We Can Not Ask for More, We Can Not Ask for More

The other day on the subway I had a chilling experience that revealed how deeply the commercial world is prepared to penetrate our private lives. I was on the F train going to work, in my usual caffeine buzz as yet uninterrupted by congress with another human. Like many New Yorkers, I work on creative tasks at home, ones that require me to descend into my unconscious, probe for symbols and memories, confront fears and monsters and often cry uncontrollably before I’ve even had my morning muesli. Then I go on the subway to a job where a few conversations about the humidity level or the problem of bees in someone’s garage can chase the cobwebs away.

But the subway is a zone of perpetual anxiety. It’s underground, it has been cited as a terrorist target, it can contain freaks and horrors. Of course most riders have books and of course I had my face buried in one when ‘they’ got on. But the long, identically colored purple and gold robes caught my eye and I looked up to see a group of young women, all in long black wigs and medieval-looking ceremonial robes, file onto the subway and take seats or hold poles. There were a lot of them – maybe ten. Even the most weirdo-hardened New Yorkers blinked at them briefly, made ‘huh?’ grimaces at each other and then ignored the women because they were, you know, weirdos.

But I couldn’t stop glancing at their faces. They had expressionless, tranced out eyes. None of them smiled or talked to each other. They stared into space creepily. They resembled a surreal vision out of a Bunuel film or haunted people who have been kidnapped and taken over by dangerous cult leaders – fresh from a stint with David Koresh or Brian David Mitchell. Their long, flowing hair was consistent with the image of deranged cult leaders who demand multiple wives in traditionally feminine robes with long hair and accommodating ways. But were these women being sexually tyrannized? Or were they going to appear on Broadway? My heart thumping uneasily, I scrutinized them surreptitiously for signs of unwilled subjugation.

Like most of us, one of my deepest fears is of blank-eyed women in black wigs and long robes appearing to walk among us. I had a recurring nightmare when I was little about a nun – what’s scarier than a nun? Grown-ups dressed in robes petrified me – I also had nightmares about the Ku Klux Klan. Grown men in sheets and pointy hats that obscure their faces? There is no better way to scare a kid senseless than to run around like that.

So I was frightened by the women in robes on the subway. Their eerie silence bothered me – why weren’t they laughing and joking together about their ridiculous wigs and those fake-gold robes? Why weren’t they laughing over the fact that they were all wearing the same lipstick? That’s not riotously funny, but you’d think they’d find something to take the edge off the strangeness of the situation.

They chose the creepiest stop imaginable to get out at -- 14th St. What on earth were they going to do up there? If they were going to Lincoln Center to be in an operetta, or uptown to be a barbershop quartet, okay – but 14th St. is a wasteland of discount luggage shops and fast food emporiums. Why did they want to ascend right there? I was even more weirded out. I stared at them as they filed past me and – this is true – as one of them passed me, she handed me a card and walked off the subway without a word. I snatched the card, thrilled to have a clue in my hand. Maybe it would give the name of their cult and I could help the police liberate them. Or if they were some weird religious group I could Google them and at least understand what the silent subway-riding-in-robes was all about.

On the card's thick, good-quality stock was only one line: www.jointhequest.com. Oh my God! I was part terrified, part thrilled. They hadn’t given a card to anyone else on the train. Did I look ready for subjugation? Did they see in me a longing to rise and join them as they shared their bad wigs with the bored pedestrians of 14th St.?

Could they read something lost and desperate about me? Because it’s true. I do feel lost and desperate. They’re right! I’ll go with them, and either save them or become one of them and maybe that’s the best thing for me because I’ve made a hash of my life, I’m fatally flawed and am doing more harm than good out here, as they could clearly see when they handed me this card.

When I got to work, I described the whole incident to my boss. As I talked, I started to get an all-too-familiar sinking, sick, cheesy feeling, which I saw reflected in her skeptical face. They were not a vision out of Bunuel – they were not a herd of lost souls in bad hair – they were advertising. It was true. When I looked up www.jointhequest.com it linked to the page for The Da Vinci Code movie.

Deflation, disgust, disappointment. Whoever those women were who got roped into that promotion, I was angry that someone came up with the idea to freak us out with their zombie-like aspects. Who among us doesn’t wish we were around to recognize and help Elizabeth Smart when she was still Brian David Mitchell’s captive? Who does not stare at those who give every appearance of being brainwashed because they’ve been in the news so much and always as piteously in need of our help?

Anyway, they misread their brand target. I might rise to join lost souls in long robes, but nothing could get me to the Da Vinci Code movie. I didn’t read the book, I’ve resisted the whole brouhaha because as a literary snob, I never read bestsellers. Movie theater? I need a ranch far from civilization where I can stop struggling with my ego-driven obsessions and give up free will then and there. Freedom is a burden. Advertising, though, is something worse than a burden. It’s a snake in the grass that preys on vulnerable people with overly vivid imaginations. It is our own Brian David Mitchell. (Analogy not perfect, but my point is rhetorical.)

Do You Believe (in Life After Love)?

You may have been hoping for some news on Cher. If only! I don't know what's happened to Cher -- she's disappeared. She's a haunting example of how our culture's obsession with youth drives older celebrities into virtual seclusion. Last I saw her, she was on a talk show, her face so stiffened from surgery and Botox that she could barely smile and definitely couldn't do her likable, cynical sneer that often preceded a good sardonic joke. She was like a wax dummy of Cher, though she managed to emit a few ironic comments, mostly to do with how it sucked to be over 50.

I feel awful for Cher, because like Meg Ryan, she seems unable to give up on youth. It's like aging is some ghastly curse, not a natural process. I don't dispute these women's attitudes, though. My own feeling is that aging is kind of like a horror movie. Awful things show up that are not going to go away. Unlike almost everything else in life, you aren't overreacting when you perceive signs of age. It's not like a sudden conviction that you have a fatal disease because of a weird feeling in your chest, but the next day the feeling is gone and so is the belief you're dying.

Nope. Those white hairs aren't going anywhere -- in fact they're gonna be joined by a lot more white hairs. And that weird lump in your middle is also not going anywhere. These facts are unbelievable -- you've spent your whole life thinking of yourself as young. For me, it was a habit. Suddenly I'm looking at evidence to the contrary, thinking: What the freak is all that white hair doing on a young person like me's head?

Oh the humanity.

I heard a Christian fellow preaching the doctrine on the subway the other morning. A man asked him something about why dinosaurs had disappeared, and I didn't hear all of his answer but at one point he said calmly, "Man got eaten because of sin. Because he was a sinner."

It was strange hearing these old-fashioned ideas in a city that prides itself on progressive ones. I was struck by the word sin, how simple it is. It seems to reduce life to a battleground of good and bad, which is like a game. Sin and you're out. Don't sin and you win. It's not hard to see the appeal in such a simple life view.

I was also interested in the preacher because I just read Walter Kirn's Mission to America. It's about these two clumsy, poorly dressed missionaries descending from a religious sect that seems like a mixture of Mormonism, Christian Science, Anthroposophy and Shaker, to try to get new blood for their dwindling stock. In other words to impregnate women. They are very serious and pure at first, spouting all this crazy philosophy that rang a bell with me for the years my sister was involved in Waldorf schools, but they're quickly corrupted by junk food and coffee, which they've never tasted since they've been eating a bland, vegetarian diet in accordance with their wacky doctrine.

I'm not doing the book justice. I'm too worried about Cher. Can she move at all anymore? Does she have to be fed through a straw?

Look at All the Firefolk Sitting in the Air

This image is courtesy of the Pixie Pit, a splended website offering online Scrabble and a comprehensive bevy of fairy- and pixie-related graphics and activities.

My colleagues and I play a lot of Scrabble. We're fierce competitors, in a way that online Scrabble, in particular, breeds. Without f2f contact, there's a kind of myopic ferociousness -- nobody light-heartedly defends a questionable word while the rest of the company guffaws and someone pours more wine. Online Scrabble is terse and silent, and played with so little contact that at times you log in so impatiently you barely glance at your opponent's last play or the score. All you care about is your next play.

The Pixie Pit set this amazing system up and for a year we played for free. Now it costs $10, but it's worth it in spades. The game allows me to ignore everything except the frolicsome sense of being engaged in a fierce but pointless battle. That's better than the dreary but equally pointless battle which is life without online Scrabble.

Dit Qu'il N'est Pas Etre

I just read on someone's blog that drummer Michael Azerrad has left The King of France, my favorite band in New York. I'm stunned. He was so integral to this band's lyrical yet explosive energy. They had/have a magic I'm still trying to define. And Michael Azzerad gave them gravitas as well as that crisp, propulsive drumming. He's a rock journalist of considerable renown. I think the world of him and I'm sorry he's decided the band isn't for him right now.

In other news, I have really bad PMS. The hormones invade you and drive rational thought out of your head. I'm going to meet with a radio DJ who has an idea for a non-profit music database, in Bryant Park, in about an hour. I answered his ad on Craig's List for a grant writer. He can't pay anything, but I liked his idea and I need experience writing grant proposals because every time I look at an ad for one, they say they want at least 3 years experience. Why are employers so inflexible about that? What about native smarts and ability? It really wears you down, that non-stop insistence on prior experience.

Anyway, I hope I can put two cogent words together for this man and also that his ideas can be in any way grasped by my sorry-ass brain today.

I'm listening to Charles Gayle play on this dj's show on WFMU. I love Gayle's simple phrasing. It's as unpretentious as the man himself, who's being interviewed in between playing. I once saw him play at Tonic and I loved the way he held his saxaphone out like a toy trumpet, eschewing that cool-jazz downcast eyes thing, just stickin' the thing out there and piping out these amazing, direct, pure and totally unexpected melody lines.

I love music!

And His Name Shall Be Called

I'm not happy with my blog posts lately. They're too self-pitying. They seem to ask why things are so hard for me, La Misma, when really many things are hard for many people and much harder than they are for La Misma.

So it's time to celebrate the good things ... let's see, what are they? Well, I have successfully kept houseplants for the first time in my life. Though I don't get much light in my apartment, these plucky little plants just keep on living, which is touching and life-affirming.

What else?

Ummmmmmmmmmmmm ...

The New York Times reported it was foolish to put up a lot of lousy stuff about yourself on the Web in case future employers Google you. But what if you have a compulsion? And anyway, can't we have any private life at all? Are our free, creative Web communications, which are designed to link us to other humans all awash in the human struggle, going to be reduced to press releases about our fine characters and lack of mistakes or tendency to give up on things too fast?

I'm a loser. And I want my future employers to know it.

But back to positivity. I have a lot of pots now. I used to only have two saucepans, and one didn't have a lid. The lid-less saucepan is fine for things like heating spaghetti sauce or refried beans, but it's hopeless for steaming vegetables or making rice. Well, in a domestic spree last fall I bought a set of pots and pans at Target for only $39.99 and it was so worth it! It has left me with plenty of lidded saucepans.

Yes. There's nothing like a lidded saucepan.

Sarky Bastard

Every so often, life holds a mirror up to you or to the way you were a few years ago, and the experience is usually jarring, unless you have no problem with yourself.

After two years of waiting, I got a humor piece I wrote three years ago published in a literary journal. My copy finally arrived in my unreliable mail last week, but I didn't read it carefully -- I just glanced at the other contributors' names in the front and tossed it aside. There's almost always a nasty surprise when you get something published, like in this case they left in the html symbols around two italicized words in the opening paragraph. Horrified, I looked through the rest of the journal to see if they had some kind of general problem but no, there were plenty of italicized words without the html symbols around them. Zut! There are hardly words for how annoying it is to have a long-awaited piece of writing besmirched with format errors. ("Zut" is not even adequate.)

So but later, perusing the Contributors Notes in the back, I read, "Kristy Eldredge writes for gloriousnoise.com and regularly performs at open mics in New York City, so her success can hardly be measured on a human scale." Argh! I had no memory of writing that, but I clearly recognized the bitter and sarcastic mood I must have been in. Even so I was startled by my snarkiness. The writer of that sentence obviously believes she has a right to be published in national magazines and singing in large, prestigious venues.

It was humbling to be shown in black and white what a sarky bastard* I can be and also what a sense of entitlement I have.

Good times.


* The photo is of Ricky Gervais to whom I am indebted for the phrase 'sarky bastard.'

What Have I Done to Deserve This?

I've written two blog entries in two days and both times, when I finished, a chance stroke of a key wiped out both of them in a flash. Ironically the entries were already about exasperation and hating everything. Where do I go from there? How to pick up the pieces and move on?

I will simply sidestep the subject of my miserable ennui and move to an editorial issue. Yesterday I was reading the Voice and there was a mistake so bad I was shocked. In an article about "the new sobriety," a writer wrote "Adam has drank..." "Has drank" is appalling. The correct form is "has drunk." Only ignorant people say "has drank". The Voice is getting a new editor, apparently, and boy do they need one. The writing in the Voice is terrible. Not just grammatical mistakes but an overall straining for cleverness that creates a turgid, constipated tone. The prose has been tinkered with by maniacs on too much caffeine, I guess, because it's been tweaked and pared down to just a few hip signifiers until it communicates only with itself.

It would be laughable if it weren't so damned infuriating. No, correction. The writing is laughable. But it's irritating because for some reason I still pore over it trying to figure out what's being said. Last night, reading a review of The Break-Up, I not only had to squint to see the crappy, tiny font they choose to review mainstream films in just so we know they consider them nearly beneath contempt, but I had to reread the opening sentence three times and it STILL didn't make sense. Neither did the rest of the review. When I was done, I had no idea if the movie is fun to sit through, whether there's any wit or truth to it, or if Vince Vaughan is funny or wasted as in weak material (Dodgeball). I don't know what the Voice writers are doing but communicating is not one of their projects.

Arrgggh. Everything sucks. And if this entry is mysteriously destroyed by my own clumsiness, I can't answer for how angry and hate-filled my next entry will be.