It's that quick, that astonishing.
The extinction of experience, I want to say.
An existential smear.
Sometimes they remind me so much of myself at that age I can barely stand to glare at them, destined as they are to inhabit screenplays they trust they're scripting, only to discover one day they've really been written by somebody else, something else that you can't actually point a finger at because its pen is scribbling everything and everyone from everywhere all at once.
Here's a bowling ball for you, my monarchs.
Happy flapping.
They can't help themselves, I can't help myself, any more than those young, short-skirted, blue-eyed, blond-haired schoolteachers can who sneak a couple of quickies back at the ranch with their wonder-eyed fourteen-year-old faunlets and later call the hanky-panky an affliction, a sickness, a disease, a sin, true love — on national TV, no less, the sluts.
What's so hard to figure? They're not bonking little boys. They're bonking themselves, their webby age lines, their saggy fannies, the adolescence they're losing a sliver of every day, skin flakes from a psoriatic. Bonk hard enough, they're frantic to believe, and maybe it won't fade so fast. Bonk hard enough, and maybe they can make it linger a few bumps and grinds longer. The least they can do is own up. They're as bad as those Christian fundies who claim to be opening their wombs for God, reproducing like rabies, swarming the globe with Jesus Camp fodder, bunging up the place with a glut of progeny in a masterful act of selfish, thoughtless, righteous insular idiocy. Like my big sis, Sarasa, who found herself with four kids, two dogs, no husband, a foreclosure, and an unbounded devotion to the Almighty who'd done all that to her. Her answer? Sprinkle said kids and dogs among church chums and hightail it to Southeast Asia on missionary work to convert more cretins to her messed-up lifestyle. Way to go, sis.
My own weaknesses subsist on another continent altogether. They have nothing to do with narcissism or nympholepsy.
They have to do, as I say, with making myself useful.
The camcorder didn't come cheap, you could call it my one genuine extravagance in life, but the rest — my makeup, toys, wigs, outfits, blank cartridges, software, faux silk leopard sheets — I collected over time the same way nerds do stamps and southern grannies those hair-raising darky cookie jars.
My modus operandi: Friday afternoon shuffle through my apartment door drained, drawn, stunned by the week behind me, wanting nothing save to sink into a protracted slack-jawed hibernation. Order out for pepperoni pizza, watch self-important Dan Rather deliver the news, spend the evening surfing the web for nothing in particular, vaguely curious about where the next click will escort me, always a little taken aback, a little disappointed, even, by where it ultimately does, at the end of the line some dumb ad for spam filters, cheap financing, affordable friends, unable to retrace my breadcrumbs back to any awareness of how I got there, and then, bushed, beat, to bed. Saturday things start looking up: curled on my living room couch, pot of green tea and tin of Walkers shortbread beside me, grade pop quizzes until three, plick down my pencil, stand, stretch, clear my head, and stride into two shots of bourbon on the rocks at the liquor cabinet, a Jenny Craig dinner, a lounge before whatever happens to be happening on TV. I prefer the reality shows, where life is scrupulously edited to look like life, only with midgets, has-been female wrestlers, geeky dates, appalling singers, and skinny rednecks setting themselves on fire in their underwear in shopping carts while they ride down ski slopes into unforgiving geologic outcroppings — all for a handful of shekels and six seconds of mild public interest mixed with open derision.
What childhoods those guys must not have had.
Dishwasher sealed, steam a-hiss inside, fill my tub with lavender-harvest bubble bath, light three coconut-scented candles, and settle into the lush cadences of Celine Dion's Falling into You.
Let people say what they want, my monkeys would rattle their cages in malicious delight if they only knew, yet the truth is this: you simply can't bring yourself to feel anything like cynical about the world when “Because You Loved Me” is playing on your boom box while you slosh in sweet foamy warmth and bird-wing flickerings.
I've learned lots these past two years. How a whole evening can be dedicated to a worthy sixteen-second clip, how the right lighting is hugely harder to attain than it may at first appear, how a plastic bag taped over your liquored-up head — just you and your caught breath and the distant whir of your camcorder — can begin turning damp and scary much more quickly than you might have initially presumed. I've learned that making is always a mixture of danger and discovery, meaning always a story, and how worthwhile it all feels sitting there Sunday morning before your computer screen, snipping, shaping, copying.
Post proelia praemia, as I always used to coach my miniature Romans. Relentlessly. After battles, the rewards.
A thought that makes, that made, Monday the most vivid day of the week. I woke early and spry, mind spiky as three cups of caffeine, downed a bagel runneled with cream cheese and orange marmalade, primped, and drove to the local library, where I waited in my Corolla the color of desert sand till the front doors unlocked. Everyone knew me there. Hands raised and smiles magnified as Ms. Lovelace bustled through the metal detectors. She waved and beamed back, beelining for the shelves stacked with phonebooks at the rear of the third floor: every major city in America, many large towns, most minor ones, a landslide of Lilliputian names rilling down page after butterfly-wing-thin page. It's heady stuff, all that data speeding by.
I lifted a finger and jabbed it down at random: there and… there and… that one, too.
A lust lottery.
Passion packages.
Moira's love letters to the world.
Outside the post office several minutes later, I'd pause an extra heart whoosh in the incessantly unpleasant Minnesotan wind before letting an armful of them drop down the chute, picturing the sizzle they would put into the spines of people I would never meet: the middle-aged housewife with chapped lips who innocently unearths my offering among the otherwise featureless mail mountain on her husband's desk; the doe-eyed sophomore in a fuzzy rose sweater unwrapping one surrounded by her sorority sisters in her Alpha Kappa Alpha den, assuming she's unwrapping a thoughtful weekly present from her parents in Peoria; the beetle-backed preacher in pressed jeans and plaid shirt humming to himself, swaying to his own celestial music on some suburban street corner, lifting a bubble-padded envelope out of the black aluminum tube and believing he's just received a lovely little daybook or Whitman sampler from one of his flock in Fredericksburg; the friendless widower; the blue bus driver; the waitress who feels she's waited long enough; or, luck being what it is, what it isn't, another teacher, an educator not unlike myself, only, say, male instead of female, younger instead of older, taller instead of sadder.
Puritanism is at its most diabolical when, as in this perilously unimaginative nation, it somehow trusts that it's being its opposite. Swedes would swoon at my enterprise, Danes dance, but all my fallow Americans can do is pray on, preying on. Moira intended to show them what change feels like, that there remained alternatives to this alternative, and so, standing at that postal chute, she couldn't help wondering who might be thinking about her this very minute in Pleasantville, Iowa, and how… and then it was bombs away, fire in the hole, the prim squat schoolmarm barging back to her car, sliding in behind the wheel, thumping shut the door, flipping on NPR to see what progress isn't being made in the Middle East, and rolling happily out of the parking lot onto the boulevard lined with fast-food joints and bus stops and used-car lots that led toward her quadratic equations and third conjugation i-stem verbs.