The Pencil, The Planner

(A journal entry I found on my computer. Dated May 2015)

I lost a pencil this week, last week a planner.

Today I bought a piece of plastic so toxic that I need to mail it back to the maker after one year of use. It sends out a blue tooth signal so that whatever it’s attached to can be easily found. This piece if poison is called The Tile. But my iPhone 5 isn’t new enough to talk to it.

The lost pencil is a Mitsubishi Hi-Uni HB. The Hi-Uni is soft, it floats on the paper. Either that pencil will turn up or it will make someone very happy. The planner, in particular, is upsetting.

I seem to be full-blown materialistic. Little things. It is not as bad as the year, 2010 I think, when I followed a fashion blog and bought a pair of blue jeans with a fly that always unzipped itself. Couldn't wear those to work.

Once I was standing in front of my apartment and a former partner passed on her bike. We made eye contact. She cringed and then stopped.

I’m still borrowing some of your books, she said.

Give me back Eula Biss, I said. 

She told me that my fly was down.

Months before I’d explained about the blog, my year of needing to feel like I had nice clothes. All of my friends knew about these pants. What I’m saying is, it was unnecessary to point out the broken zipper. But I understood that it was time to get rid off them. 

We bid each other a good riddance. I bought new copies of some of the lost books and the pants were made into shorts and the shorts have since disintegrated.

Down with plastic, up with pencils, Levis forever.  

God or no God, the universe sends us messages.

I Could Finish My Homework, Or I Could Think About Whales, God

I was at my cousin’s wedding, which was lovely, and the service was lead by a monsignor, a guy above bishops. He was conversational and Herman Melville turned up in his sermon. I’d just read In The Heart of The Sea, a book based on the boat-staving sperm whale who inspired Meville’s Moby Dick, so I thought yes, Melville, you’ve got me, Father. Now what about the novelist?

Mostly what I’m thinking about is that it would be hard to write so many sermons.

At this wedding in LA, my friend Danichi wedding, which was also beautiful, but the priest, a young guy, not catholic, so I guess he would not be a priest, he talked about Kierkegaard. And quoted him. In his service before the vows. Very bad. So many hip philosophers to choose from when speaking about love. Why that one.

I’ll admit that I was dehydrated at this time from a late night. And I also had food poisoning from a vegan restaurant in Silver Lake that Munchie chose for us to eat at for brunch. And the day before, in a bathroom of a San Francisco Starbucks (serves me right) my glasses fell into the urinal while I was peeing, and suddenly I was peeing all over my glasses, and urinal water, my glasses sat in urinal water. And I kid you not, I had fleas. Or maybe bedbugs, from the Fisherman’s Wharf Hostel. I wrapped my clothes in trash bags and dumped those bags in a public trash can.

So, bitten, blind, nauseous, and headached, and very, very ashamed, I can’t remember the quote, but the important thing to know is this—that Kierkegaard was a miserable creature who hounded his intended fiancée, and after begging her for marriage, he backed out of the deal so that he could, I don't know, be, what, severe and anxious? Which is his right. But really, what I’m wondering is, what a brave and worldly, or not even worldly but practical monsignor to use the skeptic Herman Melville, and what a poor move to use that emo Dane.

What was the Melville quote? I thought I’d never find it. I knew I wanted to look it up but I thought, nope, that thing is gone. Turns out it’s everywhere:

“We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.”  

The context was, it’s OK not to be a good Catholic, and get this, the guy actually said it, it’s OK not even to be Catholic, just so long as you are decent to people. I wanted to cry if that were the kind of thing I could do. I’d been waiting to hear that for years. This is the closest I’d come to God in decades. How can he say such good things? Probably this guy is an atheist who knows he has a fun job, I thought.

But to the literature point, it sounds like Melville—“A thousand fibers… among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes” a third of Moby Dick is just wild flashes of rhetoric and cadence. Can you read scansion? I bet that line has some meter. 

But then I read this blog, melvilliana.blogspot.com, and they found that above quote in a sermon by Henry Melville (no relation?) a British preacher, 1855. Herman the Novelist was alive then, had just finished his whale book a few years prior. How about that. And what does it all mean, and etc. 

I don’t like Moby Dick as much as I used to. So many encyclopedia chapters where the author tries to prove to you that he’s smart and knows his shit. All this is because critics made fun of his early books—Omoo, Typee, Mardi, Red Burn, White Jacket—said that he made it all up, and knew nothing of Fiji and these other, to New England, uncivilized communities where people were always doing it and having a good guilt free time. Although he published these books as novels, I’m not sure what genre expectations were at the time, but they came off as too outrageous for most.

So I’ve just been skipping those encyclopedic I-will-prove-it! chapters. I write “Herman, no!” under those chapter titles. Why I still read it, aside from my love for setting and novels set in small spaces is how Ishmael, although he does not really believe, still challenges himself to. Either because he is lonely, worried, or because (not or, but and) he realizes that there is some value in the practice of belief. Or that haters are often coming from a place of wanting to believe.

Now, I am not that person, but I do like reading a book about that person. And I also like that London preacher Henry Melville’s quotation got misattributed to a spiritual mess of a guy like Herman Melville, whose now classic novel was almost unanimously hated in his lifetime and earned him no money in large part to his narrator’s endless knocks against his Protestant countrymen and his embrace of taking transcendence where he could get it.

Another Laundry Thing

I love the laundromat. Though I have actually gotten worse at cleaning my clothes. I have lost, for instance, my spray bottle of Shout which I use to erase the grime from my clothes. The whites especially. Most of mine are a bit of, hinting toward another color, like the funked water that pours from gas station pop fountains, a little like lemonade, a little like the water you wanted. 

Tonight I threw everything in the was at normal temperature, poured white powder from a little paper box of Clorox, added some C grade detergent and watched the spinning machine thrash the dirt out of my clothes into puddle colored water. Did some grading while the news played on a flatscreen beside a painting of the nativity. Obama is in town. Will he get to eat at his favorite restaurant, the Valois? NBC news needs to know. If I get tired tomorrow morning I will steel myself with the thought that only a CTA ride away the President is drinking cafeteria coffee or hunting the bacon tray for worthy pieces.

I let my laundry run in the dryer for the full 30 minutes until it is piping hot, just so I can squeeze out a few more grades. When I fold my shirts, I can see that I have sealed the pit stains into my whites. I look to the nativity scene, then back to my clothes. I'll just have to wear sweaters over the white shirts, that's all. And find some other reasonable things to feel good about, nearby things: my socks are hot and stretchy, which I like. And I'll be moving this weekend, which is more work than laundry, but a better payoff afterward.