My Asinine Life

1. If you could only hold onto one memory, which would it be?

There is a memory which comes to mind. It’s of two people falling against a door in the middle of the night, their lips more than linked, like a fish could survive in the cavity of their conjoined mouths. This woman, who was small and quick-tempered, who was from a funny little island and spoke in a funny little way, who loved Gaston Bachelard and print-making and poked at this man who was me once when I believed myself immune to time and its more irritating effects. I’m not proud of the boy I was then, but we did make each other laugh.

We were drunk and had just stumbled in from a cafe round the corner, and I had just slipped into my parents’ bedroom to announce my return – she’s an exchange student from England staying with us through the winter, who I had taken to go in search of a basement bookstore in a blizzard before sneaking off to Maryland to work in a bird clinic only to hide out in the forest and weep my way through two cigarettes, this being just after she’d come to visit with my family and the two of us had stayed up all night long blatantly flirting with each other even though I was too dumb to notice. Then I made up some excuse to get me out of my internship, took a train back to Boston, and proceeded to haunt her bedroom most nights while she worked with printers’ ink and made the off-hand off-color joke or simply exclaimed by her radiator, “Oh, Gaston,” as if the two of them were the best of friends, until that particular evening, when I took her out to see a friends’ band and she snuck me beers all night long, and we played footsie under the table before making our way back to the house, and I slipped in to my parents’ room to announce we were home right off the bat because I had always been a conscientious son. This was on April Fools’ Day, and she was to return home two weeks later, and now most often when I pause to reflect on my first love and love in general it is this memory that I see, this memory that has been reduced to that single instant when the two of us fell against the bathroom door.

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Recently, I discovered my Chinese name, Gaibaole, means “Baby Happiness”. At first, I felt very confused. I am a powerful and angry person who should never be compared with babies or happiness, I think. Then I wet myself and realize this is false. I am indeed still an infant and very often am smiling for no particular reason.

I’ve been having too many dreams lately. The sorts of dreams you wake up from at 4 in the morning and spend an hour browsing independent poetry presses. Of spitting cobras facing off with girls I used to love and spitting cobras biting me in the heel. Or children in libraries clinging to my shoulders with a desperate need while I argue with their parents, the shelves filled with brightly colored instructional manuals from forty years ago, and all the furniture distinctly utopian. Dreaming of women attempting to kill themselves over and over until she’s standing on the prow of a ship and facing a cartoon rendition of the afterlife. And dreaming of smoking cigarettes while hurrying down stone steps in downtown Boston and bodies smeared together messily and someone I almost know loitering at the periphery of my vision and near our table in the middle of the night. My brain’s trying to tell me something, but what it is I don’t know. Might have something to do with that not so remarkable afternoon last month when it seemed absolutely necessary to move to China to save money so I could move to Chicago, and two weeks later I’m on a plane exchanging small talk with an executive from Sesna headed home to Beijing, then Yantai, then Laizhou, then Zibo.

Zibo’s not a bad place to be down and out all things considered. I’m honestly fine with living the blandest of lives while crammed in the smallest of corners. Or perhaps you don’t believe me. Perhaps you think I’m one of these people who believes it his right to do whatever he wants whenever he wants it and furthermore that my life should just be one adventure after another. Well, you’re right there. It should.

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Let’s say we’re all friends here, that here we are, at a little party on the patio, and maybe a guy starts to get the sense he can tell what’s going on inside his own head, or maybe he thinks he knows whatever emotion it is you’re suffering from right now, and you think you know what’s going to happen tomorrow, and someone else thinks there’s something wrong here, but she can’t put her finger on it, and then there’s me, and these days every time I try and smile it always comes up looking hateful largely because I spend so much time alone with my computer that communicating face to face feels funny.

Fact is, I just enjoy spilling my secrets to this here thinking machine almost exclusively and am still working under the illusion that no one’s peaking at the words I put up for general perusal within the infinite expanse of the internet, which is nothing like the infinity behind the eyes, but more like the infinity between zero and one. I want to reach out to you, but I can’t on account of I honestly believe we’re each and every one of us nothing more than empty vessels with porcelain brains could shatter at the slightest touch. So it’s all alone time in internetland.

But I’d rather be talking to you, if you’d let me. I know you’re out there whether you’re reading this or not, but me I’m only the front man for a whole orchestra of internal tendencies and beliefs look more like a cloud or nebula than a single unity of apperception. I crave silence but instead am clawing at myself from every direction like my brain is full of snakes and they’re snapping at themselves in their claustrophobia. That sort of thing.

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I’ve always associated God with pornography. Ever since I first discovered glossy reproductions of female reproductive parts, I’ve associated these idealized versions of womanhood with the godhead, perhaps because whenever I come in contact with an actual bared vagina, it’s always a religious experience, whether ecstasy or agony doesn’t matter. Sometimes I wonder what happened to that youthful moment when everything was possible, the one I squandered on an on-going internal narrative that seemed more important than breath at the time, but now seems about as worthwhile as a brain in a jar. There’s a time the world was made of water, and I was splashing everywhere I went, but now it’s all just embers of the thing, and I’m hoping to stand up to people I haven’t met yet, when all I ever wanted was just to have a small place to myself, and a few friendly faces filling my days.

I got this strange feeling I’m alive, and I don’t like it. There’s a moment when you hold out your hand and someone reaches back and the two of you are standing somewhere between the place you are and where you want to be, like a place has been allotted to you on the stage of history and when you get there the applause will be like an explosion of gratitude and you’re on in five minutes, except when five minutes rolls around it’ll be nothing but another moment of silence, the petals coming down like a multicolored rain and the audience still staring at the empty stage like it’s normal and everyday to be swimming in boredom, while you sit on the sidelines gnashing your teeth because the truth of the matter is that you’re greedy for their eyes and nothing more.

There was a time when my lips were mouthing the words of dead men, and I was somewhere between here and their world, but then I couldn’t think straight, like I’d been locked out of my own head, and all I wanted was to rest there again, but I had to go around the world to find that hole on the inside and the vacuous chamber within but filling rapidly with hairs that will eventually become entwined into an electric mess keeps growing out and into my eyes. Or this is how it seemed when I remember what it was like to feel things again, and that I had to take responsibility for my emotions. It was like my head was full of hairs and I was constantly coughing up hairballs.

But getting back to my youth spent muttering obscenities at each passing nubile neurotic. I believed in things then, much like now, although the things were different. They were the sorts of things you do not mention, the ones that keep you warm in the dark, that expire under scrutiny and quiver when confronted head on, but all the same it was a time when what you do is the most important thing a person could possibly do, and you are the most important person in any given room, because you dress right and have the look of someone who can think his way out of a steel cage.

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I got food sickness towards the end, had pain in my stomach like a knife turning round and round, and was shitting water every twenty minutes or so, and so I did what any normal person would do, I openly wept then went to the health people right by the breakroom and stood in the doorway explaining that there’s no way I can work tonight, and they just looked at me and said that only my foreman could give me the night off. It was like being told off by the school nurse. “Only the principal can tell you, you can go home.” Maybe it was just pessimism, but I already knew that, unless I shat water directly in his fucking face, that man was never going to give me the night off.
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