September 13, 2002
Locked Out
I'm locked out of Brokentype. I'm looking through a window at a typewriter in a room and I can't get to it, and you are standing there shaking your head and wondering what kind of man it is who forgets his keys. I would like to be able to climb up the side, grab onto the bars and hoist myself up to the top floor windows. Put one foot on the neighbor's house and one foot on brokentype and kick through, then rush down the stairs and throw open the door just to show to you that I am not one who uses locksmiths when it is so much faster to break something open — like tearing a fruit instead of peeling it. Let everything be broken and over with and bleeding — better than to wait.
I really am locked out of brokentype, the database has corrupted and I can't log in to my own website without taking off all the hinges and doorknobs and frames and hauling it all away. I kind of like the idea of doing that, but it will take time and I have none. I am busy with lying around the apartment smoking cigarettes to the butt-end and playing sad French-sounding songs on my accordion.
In the months since my last confession I've been good then bad then good and bad again. In between a friend got engaged, another friend moved to the city, another friend said goodbye, another friend said goodbye and hello all at once which sounds like good-lo, which is a fine way to describe things:. Good and Low.
I went to Maine for a week. We were in Rangeley on lake Mooselookmeguntic. The name, the locals say, came when two Indians spotted a moose.
Indian One "Moose, Look Meguntic!"
Meguntic "Let's go canoe around and have some lobster you racist fuck."
One night I went out with a fishing pole onto the lake in the late afternoon. The sun began to set behind a fog of gray clouds and the water turned into milk with jellyfish.
I caught 12 fish, all too small to eat. I killed one of them when I pulled the hook out, and he floated around the boat for a while to remind me of what I had done.
"Look what you've done to me."
"I'm sorry dead fish."
"No you're not, you have no idea. Why’re you here at all? You don’t belong here."
"But I'm part of nature too."
"Do be so sure."
'What?'
"Asshole."
++++
On 30th avenue in Astoria, in front off Lilly’s Bagel Shop, Someone hung up a sign on a tree: it reads "9/11, 2001, we Will Never Forget." (Or maybe is says "To the Victims, We Will Always Remember"; or "America Will Never Forget"; "Or We the People Will Not Forget,") In smaller letters, beneath it, it says the same thing in dozens of other languages. It occurs to the passerby who stops to reflect that someone went to the nail salon and the coffee shop and the butcher and the shoemaker and the pharmacy and the gyro stand and the liquor store and asked the people there, "Where are you from? What language do you speak? Would you mind writing it down?"
