shampooP: PART THREE
I run to inspect this view from the cliff--the Pacific Vista--the end of the world--and am thrilled at how unlike Europe the view is, Europe's overhistoried countrysides dusted with charcoal and laced with unmoving gullies of pureed smoker's lung.
And while I stand on the cliff, my instinct is to scan pretty scenery--but not for too long. I feel the need to turn around to ensure I'm not about to be pushed over.
That night before we go to sleep we eat bread from the yuppie delicatessen. It smells faintly of roses. We drink water from the motel's tap. It tastes like melted snow.
YOURE INABILITY TO ACHIEVE SOLITUDE MAKES YOU SETTLE FOR SUBSTANDARD RELATIONS
YOU DON'T BELIEVE MAGIC IS POSSIBLE IN LIVES LIVED WITHIN TRADITIONAL BOUNDARIES
YOU DISGUISE YOUR LAZINESS AS PRIDE
YOU ARE PARALIZED BY THE FACT THAT CRUELTY IS OFTEN AMUSING
YOU PRETEND TO BE MORE ECCENTRIC THAN YOU ACTUALLY ARE BECAUSE YOU WORRY YOU ARE AN INTERCHANGEABLE COG
YOU MISTAKE MOTION FOR GROWTH AND ARE LURED INTO VEXING SITUATIONS
YOU DEFEND OTHER PEOPLE'S IDEAS AT THE EXPENSE OF YOUR OWN
YOU STILL DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU DO WELL
YOU ARE UNABLE TO VISUALIZE YOURSELF IN A FUTURE
YOUR INABILITY TO SUSTAIN SEXUAL INTEREST IN JUST ONE OTHER PERSON DRAINS YOUR LIFE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF INTIMACY
YOUR OWN ABILITY TO RATIONALIZE YOUR BAD DEEDS MAKES YOU BELIEVE THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE IS AS AMAROAL AS YOURSELF
YOU WILLFULLY IGNORE THE SMALL, GENTLE OBSERVATIONS IN LIFE WHICH YOU KNOW ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT
YOUR FEAR OF CHANGE IS TOO CLEARLY VISIBLE IN YOUR EYES
YOU ARE WASTING YOUR YOUTH, YOUR TIME, AND YOUR MONEY BECAUSE YOU WAN'T ACKNOWLEDGE YOUR SHORTCOMINGS
YOUR REFUSAL TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE DARKSIDE OF HUMANITY MAKES YOU PREY TO THAT DARK SIDE
YOU WORRY THAT IF YOU LOWER YOUR GUARD, EVEN FOR ONE SECOND YOUR WHOLE WORLD WILL DISINTEGRATE INTO CHAOS
YOU WAIT FOR FATE TO BRING ABOUT THE CHANGES IN LIFE WHICH YOU SHOULD BE BRINGING ABOUT YOURSELF
YOU ARE DAZED BY THE EASE WITH WHICH OBLITERATION CAN BE OBTAINED
YOU FEEL YOU HAVE MORE MEMORIES THAN YOU HAVE ENERGY TO PROCESS THOSE MEMORIES
YOU ARE UNABLE TO DIFFERENTIATE BETWEEN FACADE AND SUBSTANCE
I AM AFRAID OF THE DARK AGES
LET'S JUST HOPE WE ACCIDENTALLY BUILD GOD
IMAGINE YOURSELF BEFRIENDING A MONSTER
YOU ARE NEVER FAR FROM THE SOUND OF AN ENGINE
GROW A TAIL
WE'RE ALL THEME PARKS
TECHNOLOGY FAVORS HORRIBLE PEOPLE
ONLY DEMOCRACY SAVES US FROM THE RAVAGE OF BEING ANIMALS
Futuretowns are located on the outskirts of the city you live in, just far enough away to be out of reach of angry, torch-carrying mobs that might roam in from the downtown core.
You're not supposed to notice futuretowns--they're technically invisible: low flat buildings that look like they've just popped out of a laser printer; fetishistic landscaping; new-cars-only in the employee lots; small backlit Plexiglas totems out fron quietly brandishing the strangely any-language names of the company house inside: Cray. Hoechst. Dow. Unilever. Rand. Pfizer. Sandoz. Ciba-Geigy. NEC. Futuretowns are the same in Europse as they are in California. I figure they're the same the planet over. Futuretowns are like their own country superimposed onto other countries.
Venice Beach: proof of the biological impossibility of imagining a person being simultaneously good-looking and poor.
I have had joy in helping Stephanie share in the exuberance and abandon of the New World, but in the process, I have witnessed a flaw emerge, like a silent genetic disease knitted into her DNA, which has now inevitably unraveled at this later date. The flaw is simple: because Stephanie wa snot born here, she can never understand here.
rich people can always send in spies to monitor poor people, but the poor will never be able to send in spies to monitor the rich. "So the rich will always win," I say, and an older woman. . . at the table beside me hears my statement and winks my way.
And now I think she is like a cheetah in the zoo, which has lived a comfortable life but has never run fast, the way nature had intended her to. Okay, the cheetah is alive, but, so what?
They are not unambitious, Tyler, but i must tell yooo, I am tired of your ambition talk. I ask yooo, which is more fair: to promise your children the moon and then give your children nothing--or promise only a little--be realistic--so when your children become civil servants or drive a truck they are not unhappy? I think your ambition is crooo-el.
You know what is the most middle class trait of all, Tyler? The ability to postpone plea-zhure.
It's just that all of your history in Europe is so seductive. All of your costumes and buildings and old music and perfect little tins of cookies. History tricks you into not valuing what you have now. History's dead, but right now is alive. History is jealous of right now--jealous of that life.
I figure, even if I have to live inside a rolled-up carpet in the alley behind the house of the Heroin Family, I would rather be a loser on my own terms than spend one more nanosecond behind goopy vats of Cajum Crocodile, Barbecue Blitz, and Mister Mustard sauce listening to Jesus lie about mythical nightclub jobs.
Cars roll down the city's roads, plants grow from its soil, wealth is generated in its rooms, hope is created and lost and recreated in the minds and souls of its inhabitants, and the city continues its dream and searches for those ideas that will make it strong.
I think we are all give veils when we are born which prevent us from seeing our mothers as they were when they were young. . . young and full of gin and dancing in the arms of a man who is not our father.
Tyler, you think you know me, but you don't. I don't mean this as a challenge or a put down. No one really knows anybody, I think. But you're trying to make me be something in your own mind which I just am not. Honey, I love you so much, but don't judge me, okay?. . . In a way I'm saying, butt out, but in a way I'm also saying, I have enought faith in you to let you go your own way. Don't be too preoccupied with the actions of others.
Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's crueles irony. . . until you've been lonely yourself, please try to diplomatically void speaking about lives of those who have been.
There are so many gestures in life we cannot undo. Lost opportunities. I just accept this now. I have no regrets and I'll just have to accept my boo-boos and move on with life.
My mood has changed now. And the sun has gone behind the clouds. I'm in this mood I feel occasionally. . . this mood where there's a very good friend nearby who I should be phonging. If only I could reach that friend and talk, then everything would be just fine. The dilemma is, of course, I just don't know who that friend is. But in my heart I know my mood is merely me feeling disconnected from my true inner self.
What I will tell you. . . is this: shortly, if not already, you will begin noticing the blackness inside us all. You will develop black secrets and commit black actions. You will be shocked at the insensitivities and transgressions you are capable of, yet you will be unable to stop them. And by the time you are thirty, your friends will all have black secrets, too, but it will be years before you learn exactly what their black secrets are. Life at that point will become like throwing a Frisbee in a graveyard; much of the pleasure of your dealings with your friends will stem from the contrast between your sparkling youth and the ink you now know lies at your feet.
Later, as you get to be my age, you will see your friends begin to die, to lose their memories, to see their skins turn wrinkled and sick. You will see the effects of dark secrets making themselves known--via their minds and bodies and via the stories you friends...will begin telling you at three-thirty in the morning as you put iodine on their bruises, arrange for tetanus shots, dial 911, and listen to them cry. The only payback for all of this--for the conversion of their once-young hearts into tar--will be that you will love your friends more, even though they have made you see the universe as an emptier and scarier place--and they will love you more, too.
I think most people dream in the houses they grew up in. Even if people move to New York or tthe ocean bottom or some place cool, their dreams are always located wherever they grew up. The house you lived in when you were young is, like, your hard drive for life.
I look at Mr. Kepke's shoes and I've never seen shoes tied the way his are. Oh God, rich people probably have a way to tie their shoes I'll never know about.
I cry because the future has once again found its sparkle and has grown a million times larger. And I cry because I am ashamed of how badly I have treated the people I love--of how badly I behaved during my own personal Dark Ages--back before I had a future and someone who cared for me from above. It is like today the sky opened up and only now am I allowed to enter.
There is no indecision here. These muscles which I have been pointlessly working out at the gym for years have finally found their use. This use is to kill Dan.
I am now locking into this activity of breaking Dan's body. I am no longer fueled by clarity. I am flueled by eruptions of memory. Memory of the toxic locomotive engine buried out by the Plants that cannot simply remain buried but must be chopped to bits and cast into the center of the earth. And I am fueled by the awareness of all the badness in this world--badness I have tolerated because I had never chosen to see it for what it was. And I am fueled by my embarassment at my profoundly mistaken belief that simply living in freedom in itself guarantees the continuation of that freedom.
Tomorrow, in another world, I will tell my mother about these flowers that grow in the Nevada desert, tricked into blooming by the false sun of nightime nuclear explosions, in good faith readning out for light, instead only pollinating the sterile sands, forfeiting the future of all flowers to follow.
At least there's nothing scary about Harmony and hopefully he doesn't see anything scary in me. We go way back, to pre-school. We know each other. People I don't know just make me want to say yikes! I'll take history over mystery any day of the week.
I didn't want candy, I wanted you. And you hurt my feelings. I'll survive, sure. And I forgive you, okay? But let's give it a rest. You've got a friend for life in me, Tyler, and you can tell me absolutely anything you want and you'll always be in my hear. But you're still on the floor. I'll go find some pillows and blankets.
I lay my head down and now I feel drowsy. Maybe in a few months Anna-Loise will come ato Seattle to live with me and she can sleep on my floor and we can share a place for a while, and make new friends, and have meals in good restaurants with these new friends and then we will drift apart and lose contact over the years--forget to write Christmas cards or phone. And then our memories will decay, like the heavier transuranium elements, and we will find ourselves divorced from other people and living in big houses with interlocking pavement stones, room deodorizers, and geniune ten-karat gold faucets. And then we will get even older and our memories will fail almost completely. But no matter what happens--no matter how wide the gulf between us becomes--we will each be the last people we forget in each other's memories. Because we were each the first to be there.
And while I stand on the cliff, my instinct is to scan pretty scenery--but not for too long. I feel the need to turn around to ensure I'm not about to be pushed over.
That night before we go to sleep we eat bread from the yuppie delicatessen. It smells faintly of roses. We drink water from the motel's tap. It tastes like melted snow.
YOURE INABILITY TO ACHIEVE SOLITUDE MAKES YOU SETTLE FOR SUBSTANDARD RELATIONS
YOU DON'T BELIEVE MAGIC IS POSSIBLE IN LIVES LIVED WITHIN TRADITIONAL BOUNDARIES
YOU DISGUISE YOUR LAZINESS AS PRIDE
YOU ARE PARALIZED BY THE FACT THAT CRUELTY IS OFTEN AMUSING
YOU PRETEND TO BE MORE ECCENTRIC THAN YOU ACTUALLY ARE BECAUSE YOU WORRY YOU ARE AN INTERCHANGEABLE COG
YOU MISTAKE MOTION FOR GROWTH AND ARE LURED INTO VEXING SITUATIONS
YOU DEFEND OTHER PEOPLE'S IDEAS AT THE EXPENSE OF YOUR OWN
YOU STILL DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU DO WELL
YOU ARE UNABLE TO VISUALIZE YOURSELF IN A FUTURE
YOUR INABILITY TO SUSTAIN SEXUAL INTEREST IN JUST ONE OTHER PERSON DRAINS YOUR LIFE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF INTIMACY
YOUR OWN ABILITY TO RATIONALIZE YOUR BAD DEEDS MAKES YOU BELIEVE THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE IS AS AMAROAL AS YOURSELF
YOU WILLFULLY IGNORE THE SMALL, GENTLE OBSERVATIONS IN LIFE WHICH YOU KNOW ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT
YOUR FEAR OF CHANGE IS TOO CLEARLY VISIBLE IN YOUR EYES
YOU ARE WASTING YOUR YOUTH, YOUR TIME, AND YOUR MONEY BECAUSE YOU WAN'T ACKNOWLEDGE YOUR SHORTCOMINGS
YOUR REFUSAL TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE DARKSIDE OF HUMANITY MAKES YOU PREY TO THAT DARK SIDE
YOU WORRY THAT IF YOU LOWER YOUR GUARD, EVEN FOR ONE SECOND YOUR WHOLE WORLD WILL DISINTEGRATE INTO CHAOS
YOU WAIT FOR FATE TO BRING ABOUT THE CHANGES IN LIFE WHICH YOU SHOULD BE BRINGING ABOUT YOURSELF
YOU ARE DAZED BY THE EASE WITH WHICH OBLITERATION CAN BE OBTAINED
YOU FEEL YOU HAVE MORE MEMORIES THAN YOU HAVE ENERGY TO PROCESS THOSE MEMORIES
YOU ARE UNABLE TO DIFFERENTIATE BETWEEN FACADE AND SUBSTANCE
I AM AFRAID OF THE DARK AGES
LET'S JUST HOPE WE ACCIDENTALLY BUILD GOD
IMAGINE YOURSELF BEFRIENDING A MONSTER
YOU ARE NEVER FAR FROM THE SOUND OF AN ENGINE
GROW A TAIL
WE'RE ALL THEME PARKS
TECHNOLOGY FAVORS HORRIBLE PEOPLE
ONLY DEMOCRACY SAVES US FROM THE RAVAGE OF BEING ANIMALS
Futuretowns are located on the outskirts of the city you live in, just far enough away to be out of reach of angry, torch-carrying mobs that might roam in from the downtown core.
You're not supposed to notice futuretowns--they're technically invisible: low flat buildings that look like they've just popped out of a laser printer; fetishistic landscaping; new-cars-only in the employee lots; small backlit Plexiglas totems out fron quietly brandishing the strangely any-language names of the company house inside: Cray. Hoechst. Dow. Unilever. Rand. Pfizer. Sandoz. Ciba-Geigy. NEC. Futuretowns are the same in Europse as they are in California. I figure they're the same the planet over. Futuretowns are like their own country superimposed onto other countries.
Venice Beach: proof of the biological impossibility of imagining a person being simultaneously good-looking and poor.
I have had joy in helping Stephanie share in the exuberance and abandon of the New World, but in the process, I have witnessed a flaw emerge, like a silent genetic disease knitted into her DNA, which has now inevitably unraveled at this later date. The flaw is simple: because Stephanie wa snot born here, she can never understand here.
rich people can always send in spies to monitor poor people, but the poor will never be able to send in spies to monitor the rich. "So the rich will always win," I say, and an older woman. . . at the table beside me hears my statement and winks my way.
And now I think she is like a cheetah in the zoo, which has lived a comfortable life but has never run fast, the way nature had intended her to. Okay, the cheetah is alive, but, so what?
They are not unambitious, Tyler, but i must tell yooo, I am tired of your ambition talk. I ask yooo, which is more fair: to promise your children the moon and then give your children nothing--or promise only a little--be realistic--so when your children become civil servants or drive a truck they are not unhappy? I think your ambition is crooo-el.
You know what is the most middle class trait of all, Tyler? The ability to postpone plea-zhure.
It's just that all of your history in Europe is so seductive. All of your costumes and buildings and old music and perfect little tins of cookies. History tricks you into not valuing what you have now. History's dead, but right now is alive. History is jealous of right now--jealous of that life.
I figure, even if I have to live inside a rolled-up carpet in the alley behind the house of the Heroin Family, I would rather be a loser on my own terms than spend one more nanosecond behind goopy vats of Cajum Crocodile, Barbecue Blitz, and Mister Mustard sauce listening to Jesus lie about mythical nightclub jobs.
Cars roll down the city's roads, plants grow from its soil, wealth is generated in its rooms, hope is created and lost and recreated in the minds and souls of its inhabitants, and the city continues its dream and searches for those ideas that will make it strong.
I think we are all give veils when we are born which prevent us from seeing our mothers as they were when they were young. . . young and full of gin and dancing in the arms of a man who is not our father.
Tyler, you think you know me, but you don't. I don't mean this as a challenge or a put down. No one really knows anybody, I think. But you're trying to make me be something in your own mind which I just am not. Honey, I love you so much, but don't judge me, okay?. . . In a way I'm saying, butt out, but in a way I'm also saying, I have enought faith in you to let you go your own way. Don't be too preoccupied with the actions of others.
Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's crueles irony. . . until you've been lonely yourself, please try to diplomatically void speaking about lives of those who have been.
There are so many gestures in life we cannot undo. Lost opportunities. I just accept this now. I have no regrets and I'll just have to accept my boo-boos and move on with life.
My mood has changed now. And the sun has gone behind the clouds. I'm in this mood I feel occasionally. . . this mood where there's a very good friend nearby who I should be phonging. If only I could reach that friend and talk, then everything would be just fine. The dilemma is, of course, I just don't know who that friend is. But in my heart I know my mood is merely me feeling disconnected from my true inner self.
What I will tell you. . . is this: shortly, if not already, you will begin noticing the blackness inside us all. You will develop black secrets and commit black actions. You will be shocked at the insensitivities and transgressions you are capable of, yet you will be unable to stop them. And by the time you are thirty, your friends will all have black secrets, too, but it will be years before you learn exactly what their black secrets are. Life at that point will become like throwing a Frisbee in a graveyard; much of the pleasure of your dealings with your friends will stem from the contrast between your sparkling youth and the ink you now know lies at your feet.
Later, as you get to be my age, you will see your friends begin to die, to lose their memories, to see their skins turn wrinkled and sick. You will see the effects of dark secrets making themselves known--via their minds and bodies and via the stories you friends...will begin telling you at three-thirty in the morning as you put iodine on their bruises, arrange for tetanus shots, dial 911, and listen to them cry. The only payback for all of this--for the conversion of their once-young hearts into tar--will be that you will love your friends more, even though they have made you see the universe as an emptier and scarier place--and they will love you more, too.
I think most people dream in the houses they grew up in. Even if people move to New York or tthe ocean bottom or some place cool, their dreams are always located wherever they grew up. The house you lived in when you were young is, like, your hard drive for life.
I look at Mr. Kepke's shoes and I've never seen shoes tied the way his are. Oh God, rich people probably have a way to tie their shoes I'll never know about.
I cry because the future has once again found its sparkle and has grown a million times larger. And I cry because I am ashamed of how badly I have treated the people I love--of how badly I behaved during my own personal Dark Ages--back before I had a future and someone who cared for me from above. It is like today the sky opened up and only now am I allowed to enter.
There is no indecision here. These muscles which I have been pointlessly working out at the gym for years have finally found their use. This use is to kill Dan.
I am now locking into this activity of breaking Dan's body. I am no longer fueled by clarity. I am flueled by eruptions of memory. Memory of the toxic locomotive engine buried out by the Plants that cannot simply remain buried but must be chopped to bits and cast into the center of the earth. And I am fueled by the awareness of all the badness in this world--badness I have tolerated because I had never chosen to see it for what it was. And I am fueled by my embarassment at my profoundly mistaken belief that simply living in freedom in itself guarantees the continuation of that freedom.
Tomorrow, in another world, I will tell my mother about these flowers that grow in the Nevada desert, tricked into blooming by the false sun of nightime nuclear explosions, in good faith readning out for light, instead only pollinating the sterile sands, forfeiting the future of all flowers to follow.
At least there's nothing scary about Harmony and hopefully he doesn't see anything scary in me. We go way back, to pre-school. We know each other. People I don't know just make me want to say yikes! I'll take history over mystery any day of the week.
I didn't want candy, I wanted you. And you hurt my feelings. I'll survive, sure. And I forgive you, okay? But let's give it a rest. You've got a friend for life in me, Tyler, and you can tell me absolutely anything you want and you'll always be in my hear. But you're still on the floor. I'll go find some pillows and blankets.
I lay my head down and now I feel drowsy. Maybe in a few months Anna-Loise will come ato Seattle to live with me and she can sleep on my floor and we can share a place for a while, and make new friends, and have meals in good restaurants with these new friends and then we will drift apart and lose contact over the years--forget to write Christmas cards or phone. And then our memories will decay, like the heavier transuranium elements, and we will find ourselves divorced from other people and living in big houses with interlocking pavement stones, room deodorizers, and geniune ten-karat gold faucets. And then we will get even older and our memories will fail almost completely. But no matter what happens--no matter how wide the gulf between us becomes--we will each be the last people we forget in each other's memories. Because we were each the first to be there.