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Mike quit his job today. This is exciting and scary news. We have to be in our new place in Detroit by the first, so Monday through Friday is going to be a packing/U-haul driving/unpacking frenzy. We both start school on 9/11.
I'm glad Mike's not working at the bookstore anymore, because I think it was really starting to stress him out. Half Price Books is a great place to work for a while, especially when you're in your twenties. They have a nice benefit package with medical/vision/dental/mental health with paid sick days and holidays and vacation, as well as a profit-sharing plan and yearly bonuses and all kinds of other little perks. The flipside to this is, at least in the central Ohio district, they barely pay a living wage and it's a shitty job, incestuous and culty and full of the kind of daily humiliations endemic to the service industry.
Thus, creative kids -- former liberal or fine arts types, usually -- apply there, thinking "Hey! The used bookstore! Sounds like fun! I need a job for a little while, but what I really want to do is write/make art/make music/make movies." It is fun, for a minute, until the petty jealousies and rivalries and mind-bending minutia of running a goofy and disorganized used bookstore that caters to suburban empty nesters crushes your spirit. Seemingly overnight, these bright creative 20-somethings turn into grouchy unfulfilled 30-somethings who play WoW for six hours a day. To be perfectly maudlin about it, Half Price Books is the place where dreams go to die.
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We took a walk earlier this evening, as the sun was going down. Our apartment is adjacent to an elementary school and we walked around the track for a while until it got dark, but not too dark. Beyond the schoolyard and the train tracks is the expo center and the soccer stadium, which are lit up like Christmas all the time. We lapped the schoolyard a couple times and eventually hung out on the playground for a while, swinging and stuff.
The playground is one of those big dangerous two-by-four castles that rises out of a moat of mulch. One night we came home from a bar really late and it was crazy foggy outside. I dragged him over to the playground and shimmied up into the top turret of the two-by-four castle, to the top of the slide, and beckoned him to follow me up. It was great -- all you could see out the turret was white milky mist and lights, and since we were completely shrouded in fog, I gave him a beej.
After we walked around the track for a while, we sat on the benches by the playground and watched planes and trains go by and looked up at the one star we could see and talked for a couple hours.
This is probably the last time we'll get to do that here.
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For some reason, we had a good long conversation about our middle school AOL usage. I only had AOL for a little while -- it wasn't until I was 19 or 20 that there was a local AOL access number I could call from my house, much less cable or DSL or anything. To be on the "internet" (and it was mostly BBs and chat rooms and newsgroups at that point, I guess), I had to dial up a long-distance access number as well as pay by the hour, since this was before the days of unlimited access dial-up.
Oh, and this was on a 2400 bps modem, btw. No, not a 28k, or even a 9600, but a 2400! By way of contrast, I am currently stealing my neighbor's unsecured wireless via AirPort EXXXTREME or whatever on my shiny new used I-Book.
As a young teen, I used AOL to be a total ho. Everyone who knows me very well at all knows that I was a pretty sexually precocious teenager, so when I was 13 I would hop on the adult rooms and have phone sex with all these random guys. I was afraid to give out my phone number and I didn't want my mom asking questions about the long distance bill, so I would make these guys let me call them collect.
I was telling Mike tonight that I had a pretty fleshed-out character that I refined with each new encounter. Her name was Aerin and she was the 26-year-old manager of a hot restaurant/bar/club that I made up. This was convenient because I would always get on AOL after school, around 3:00pm but before my mom got home from work around 5:00. I would tell these guys that I had a break in my day -- after the lunch shift and before dinner started -- and that I needed to "recharge" or "unwind." Guys always wanted some kind of sexy story, right, from my life? And so I would make up this shit like, "Okay, so sometimes we have bands at night at the restaurant, right? Well, there's this drummer in one of the bands, his name is Tommy" -- based on Tommy Treadway, a drummer in the marching band that I had the biggest crush on at the time and whom I have since learned is a total cheese -- "and after everyone else went home, I had him stay after and fuck me right there on one of the tables. He was so amazing. Drummers have great rhythm."
Looking back on these incidents, I would like to say that I am impressed with my 13-year-old self for the following reasons:
1) That I had the sophistication about the adult world to understand that restaurant managers tend to take little breaks between 3 and 5. I don't even know how I knew that! How did I know that? I didn't know any restaurant managers. I had barely even been to any restaurants, except for like, Bob Evans.
2) That I could construct a realistic fantasy about heterosexual sex that appealed to the appetites of 30-something dudes on the internet. A getting-fucked-on-a-restaurant-table fantasy is sort of the perfect level of naughty for a nice-but-kind-of-slutty girl with a penchant for afternoon phone sex, without being too over-the-top raunchy, which I think represents a pretty cogent understanding of the adult male erotic imagination. In fact, I think I probably had a little better instinct for this kind of thing then than I do now, because now I'm so jaded and cynical that I would probably be pretty bored with this kind of shit. If I were to attempt recreational phone sex with a stranger now and he were to ask me about my last sexual encounter, I would probably say something like YEAH DUDE I TOOK ON THE WHOLE BAND AND ALL SIX OF THEM SNORTED COKE OUT OF MY ASSHOLE AND THEN THEY ALL PEED ON MY HEAD AND AND FUCKED ME WITH A PEPPERONI. You know, for kicks.
3) I am impressed that I was smart enough to protect myself from stalkers and aggro guys who would have blown my cover. I'm also impressed that I knew enough at that age to make dudes pay for shit. I just wish there had been amazon.com wishlists back then.
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Mike told me tonight that he made several random friends on AOL at that age. Mike is a very private and solitary person, yet for some reason gets a kick out of it when I write about him in semi-public fora. Anyway, he spent a good deal of his adolescence by himself reading comic books, and occasionally chatting on the internet. He said somehow he got hooked up with this group of internet friends who met in a chat room called “Creative Weirdos” and talked to each other every Wednesday night at eight.
He, at fifteen, was by far the youngest. The other “creative weirdos” included Jo, a forty-something hippie lady who lived in California and claimed to have toured as a roadie/groupie for the Allman Brothers; Jack, an IT guy in his thirties who owned a lot of gadgets and was into Monty Python (yuck) and Terry Pratchett and jazz; and Glenda Lee, a mom of indeterminate age who liked wacky jokes and talked about her kids a lot and liked to send jokey Christian e-mail forwards with punch lines like, “See? Jesus Christ really is Lord of All!”
Mike was telling me that a few years ago he was digging through his old stuff at his parents’ house and he found a Final Fantasy Nintendo cartridge and on a whim he put it in and turned it on to fight some imps for a while. He reloaded a saved game, and he noticed that he’d named his team “Jo,” “Jack,” “Glen,” and “Mike.” He had named his Final Fantasy characters after his middle-aged AOL chat room creative weirdo friends, because those were the only friends he had at the time.
“That’s an amazingly sad story,” I said. Poor adolescent Mike.
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When I played Final Fantasy, I always named the Black Mage after myself. The Black Mage was mysterious and powerful and genderless and spooky and kind of goth. Mike was trying to tell me some story on the playground tonight and he stopped and said, “You don’t look like you’re listening.” “Oh!” I said, “I was thinking about the Black Mage. What’s the deal with his stupid straw hat?”
“You can summon lightning down from the sky, but you can’t buy a decent hat?”
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As the curator of an exhibition, ''Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture,'' which opens this week at the Japan Society in New York, Takashi Murakami surveys the geeky movement, known as otaku, that revolves around animated movies (anime), comic books (manga) and sexually suggestive figure models -- and arrives at a provocative conclusion. Murakami maintains that respectable Japanese artists largely ignored the horrors of World War II and the humiliations of the postwar occupation, relinquishing the subjects to the otaku, who transported these tough realities into the realm of cartoon fantasy. In childlike animated forms, anguished truths were stripped of their historical context - a flattening process that conveniently released both the artist and the viewer from grappling with the contradictions of Japan's wartime experience as predator and victim and postwar status as economic rival of, and political subordinate to, the United States.
Flat, colorful and rootless, the images of this popular subculture - the blank-faced Hello Kitty, the mutant monster Godzilla, the giant alien Ultraman, the cat-shaped guardian robot Doraemon -- line up in no particular order, like icons on a computer screen.
--”The Murakami Method,” The New York Times Magazine, April 3, 2006.
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After I got done complaining about the Black Mage’s fashion choices, I moved on to complaining about the redundancy of narrative arc in all the Final Fantasy games, i.e., some outside alien force of chaos encroaches, you and your friends gather all your elemental resources and prepare for the ultimate battle between good and evil, usually involving an ultra powerful weapon or monster that will eventually rend the fabric of the space-time-matter continuum. Mike gently (probably more gently than he should have) reminded me of the above paragraph and Takashi Murakami’s theory of collective sublimation or “flattening” of the atrocities of WWII and how they seep out into otaku iconography as a kind of encoded cultural metanarrative.
The game remembers.
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This week is going to be so crazy. I don’t believe I’m finally leaving this city, where I’ve spent the last five years spinning my wheels. When I talk to my friends, they all say, “but you accomplished so much!” but I don’t feel that way.
I really hope that we’re happy in Detroit and that this is the right decision for us. I have a lot of fear around this move. I keep having these morbid fantasies that I die in Detroit. There’s something about it that just feels so much like the end of the road.
I think a lot of it has to do with not have any strong connections there, as well as the fear of not having health insurance anymore - I had really great health coverage as Mike’s domestic partner, but now that he’s leaving this job, it’s either COBRA or Medicaid. This is worrisome, to say the least.
I know it will all work out. I know we’ll have a roof over our heads and I’ll have the opportunity to finally finish school and Mike will have plenty of space and opportunity to work on his art with other artists in an amazing space on a beautiful campus. We’ll meet a lot of new people and I will get to make a lot of great connections and probably even get to hammer out some great internships and research opportunities.
Oh, I don’t know.
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I just finished reading the biography of Harry Hay. I’m really into failed utopia these days.