Author: Jeff

I bought a DVD drive on a whim yesterday. Installing the hardware was quite pleasing since I had to flex my problem solving skills a little bit, but not too much. (I learned that my PC manufacturer shorted me one IDE cable. Yesterday morning I didn’t even know what an IDE cable was.) Finally, I rented Human Nature to test it out.

The first thing that happened after I put my first DVD into my first DVD player: An installation wizard opened up and I let it walk me through the installation of a friendly little piece of spyware called InterActual Player.

Installation Wizard: “This InterActual Player software application allows you to access additional content and features on the disc and from the Internet.”

Me: What? I already installed a DVD player. Okay, whatever. (Skims through short license, clicks “Install”.)

Installation Wizard: “Please provide us with anonymous demographic data so we may optimize your software experience to serve you better [, chump] . . . The InterActual Player collects and uploads anonymous product usage and viewing behavior information to be used and provided to third parties by InterActual for marketing purposes.”

Warner Bros: (Figuratively holds up hand as if to wave hello, but extends middle finger instead.)

PS, Human Nature is a good movie. You should see it.

She had pink hair one of the times I talked to her a few years ago, at a different coffee shop. She hadn’t been extra careful with the hair dye. Her fingers were also stained pink – her hands too, probably. I couldn’t see her hands. The sleeves of her sweater were pulled over her hands, only her fingers were poking out. Her mug of hot cocoa was smeared with swirls of pink fingerprints. I turned into a jittery bundle of nerves as soon as she came up to me, just as I had the couple of other times I’d talked to her.

Today I wasn’t certain that it was the same girl at first. It had been a couple of years; she looked different – longer hair, glasses, a little older. I was standing in line at the counter trading light conversation with an acquaintance and when she looked up I gave a sideways wave hello. She reacted with a look of discomfort and confusion and my wave withered into a vague directionless pointing gesture. I sat down with my tea, humbled. She came over a few minutes later to chat. It was her and I turned into that same stuttering bundle of nerves from three years ago. We had a short conversation, both of us pretending to have forgotten the details of our confusing past correspondence – though it seemed like we both remembered everything. (We remembered each other’s names and the details of our couple of email exchanges.) She went back to her seat, where she was perched over a chessboard, and I sat and wrote for awhile. When I looked over at her again, she was leaning back in her chair with a chess book open in front of her. The sleeves of her sweater were pulled down over her hands, just like before.

I wouldn’t have remembered the way she stretched out her sleeves if it hadn’t been for the pink fingerprints on the hot cocoa mug.

At first the most remarkable thing about the old man who was walking by, slightly hunched over but moving at a comfortable pace, were his long white whiskers (not beard, definitely whiskers), and his stained-blond mustache. But just as he passed by, I noticed the glasses taped to his head. The lenses and the front of the frames were intact, but there were two strips of blue masking tape stretched between his temples and the outer edges of the lenses.

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A pack of twelve or fifteen kids, probably all under ten years old, were running around in the stairs that lead down through Pike Place Market. A couple of the kids stopped to look down at the daycare’s colorful playground. “Hey guys, look!” The rest of the kids came running back to admire the slide for a minute. A couple of adults eventually regained control and began herding the group further along toward their destination, and a passerby stopped to make small talk with a woman who was coaxing the last few stragglers along.

He said, “That’s quite a crew! Is it a school group?”

“No. It’s a Christian school,” the woman answered.

I was about to cross the street at a quiet corner a few blocks from home. I would have been jaywalking, except that a tall curly-headed guy ran up in front of me and stopped just one step away. He had come out of nowhere, as they say. He quickly closed the narrow distance between us, almost brushing up against me. I took the space back again by making a half step backward. He looked me in the face and said with contempt, “This shit doesn’t work, dude!” He was referring to the little vial of clear liquid that he had just stuck up under my nose. I took a couple of more steps back, shrugging – slack-jawed and stupified. We had a three second standoff, ending when my new friend had gotten a good look at me. His agressive posture slumped and he said, “Oh. . . . I thought you were someone else.” He gave me an apologetic smile and turned to head back the way he came. I hesitated before resuming my interrupted street crossing (this time legal) and turned toward home. The two of us were walking in the same direction, on opposite sides of the street. He looked over a couple of times and said something, I didn’t hear what. About fifty yards up from the corner, he got into a sports car that had apparently been parked hastily – It was pointed against traffic and had one wheel on the curb.

Robert is walking on the other side of the street, peering at me through his good eye. (Through his good eye, rather than with his good eye, because when he looks at me from that far away I get the sense of being looked at from behind a telescope. It’s as if he felt that if he were to blink or lose focus, he might not be able to find me again.) I wave to acknowledge that I see him and he slows down, then stops.

He turns his head, keeping me in sight, as I cross the street. When I reach him, I ask, “How are you.”

He says the usual, “I’m hanging in there.”

“Do you have a place to stay these days?”

“No. I was staying at Angela’s, Linda’s sister. But she’s out of town for a late Christmas thing. She’s taking care of her mom who has diabetes – just like my mom.”

“That’s too bad.”

“I guess I should watch out. It’s supposed to run in the family.”

“Uh huh.”

“Say, I wonder if you could loan me five dollars. I’d like to go over to the coffee shop for a cup of coffee and some donuts. That’s what I want. I’d really like some donuts.”

“You know, you should eat better. You should get some soup or something like that.” I stop to think of something that he’d be more likely to eat, “Or if not soup, I don’t know . . . hamburgers. You’ll be less likely to get diabetes if you eat better.” I half made that up. I don’t really know what I’m talking about.

“I didn’t realize that. I’ll have to think about that. Ok. Soup and hamburgers.”

He’s trying to repeat my words so that I’ll understand that he’ll consider my advice. But he’s not really worried about his health or about piecing together money for a week’s rent at the dumpy hotel. He’s busy thinking about filling his stomach and passing a couple of hours’ time. How could there be a this week or a this year when it’s always this afternoon.

There were two men up ahead on the sidewalk chatting. I was walking up the hill toward them. One of them was a homeless man who I’ve seen around a lot – a drinker. I didn’t recognize the second man until he turned toward me a bit. It was Ernie, an old coworker who I’d last seen a few months ago. His face looked permanently fallen and serious. Ernie didn’t look straight at me, but he saw me even though I was still a good distance away. When I got closer he abandoned his companion in mid-sentence and walked up the hill away from both of us. He stopped several steps ahead and pretended to look out over the freeway. I passed the homeless man as he turned to shuffle his way up toward Ernie and started to muster a hello, carefully measuring out a level of greeting that he’d be least uncomfortable with. But he was pretending to look out over the freeway now, watching me from the corner of his bloodshot eyes. He was trying to make himself as small as possible. We were on an overpass, so there was nowhere for him to retreat to, no way to avoid me. I withheld my wave, pocketed my hand, and walked on.

I couldn’t resist posting another Nicholson Baker quote, since it ties into a couple of recurring Bean-themes, tea and the spelling of the word gray. This is from A Box of Matches:

“The dawn sky is now visible: the snow is a very light blue rather than a grey. Yes, grey with an e – that’s one of those English spellings that I accept (aeroplane isn’t bad either), and not just because I learned to read it on the boxes of Earl Grey tea that my mother had. When spelled with an e, grey half hides the wide, crude sound of the a behind the obscuring mists of the e. It’s rare for a one-syllable word to have so much going on.”

The Blog Meetup yesterday (at the Starbucks in the Barnes and Noble across the street from the other Starbucks) was pretty neat.

Here are the folks I met and their sites: Ali, Anita, Jake, Jerry, Manuel, Matt, Tara, tyd & Mr. tyd

“You notice something, some particular quality of the slush at the side of the road . . . or something, . . . anything. You notice it a few times down in the lizard brain area. And then it’s only the third or forth time that you notice it, that it feels as if you’re noticing it. Seeing something again and again is essential to noticing something for the first time in a strange way.”
–Nicholson Baker, profiled on All Things Considered

The same page also includes two one-minute clips of Baker reading from his new book, A Box of Matches and there’s another excerpt on Random House’s page.