesterday. I got soaked. So did everyone else. Larry and I posed in our fishermen’s finest, waiting for Ry to get off the phone. This has been a long week.

No, really. Go on — test your knowledge.

This was based on a conversation in the lunchroom re: mens’ communal bathroom etiquette.

Apparently, men and women have totally opposite bathroom etiquette. Men say as little to eachother as possible, whereas I look under the stall door, identify the pair of high heels or sneakers, and call out to the person:

Nguyen, is that YOU?? Wussup, yo?! Wha’s goin on, dawg?

Guys just don’t do that.

New York was, as usual, a 36-hour adventure that felt more like 360 hours. Aside from getting stuck in the rain at midnight without really knowing where I was going to sleep, until N. and J. saved my soggy ass from a cold night on the street, things were cool.

I got to see S. for a glorious day of rain and self-portraits…we went to the Photography Expo at Javits Center, which was filled with shiny new Nikons and Adobe staffers. That was followed by Zak Smith’s art exhibit, which was a major reason I went down to NYC. It was pretty cool. His stuff looks totally different in person than on a computer screen. And, as he pointed out in a blog comment that sat in my spam filter for 6 months, he only uses acrylics, not oils or watercolor. Knowing that, his stuff seemed more impressive. I remain convinced that Zak is one of the pioneers of our generation’s nonexistant urban art movement. Wait, let’s take back that sentence. It sounded really pretentious, when the fact is I have no idea what I’m talking about. I don’t know about art; I just know when I like something. I don’t really know why I like it. I can’t describe what I like about it. And for some reason, despite the female portrait theme of young, hot and possibly strung-out women blinking apathetically through his paintings, or maybe because of it, because he’s found a way to mix edginess and uncertainty with utter realism (and express it two-dimensionally), or maybe because he doesn’t care to impress anybody, so much so that he titled his exhibit “Exquisite as Fuck” — maybe that’s why I like Zak’s art. If you like art, you should go down to Frederick & Freiser Gallery and see it before Sunday, when it’s over. Ok?

Then what happened?

Right, the story of the weekend. After dinner with multilingual Flo & funkmaster poet DeWayne, but before meeting smart cyber-pal G., I met with a successful independent world-traveling documentary producer to learn about the business. He told me what I expected to hear: you don’t need a master’s degree to be taken seriously as a filmmaker; you just need to make great films. Also: you have to sell your soul to the corporate TV networks if you ever want to be able to feed yourself and make documentaries on the side.

“Sorry,” I said. “I can’t do it. I’m incapable of working for anyone I don’t respect.”

To that, he laughed out loud. “Then you’re in the wrong industry,” he answered. Then he asked how old I was.

I’m 27.

He’s probably early-40s, but he didn’t offer up much personal info to me, and I didn’t ask. But before leaving the large leather chair in his spacious Chinatown loft, I asked him: “So in this field, do you have to be single forever?” It was a serious question. “Well,” he said. “It certainly helps. It’s hard to find someone who will trapse around the world with you.” (That’s a conclusion I came to long ago.) “But generally you always end up hooking up with crew members,” he continued, “so you’ll never be lonely.”

“Speak for yourself,” I said. “That’s not for me.”

And it isn’t. Call me crazy, but I’m a big fan of monogamy.
So the struggle to become a successful control-freak global multimedia producer continues. All aboard, people.

Fast-forward to this morning.

Ry had to get his wisdom teeth out, por fin, and long ago I’d volunteered to play Mom. So I took the day off work and brought him to the Doc and watched him drool blood and act totally incoherent, poor thing, and while I shopped for gauze, he waited patiently in Brooks Drugs reading all about Bono until the blood started dripping onto the pages of Rolling Stone. Whoops.

I took him home, got him soup, canned peaches, soy milk, yogurt, applesauce. We watched a dumb movie. He was there for me when I was toothless, so now I’m here for him. I’m still here: rainy Davis Square. Exhausted from late nights. There’s just one more thing I’d like to point out:

Everyone has been extremely pleasant today, I’ve noticed. Even drivers. People are saying “Please” and “Thank you” and “Pardon me” and making jokes and giving me discounts off groceries. The pin on the checkout clerk’s sweater even said “Life is terrific!”

Because it is.

Big Brother’s still alive and well in Washington:

Secret Code in Color Printers Lets Government Track You

San Francisco – A research team led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recently broke the code behind tiny tracking dots that some color laser printers secretly hide in every document.

The U.S. Secret Service admitted that the tracking information is part of a deal struck with selected color laser printer manufacturers, ostensibly to identify counterfeiters. However, the nature of the private information encoded in each document was not previously known….

To those of you who are standing up to this human infestation of moral rodents, the Bush gang, I salute you.

That’s from a forwarded lefty email by a pretty angry lady. There’s too much ‘ennui’ among the democrats. If they could just get a little more emotional — or scheming, rather than emotional — maybe something would happen. Democrats are like that brooding kid in high school who never cut his hair and only carried a single pencil to class and would sit in the middle row, drawing three-dimensional octagons with shadows. You run into the kid ten years later and are surprised to see he’s got on a collared shirt and is working as a mid-level programmer in some corporate office, the kind with $1500 single-cup-of-coffee machines in the kitchen, although he still wears Docs and hasn’t shaved for at least four days. He’s had the same girlfriend for eight years, she still works at the video store, and they’re never getting married. But they have two cats, and on weekends they make waffles. When they argue, he stops talking and “goes for a walk”, and then she writes him a letter summarizing her feelings, and then he responds to the letter with his own letter after an evening of silence, and then the next day he calls her at work and says, “Are we cool?”

“Yeah, we’re cool,” she says.

That’s what Democrats are like.