And maybe I'm being too hard on him. Maybe, as soon as he had finished painting the Mona Lisa, he looked at it and immediately began to worry that although it was sort of enigmatic, it wasn't nearly enigmatic enough. Perhaps he saw that compared to the heart of a boy, which extends into infinity, nothing is enigmatic.
ENLIGHTENMENT, THE
One morning in the eighteenth century, Denis Diderot, sick to death of working on his Encyclopédie, and totally bored with the task of categorizing, went out for a spot of hunting. N is for nature G is for gun C is for crow. The black bird landed a short distance from his feet. Sunlight poured through the perfect hole in the bird's glossy body, giving the philosopher the idea for the Enlightenment.
Everyone had finally gotten used to the Dark Ages and had even begun to enjoy them, so when the Enlightenment arrived, people began to notice the side effects almost immediately, the main one being terrible headaches.
In his own encyclopedia, Diderot described the Enlightenment as a sort of giant photocopier, but one whose lid is always open. The invention of aspirin, he went on, is the direct result of the Enlightenment and is the Enlightenment's greatest achievement.
ENLIGHTENMENT, MEN OF THE
When we think about the men of the Enlightenment, we do not think about their faith in objective reason, in the natural goodness of men, and in the value of scientific knowledge; nor do we reflect upon their distrust of orthodoxy and intolerance, their hatred of tyranny and social institutions, or their love of skepticism, freedom, satire and wit.
Whenever our thoughts turn backwards, toward the Enlightenment, we think of Rousseau and his persecution complex. We think of Diderot and his obsession with stains, particularly the grass stains on the knees of his breeches, and his numerous failed attempts to create an entry for stains in his Encylopédie. Most of all, we think of Voltaire and his chamber pot, his recurring dream that a realistic likeness of his face was painted on the side of his chamber pot. We ponder the fact that all his life's work ultimately led to the incident toward the end of his life, during which he ate the contents of his own chamber pot.
ERASERS
When we were children we noticed that our erasers, which were pink and gray, were rounded at either end like the tops of tombstones. The best thing about childhood was the erasers. We erased everything. We'd crouch down behind our erasers, peer over the tops, and watch the priests soberly fucking.
ETERNITY
There are conflicting reports regarding eternity. Some say that it's full of fountains and peaches blue as bruises, and that there's a very, very long clothesline, on which hangs nothing but rows and rows of sober black satin waistcoats and pearl-gray silk trousers, dripping on into infinity. They claim that upon arriving in eternity, everyone is greeted by Emily Dickinson, and she shakes your hand, and her hand is just as you would expect—very cold, and very lovely, like ice blocks wrapped in a handkerchief to reduce a fever—but her forehead is not as prominent as it appears in photographs.
Others state quite the opposite. They maintain that eternity is nothing but a big factory, run on a forty-hour workweek. With a half-hour lunch break. You have to wear a hairnet. You have to earn your keep.
ETERNITY, LAWS OF
Within these conflicting reports, both schools of thought agree on one thing. Taking measurements of any sort is strictly forbidden in eternity. Anyone caught measuring anything is subject to the death penalty (they used to behead people, but now they use lethal injection, because they want to act humanely).
As a result, a large percentage of eternity's inhabitants find themselves becoming deeply nostalgic for instruments of measurement. They miss terribly those measuring tapes forward tailors used to measure their inner thighs when fitting their school trousers. More than anything, they yearn for those silver measuring cups that they filled with flour and sugar when they helped their mothers bake cakes on those endless rainy days.
To discourage this pining, the authorities organize routine bonfires at which wooden rulers (the kind the nuns rapped on your fingers) are burnt to cinders. Everyone is required to attend.
EXPERIMENTS
Whenever I feel a little bleak around the edges, I try and remind myself that I'm just an experiment, an event that can happen again, and that I'm mainly attracted to men who can happen again. This scientific attitude toward myself really helps, it really cheers me up, and although I still feel grim, I begin to feel almost elated, simultaneously heavy and light. It's as if there's a balloon seller in my head who follows me everywhere and wears a heavy gray coat, even in the summer. He sells only gray balloons in differing shades of gray—dove gray, lead-pencil gray, nerve-tissue gray—and whenever he sees how I'm feeling he gives me a balloon for free, and I feel considerably less bleak.
EXPOSURE
The end of the world will not be very pleasant, but it will be extremely straightforward. Just as we had been led to believe, it will be horrific, like the best horror movie you've ever seen, or the most real nightmare you've ever dreamt.
Yet you will be able to take comfort in the fact that it will also be very orderly. There will be no incongruity between how we expected it to happen and how it actually goes down. God will simply strip us of all our irony. Without it, at best, we will be very, very skinny; at worst, we will be like skeletons. Unable to bear the literal, we will die almost immediately from exposure to the world's day-glo elements, its harsh beauty.
EXTINCTION
Sometimes when I look in the mirror on the medicine cabinet in our bathroom, I am reminded of the time my mother took me to the Museum of Natural History. We saw a tiny fossil of a small, strange, winged creature. The pattern of its wings was so delicate. It was as if the ancient bird was hurtling toward us, flying through the slate-gray rock. As I looked, my face pressed up to the glass case, some joy in me snapped.
Thought took us to the brink of extinction, but on further reflection, we have decided to come back.
EYES, BLOODSHOT
I like boys with bloodshot eyes. The whites of their eyes are full of red popes' hats, magnificent, violent sunsets. It's like there's a murder going on in their eyes, a tiny murder, done with tiny knives. Boys with bloodshot eyes are royalty, whereas boys with clear eyes are their lowly subjects.
F
FACE, THE
Some days, my face feels like a ski mask, like the black wool kind commonly worn by terrorists. I feel like my eyes are twinkling coldly through the narrow slits in my face. And just as a ski mask hides the true identity of the terrorist, my face seems to be hiding something about me, something that will give me away and that I cannot show to anyone.
On my better days, although my face still feels like a mask, a mask I can't take off, behind which lies something so real and revealing that I must conceal it from everyone, it somehow feels spangly and glittery, more like a mask worn by a Lucha Libre wrestler.
FATE
Fate is a machine. The early model was hand-operated and looked like a very large sausage grinder; you had to crank a handle to meet your fate. This was labor intensive. It left thin red scars all over the user, like the flat red satin ribbons found in the pages of Sunday school Bibles.
With the new, improved model, all you have to do is press a button and a solid sheet of glass comes at you like a guillotine. According to the manufacturer, it cuts you from behind one ear and on to the voice box, slicing through both jugular veins. It works like a dream.
FINGERFUCKING
Surely there is nothing more melancholy than the sublime act of fingerfucking. Any man who has ever fingerfucked or been fingerfucked knows this.
During that brief intermission, when one is between acts of fingerfucking, and one either sniffs one's fingers or inhales the odor rising from one's own asshole—depending on the role one is playing—although one takes in a smell that is sweet and cloistered, similar to the clean yet close odor of a nun's room in a convent, even if the man in question has been most thorough in cleaning himself, inevita
bly one detects lurking just beneath this sweet scent the faint odor of feces, reminding us that all men, including ourselves, inevitably decay.
This explains why, sometimes, the fingerfucker, right in the midst of fingerfucking a really hot man, receives the distinct sensation that he is fingerfucking a really hot skeleton. He is painfully reminded that every man is a cemetery, full of little tombstones; in fact, the tips of his fingers can almost make out the inscriptions on the headstones.
Arguably, one can speculate that this experience of mortality is more intense for the gentleman fingerfucking; whereas the gentleman being fingerfucked is immersed in his own pleasure and in his own odor, the fingerfucker has distance from the act.
For the fingerfucker, perhaps the only thing more melancholy than the sublime act of fingerfucking a man is the aftermath of fingering, when, in the morning, still in a dream state, he absentmindedly lifts his fingers to his nostrils, and the faint smell of lavender soap that lingers, that mystical trace—of course still with the unmistakable undertow of feces—causes a kind of temporal abyss to open up—in fact, one might say that time takes on the spatial depth and complexity of a man's asshole—and transports him back not only to the man from the previous night, but to every man he has ever fingered, and even further, to every historical instance of fingerfucking, and further yet, to every bar of soap that every man in the history of humanity has ever used, in a hopeful yet ultimately futile attempt to erase the stench of death.
FINGERPRINTS
Although it is nice to know that at the end of every one of my fingertips there is a tiny little maze that is wonderfully unique, it is not so pleasant to ponder the thought that a miniature, barbaric, merciless—admittedly well-built—Minotaur dwells at the heart of every one of these little mazes. I suppose this means that I must sacrifice seven Angeleno youths every year to keep each of my Minotaurs content. Ten fingers means ten mazes, hence ten Minotaurs who demand to be satisfied. That's seventy sacrificial youths a year. Uniqueness is something from which no one can escape.
FIRE
When I was really little there was this man whom I would sometimes see walking around our neighborhood. His face was all burnt up. It had been burnt so badly that he had lost his nose. He just sort of had a hole there. He always wore a heavy coat and a pork-pie hat, even in the summer. People said that he had been burnt in a house fire, and that he had been the one who had set the house on fire, with the intention of incinerating both himself and his house, but something had gone wrong and he had managed to escape the fire.
FLIES
There have been a lot of flies around our house lately, and I've noticed that they're moving very slowly. When one lands on my skin it takes forever to leave. These flies linger on surfaces such as windowpanes and lampshades for so long that it makes it very easy to kill them. I have no idea what their slowness means, either for them, or for me. Perhaps they are depressed. All I know is that it gives me a longer time to observe the so-called compound eyes of the fly, which, like our hearts, are made up of thousands of miniscule jewel-like parts called facets. And I get a better look at their glowing bodies, which are like miniature, green satin ball gowns.
FLIES, SUICIDAL
This morning I came across a fly holding between its two black front legs, which were as dainty as a baby's eyelashes, the tiniest razor blade I have ever seen. The fly kept reaching back and slashing at its wings, murmuring over and over again Kurt Cobain's words, I hate myself and I want to die, I hate myself and I want to die.
Things can't be all that bad, I said, patting the fly's glossy, emerald-green hunchback. Gently, I took the miniscule blade from the fly, in the process cutting one of the wavy lines in my fingertip. Although I could not be sure, I thought I detected a smile on the fly's face, if it even had such a thing.
FLOOD, THE GREAT
I think my favorite story in the Bible is the one about the Flood. It happens early on if I remember correctly, very early, in the first few pages, and to be honest I've always thought it a bit funny that God decides to destroy all flesh (even the creeping things!) so early on, but still, I suppose he had his reasons.
There are so many great parts in this story that it's hard to pinpoint why it's so good. I like everything about it, for example, the whole business with constructing the Ark—out of gopher wood, no less—and how specific God is in his instructions to Noah regarding the dimensions. God's highly specific. And I like how everyone thinks Noah's a crazy old fool, a very old fool—when the Flood finally comes he's six hundred years old—but then when the waters actually arrive, of course everyone wants to get in the Ark. But they obviously can't, because of the business with the pairs, only one pair of everything.
And when the waters rise and don't stop rising, of course it's exciting. I think that's what I like most about the story. It's extremely visual. You can really see everyone getting blotted out. Ever since I was a kid I've had a very clear picture of this.
I remember in first grade, when it rained heavily, the courtyard of my school, Our Lady Queen of Peace, would often flood. And on those days, when morning recess or afternoon recess or lunchtime came, we'd leave our desks in an orderly fashion and file into the hallway, where our raincoats and rain hats and galoshes were hanging on hooks spaced at regular intervals. We would put on our bright yellow rain gear as quickly as we could and run outside to play and splash in the rain, which filled me with deep delight.
As we played, I liked to imagine that the Ark was passing by, bobbing on the water, and that I could see the animals in the Ark, their faces pressed up against the windows. Our parish priest Father Lions had made it perfectly clear that when, once again, the rains refused to stop and the waters steadily rose until they covered the earth, our rain gear would be of no use to us. I could picture exactly the big buttons on my raincoat coming undone from the force of the rushing water, and my galoshes slipping off my feet. And long after I and everyone else had drowned, I could see all our yellow rain hats, floating brightly on the water's flat gray surface.
In the actual story, it's nice when the waters gradually recede. Even today when it stops raining, I can almost imagine how Noah must have felt, filled with unimaginable hope and unimaginable dread. How organized everything must have seemed, the world so quiet and empty, and everything in it divided neatly into pairs.
FLOOD, THE NEW ORLEANS
In 2005, two days after Hurricane Katrina hit the city of New Orleans and the levees broke, flooding the region, President Bush flew over the submerged city in Air Force One, which is like an Ark with wings. He saw all sorts of things, from a height of only 2,500 feet. He saw the people stranded on their rooftops waving at him, so he waved back. He saw people using their doors as if they were rafts, paddling down the wretched waters like Jim in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn! He saw a very dark skinned black woman and an albino woman wading through the filthy waters lugging a big stolen television. Even the open-eyed corpses floating through the stinking waters on their backs seemed to smile and wave at him. And he waved back.
FLY SPRAY
Nothing is more nostalgic to me than the image of my mother with a can of fly spray in one hand, spraying the toxic gases in the air, clouds of it lingering, like the harshest perfume, and with a big blue or pink flyswatter in her other hand, batting the flies' bodies against the windows, making tiny bloody stains and leaving bits of their wings on the windows' lace curtains.
Sometimes I dream that in the middle of the night there is a knock at my door and a young man is standing there, wearing nothing but the soft metal odor of fly spray.
FOOTBALL, AMERICAN
One can never truly know a football player. Every time his self appears it is almost instantly obscured by his big shoulders and his huge butt. Ontologically speaking, he is erased by his voluptuous butt.
FORGOTTEN, BEING
The one thing we can all be certain of is that we will be forgotten. Somewhere, not far from here, these words are already being eras
ed. Although this is a bit depressing, the futility of this effort, of any effort really, is also somehow freeing. If I had really wanted to be remembered, it would have been better to have never been born at all. My chances for posterity would have been much higher if I had arrived on this earth in the form of the bullet that the poet Paul Verlaine fired into his lover Arthur Rimbaud's thin wrist on July 10, 1873. What a lucky bullet, to spend a whole week inside Rimbaud! It would have been far more profitable to have been the tree whose branches eventually became the crutches Rimbaud required the use of after his leg was amputated, on May 13, 1891.
FRA ANGELICO
I'm a great admirer of all of the work of the painter Fra Angelico, who was a Dominican monk who covered the walls of the monastery he lived in during the 15th century with gay pornographic images, but I especially like Young Man Kneeling at the Urinals Waiting for a Fat Businessman and Man Fingering Himself upon Entering a Precariously Slippery Shower. Both works are primarily religious in nature. One cannot help but admire the painter's restraint with gold leaf. In the latter work, everything is bright blue and gray and bright red except for the man's asshole, which is gold. In the former work, there is a just a trace of gold leaf, pooled at the bottom of the urinal.
FRECKLES
When we remember childhood, we recall very little, just those varied precipitations of pigment in the skin known as freckles. Occasionally, certain scenes and moments come back to us, but they are so overlaid with freckles we can barely make out the scene. Freckles obscure memory.
FURNITURE
The reign of Louis XVI, a dull man, 1774–92, saw many major developments in styles of furniture; this was because of his wife, Marie Antoinette, who had a thing for furniture, and who hired hundreds of cabinetmakers to build furniture expressly for her, new kinds of furniture with nice names like chocolate tables and fire screens (her moans could be heard beneath and above the sound of all the constant hammering).
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