This was an event. Having no younger siblings or relatives, and having never logged any babysitting hours, I’ve rarely dandled a baby in my lap. The last time I did it was so long ago I can’t remember either the baby or the situation. Truth be told, the idea of handling someone else’s baby scares me – the same way it would scare me to be carrying a Rodin in the trunk of my car. Who wants the responsibility?

However, last night at a Christmas party, J, without sounding any warning, put his baby in my lap. “Hold her,” he said, and more or less grinned at my dismay.

J’s baby turned around to look at me. She touched my beard. She considered me. Then she returned to agitating lightly in my lap, reaching out in front of her and softly gurgling.

It felt awkward for a moment. But only for a moment. Holding J’s baby, I was reminded that babies—at least nine-month-olds—aren’t delicate. They won’t break. To the contrary, they’re vigorous and durable. They’re alive. They have heft. One needn’t handle them like crystal (or like a Rodin). Plus, they’ll tell you how they feel. If they’re not comfortable, they’ll let you know. You don’t have to monitor a baby as though it were comatose. Good baby-care, it seems, requires one’s steady presence, not one’s constant vigilance. Thank God.

All of this is reassuring. I still have hopes of having children. And last night I had the feeling that I can do this. I can handle a baby. This isn’t so hard. What’s to be afraid of?

What a good feeling! Maybe I need to change a diaper soon. That’s probably a better test of parental suitability. Here’s to hoping I pass.

“Don’t tell me about this now,” I said. “Next time get the number!”

What kept him from approaching her, I think, was the awkwardness of acting as a proxy. Few men directly approach women on their own behalf; even fewer would approach a woman on someone else’s. So I don’t blame A for inertia. If I spotted a woman who was precisely his type, I probably wouldn’t play matchmaker either. I don’t have the nerve.

Would that I did. Would that everyone did. It seems incontestable that if men and women, as a matter of course, briefed five friends in detail about their “type,” and if said friends made regular “proxy-approaches”—again, as a matter of course—the resulting increase in erotic and romantic fulfillment among Americans would be enormous. No legislation or government policy could do as much to improve the commonweal. The dreams of revolutionaries would pale in comparison.

I’ll start carrying around pen and paper if you do.

Yesterday I arrived home to find my building’s driveway blocked by yellow police tape. My first thought was: someone’s been murdered. A few ladies who live down the street were gathered nearby, wondering about the reason for the tape. No one knew why it was there. Yellow police tape isn’t an everyday sight in South Pas. In my four months of living here, I’ve never observed any police action period. It’s easy to forget that Los Angeles is a few miles away.

I called the local police station to inquire about the tape. The desk cop told me he just got on duty and would have to investigate. He took my phone number and promised to call me back. I thanked him and expected to hear back from him in no less than four hours, if at all. Five minutes later he called back and informed me that a falling tree branch had knocked down a telephone wire.

Oh, okay.

And what about my car? It was parked on the street, I told him. How do I make sure I don’t get ticketed while I’m waiting for my driveway to re-open? The cop asked for my license plate number and assured me that he would pass it along to Parking Enforcement, letting them know that I was authorized to park on the street.

Thank you!

And if that measure of kindness wasn’t small-towny enough, the cop called me back again an hour later to let me know that the yellow tape had been removed.

Good to know!

At this rate a milkman is going to deliver milk to my front door before the end of the week.

I’m on the verge of going back in. After faltering for a few weeks, the Dow is up to around 12,100. At the start of its precipitous decline back in 2008, it hovered around 11,000. At its bottom it hit 6500. Economic indicators don’t warrant its rebound. Stimulus spending goosed the economy and drove the Dow. But the stimulus will end, and like an addict out of dope, the economy will tremble, and so will the market. I sense the market’s jitteriness already, the waning of its high. Our thirty-one year spree of low taxes and big budgets is almost over. The ascetic fiscal plan proposed by Jerry Brown in California is going to be the model for national debt reduction. And when the government raises taxes and reduces spending, the stock market will suffer. Badly. I see it returning to 6500. Call me an opportunist. I aim to cash in.

I couldn’t tell if he was writing poetry or prose. If he was writing poetry, it was Merwin-esque in its wisdom and loveliness—or so I imagined. If he was writing prose, it was fearless and erudite like, say, Dwight MacDonald’s. He traced those letters, one block at a time, skipping lines. Nabokov wrote on index cards while standing at a lectern. The greater the writer, the quirkier the habits.

Oh, how disappointing it was to see him yesterday, accompanied by a pair of softcover books about spirituality, the cheap self-published kind. The cover art screamed whimsy and intellectual flabbiness. It got worse. A young man sat down with him and the two started talking about karma. The old man hauled the conversation, as though he were speaking to a novice. He spoke with utter conviction about things utterly speculative, and occasionally patted his books, citing them as confirmation. His metaphysics was a web of clichés. He had an answer to every question. Imponderables didn’t bother him. He blabbered like a fool.

Which must be why he looked so happy and serene.

The search for a new place has been grim. Probably I’m too picky. I want location, size, and aesthetics, all at a reasonable price. Of the ten or so rentals I’ve seen, only two won me over, and I still hold reservations about both. I’ll have to decide in a day or two where I’m going to live. If I can’t decide on a destination, I may just stay in South Pas, even if it means that I become a hermit.

I’ve noticed that many landlords do a terrible job of promoting their properties. They do such a poor job that I wonder how many of them became landlords in the first place. Many don’t know how to post a photo online. And those who do know how often post unflattering or unrevealing images. (Of course, the posting of unrevealing photos is often intentional; many apartments in L.A. are depressing in design and atmosphere.) More puzzling still is their habit of showing apartments that haven’t yet been vacated or cleaned. Yesterday I toured a place in the Fairfax district that was empty but not clean. The wood floors were covered with dust and paint chips. The kitchen counters and the bathtub bore mysterious stains and residue. A Depression-era flophouse was cleaner.

Even worse, a few days ago I saw a place that was neither clean nor vacant. The current tenant, a bearish guy with long hair and nipple-piercings, walked around shirtless. Two people were asleep on old couches in the living room, covered by blankets like corpses. The sink was piled high with dirty dishes. One of the bedrooms was painted lime. It was a repository for the tenant’s junk—old TVs, books, empty boxes. A large foul-smelling dog trotted around the place, barking.

When can I move in?

Five years ago I found a pair of vintage bedside tables on Craigslist. They looked as though they were purchased in Palm Springs in 1961. The seller knew nothing about their making. A fast talker, he seemed to be in a hurry to get rid of his furniture. I drove down to Santa Monica, paid him, and carried both of them to my trunk. The inside of the drawers bore the inscription Vega, by Morris. Over the years I’ve done a few Google searches, hoping to find out more about the brand. I’ve always come up empty. I’ve never seen them in any vintage shop, either.

Until yesterday. Here are the same tables at The Living Room, in Silver Lake. The price tag was $345 apiece. My cost? $50.

It was one of those moments that made me smile and think that my luck isn’t so bad after all.

I never saw him lift very heavy weights. He would stand in front of a mirror, shirtless, and curl dumbbells. Sometimes, using the same dumbbells, he would do single-leg squats. Although he had gray hair, he was more finely muscled than I was, with wiry arms and a cobblestone belly that, toward the end of his workout, gleamed with sweat. He seemed to have no interest in building size or endurance; his entire regimen seemed designed to maintain his knitted physique. In the locker room he chatted with other men, though he never dawdled. His greatest purpose and pleasure seemed to lie elsewhere. The gym was just a necessary sideline, not a vocation.

For sure, he was gay. I probably had an inkling then, but I was still in that naïve phase where every man is straight until evidence proves otherwise.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone happier. He never had the grim look of a man reluctantly working out to fend off age. The concentration on his face bespoke relish. He loved to exercise and look good. Probably I envied him. I was depressed and directionless. I didn’t understand where he got his gusto, his visible contentment with himself.

Yesterday he walked by me. He wore a black suit. His hair was whiter, his face pinker and more wrinkled. The glasses were the same. His body was as trim as it had been before, his waist still preternaturally small. He swayed slightly as he walked, the way someone does when he’s jubilant. He did not recognize me, but I recognized him. A breeze lifted his jacket as he passed.

Here’s what I imagine will happen. Morgan will be escorted into the auditorium by a phalanx of GLAAD martinets who will watch from the wings, arms folded, as Morgan weeps, confesses his sins, and appeals for forgiveness. The audience will consist of the press, a few members of the original audience (who may be wondering at the reason for all the hullabaloo), and a handful of aggrieved locals who like the idea of seeing someone who offended them reduced to sobbing and ignominy. Following his stage appearance, Morgan will issue a new statement affirming the dignity of gay people. Privately he’ll make a suitable donation to the GLAAD. GLAAD will give Morgan its blessing to resume his career, and the industry will embrace Morgan anew. The whole episode will be relegated to Wikipedia.

I find the whole roundelay chilling. Granted, Morgan’s stand-up slur was ugly (not to say juvenile). But his punishment is the greater horror. As his fellow performers note, Morgan is a man who would never hurt anyone. Why, then, is his simple apology for his joke inadequate? Why must he be subjected to public humiliation? I doubt that his scheduled pilgrimage to Nashville is his idea alone; it’s a spectacle he and his handlers have negotiated with GLAAD as a condition of his release from their condemnation. Is Morgan’s public mea culpa really going to soften genuine fag-haters? You tell me.

Overlooked amid the hoopla surrounding the killing of Osama bin Laden was the news that investigators found a collection of pornography on the Al Qaeda leader’s computers. According to Reuters, the stash was “fairly extensive.” Of course, the report could be bogus, a posthumous slander. It wouldn’t be the first time that our military has lied. It’s also possible that the files, even if real, weren’t Bin Laden’s. Who knows how they got there? But if the report is true, and the porn really was Bin Laden’s (as I suspect it was), then I think it’s big news. It means another death for Bin Laden, the death of his mystique.

As the leader of Al Qaeda, Bin Laden projected suitable menace. Ambling around in a white tunic, and carrying a staff, Bin Laden seemed to incarnate the very values that made the jihadists so threatening. He was disciplined, ascetic, and devoted. His persona alone was a rebuke to American laziness and excess. He made us look soft, lost in the swoon of capitalism. True, the Koran wasn’t going to replace the Bible in this generation. But in a hundred years? It seemed possible, especially during the several nervous years prior to our “surge” in Iraq.

The threat seems a lot less now. The discovery of porn on Bin Laden’s computers suggests that perhaps it was never that great to begin with. It turns out he wasn’t an avatar of discipline. Instead, he was an old man jacking off to images.

It’s good that he’s gone. It’s also good to know the terrorists trying to bring us under Sharia law are just as sloppily human as we are.

Let it be said that I am a man who will indeed kill a fly, especially for the sake of quiet. The smoke is still issuing from my pillow.

The film follows the fortunes of a Boston bank-robbing crew led by Ben Affleck and Jeremy Renner. During the heist that opens the film, a bank manager, played by Rebecca Hall, catches a glimpse of Renner. The next week, Affleck tails her to make sure she doesn’t give them away to the Feds. The obvious ensues. He falls in love with her, she with him, and the problem of how he’s going to reveal who he really is slowly makes its way toward resolution.

The performances in The Town require no defense. Affleck, who also co-wrote the film, milks rich drama out of confrontation scenes, especially those featuring Hall and Renner (who ended up getting an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor). There’s also a spectacular scene in which Pete Postlethwaite, a menacing florist who also plans the crew’s heists, puts the kibosh on Affleck’s decision to leave the crew. (I immediately jumped to it when I got the DVD from Netflix.) As the film’s lead, Affleck pulls off the sensitive thug bit with finesse, waxing emotional with a Southie accent and stalking A.A. meetings with wounded eyes while periodically putting beatdowns on old acquaintances from the ‘hood and showing off his ‘roided, tatted shoulders.

It may be a high-quality genre film, but a genre film it certainly is. One of the big distinctions between a genre narrative and a literary narrative is that the former evokes an unrecognizable world; that is to say, it evokes a world that doesn’t impose the same curbs on the characters (bank thieves can breach a citywide police gauntlet) or exact the same consequences (the thieves’ liberal use of assault rifles never seems to harm any police or bystanders). It’s a world with no semblance of the workaday, a world of highlights rather than minutiae.

Ultimately, the genre film is a fantasia, the kind of film that does requires no suspension of disbelief because it was never believable to begin with. The most unbelievable thing in The Town is that Ben Affleck’s character retains his emotional sensitivity even as he’s knocking off banks and shooting at cops. In the real world, to do the latter stuff requires renunciation of the former; to keep the former requires abstinence from the latter. No one gets to have it both ways, which is why The Town, for all of its fun drama, remains steadfastly a genre film.

And it’s also the reason I wanted to see it again. For me, the excitement of the film is not in the action, or even the ingenuity of the heists; it’s in watching a character have it both ways, be both a daring transgressor and a self-reflecting citizen, a badass thug and a young man vulnerably in love. Schmucks like me can’t be both. Projecting myself onto Ben Affleck’s character in The Town is the closest I’ll get to unleashing my repressed sociopath. Far less fun it is to identify with Tilda Swinton in I Am Love, who must make a painful decision between passion and family in a world that often does not allow both. That film is brilliant, but where’s the joy in seeing renunciation occur on screen? For sheer gratification, I want to watch the character who doesn’t have to give up anything.

What happens during the usual Oscar party? People gather round the living room, hors d’oeuvres and a veggie wheel mounted on a nearby table. Loyalties harden as the early awards are given out; people align themselves with this film or that. The commentary freely flows: this actress looks beautiful, that one should never have gone strapless. We are moved by the winners’ speeches, still more by their triumph. It is riveting to watch someone being vaulted into social Olympus, receiving an award that confers such immense esteem, status, and, let us not overlook it, financial gain.

But show me the man or woman who loves himself more, feels better about his lot, or sees more meaning in the world after watching the Academy Awards. My hunch is that Serotonin levels drop all over the world in the hour or two following the broadcast. I warrant that the faces of solitary drivers in Monday morning traffic are more lugubrious than usual. The Oscars are exciting because they allow us to identify with something—an actor, a director, a movie—more radiant than ourselves. This is gratifying, of course, but there must be a comedown when the hosts bid us good night and we’re left with ourselves once more. Last night I felt no high, but no low, either, and I type this on Monday morning feeling clean and good.

What’s infuriating is how little legal responsibility landlords bear for ensuring quiet in their buildings. Once a California landlord has a lease in hand, he can wash his hands of all responsibility for the living conditions of his tenants, save only the direst human needs: water, heat, freedom from infestation. If the adjacent homeowner gets a relentlessly barking dog, the tenants have to deal with it, not the landlord. (Compare the landlord’s responsibility in this situation to a hotelier’s; that front desk would be all over the dog.) In France landlords are legally obligated to provide quiet for their tenants. Here, on the other hand, landlords routinely advertise their properties as quiet and face no consequences when their claims prove false. I just heard that my landlord stripped all the carpet out of another top-floor apartment in my building. With polished hardwood floors, that unit will rent for a premium. I’ll bet, though, that he describes the lower unit as “quiet” the next time it goes on Craigslist. He’s that kind of landlord: both clueless and ruthless, and never the worse for it. According to other tenants, he only addresses tenant complaints when forced by law. He can afford to be an asshole. The last time he ran afoul of the housing code, his fine was $200. This, in a building where one-bedrooms rent for $1600.

So this is my living condition. My feet are tied by a slumlord owner. To be fair, I haven’t heard his response to my complaint, but I don’t expect to get a lot of sympathy. All I want is to be set free from the lease; I’ll even pay a lease-breaking penalty if the dollar amount is reasonable. If he gives me the runaround or ignores my complaint altogether, I may sue him for breach of contract. Alas, I don’t expect much help from the man behind the bench, either. The law favors landlords, and I’m just a tenant.

So far so good.  I feel lighter and freer at the keyboard.  My projects don’t feel so imposing.  My task is no longer to complete the project; it is to work productively for the current 25-minute “Pomodoro.”   That I can do.  I’m noticing that I’m more aware of my feelings and thoughts as I write, removed as I am from the enormous shadow of my project.  I’m more conscious of my body.  I feel more like an agent, less like a servant.  My writing is becoming more about me, less about the project.  That sounds fey and narcissistic, I know, but I suspect that this shift is going to improve my work.  Check that: it already has improved my work.

I told her I wanted to get off my current medication.  She thought my intention was worthy and gave me a tapering plan.  Total hassle?  Minimal.  Still, sitting across from her, I felt the ineradicable discomfort of being assessed by someone whose judgment of my mind and character carries more weight, if only legally, than my own.  I’m no Foucauldian anarchist; psychiatrists, I warrant, serve a positive function, regulating the medication of millions of Americans and curating the criteria for mental soundness.  I have no illusions that a society without this regulation and without these criteria would be better than ours.

But we pay a price for that function: namely, we give a class of professionals the authority to deny us something (drugs); and, by anointing them the arbiters of mental health in many court proceedings, we subordinate ourselves legally to their judgment, which is, of course, imperfect.  If I need something from a psychiatrist, I depend on the favorable determination of someone who may not himself be of the soundest mind.  Needless to say, the power to determine mental health is not tantamount to having mental health.  A few psychiatrists I know (one professionally, two personally) are, psychologically speaking, among the most massively defended people I have ever met.  In fact, I suspect a good many psychiatrists enter the profession in part because of the refuge it offers from the very kind of analysis they render of others.  And yet they hold sway, however minor, over our lives.  Although this new psychiatrist had no practical power over me—I didn’t want anything from her, and even if I did, I could have gone to another psychiatrist if she didn’t accommodate me—I felt the weight of her authority.  When I left the building, the traffic on Sunset made a welcome hubbub.



Now she is dead and I cannot feel grief.  To be sure, I am sad, but my sadness is shallow in a way I find disconcerting.

She had checked into the hospital complaining of shortness of breath.  A nurse found her unconscious in the bathroom; doctors could not revive her.  She had suffered a pulmonary embolism, her second in the last year.

More than anything, it is the idea of death that upsets me today.  A lifetime of joy, fear, love, anger, and grace, seventy-plus years of churning human emotion: where does it all go?  Does death render it null?  It seems so hard to play against the house when the house is death.

And when I cannot get exactly what I want in the marketplace, I pay to have it tailored to my desire.  For example, I bought a writing desk from Crate and Barrel last month.  It had a walnut-veneer desktop, and powder-coated metal legs.  Slim and spare, almost like a parson’s table, it suited my taste, except in height; at 30.5” inches, it was at least two inches too high for me.  I like to loom over my work.  I like to bear down on it. What was my solution to this highly vexing problem?  (And indeed it was the sort of problem that nagged at me until I figured out how to solve it.)  I paid a metal fabricator in downtown L.A. $100 to trim the legs.  He took 2.5 inches from the legs, cutting them with a machine that cuts metal to within 1/5000^th of a centimeter.  He was even fastidious enough to take a 2.5” segment from the middle of the legs and then weld the parts back together, so as to keep the factory-molded bottom of each leg intact.  He even applied a new powder-coating to the metal.  When I re-attached the legs, the desk was perfect.  Perfect.

But, see, this is a problem. I’m obsessed with making things work perfectly.  My humble affluence (and it is humble; I drive a Honda Civic, for Christ’s sake!) has made me keenly aware of my needs and desires.  That’s something money does—it puts you into contact with needs and desires you never recognized when you were young and poor.  It used to be that I’d buy furniture at second-hand stores, place it haphazardly around my apartment, and consider myself furnished.  There was a time when I was oblivious to style and appearance, when the height of a writing desk made no impression on me.  Now I’m having metal fabricators re-make brand new furniture for me in order to quell insuperable reservations.  It isn’t even the cost of my desires that worries me; it’s the heat of my irritation with imperfect things that concerns me.  My frustration with imperfection seems to devil me more and more as I get older.

Another example?  I was all set to buy a 13” MacBook Pro back in October.  It is not a cheap computer; however, light, powerful, and stylish, the 13” MacBook Pro suited my needs more than any laptop on the market.  I was ready to splurge. But last week as I was tinkering the with MacBook Pro at the Apple Store, working through my final reservations about abandoning Windows, a helpful store employee brought my attention to the new MacBook Air, which until then I hadn’t considered buying, even for a second.  I played with the new Air, which is less powerful than the Pro, but snappier on account of its flash memory hard drive.  (The Air opens programs more quickly, but the Pro makes them run faster.)  The keyboard on the Air is better, although its screen is harsher.  The Air is lighter than the Pro, although I’m not sure how I feel about that.  And on second thought, are the flatter keys on the Air really better than the slightly more prominent keys on the Pro?

Now I’m all fucked up.  I can’t decide between the two computers.  And my dilemma bothers me way more than I care to admit.  Here’s a thesis: my insistence on making things work perfectly for me is part and parcel of depression, a kind of soul-sickness.  I miss being young and naïve, tolerant of my material lot, and focused only on aiming the vector of my spirit.  This isn’t a novel idea—consumerism equals soul-sickness—but I need to hear myself say it.  Oh, how tired and complacent I have become.