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Connections
Sep. 12th, 2003 07:36 amFeeling stupid, inarticulate. Partly a function of the heat – only a little before seven-thirty in the morning and it’s seventy degrees already. There’s a low ground mist rising over the streets of the city lower down on the hill. Your standard-streets-of-gold effect. I took yesterday off from the store to run errands and meet KL for brunch and at two in the afternoon, when I finally let myself sit down at the computer for the real work of living, the primary business of my stupid little life on this planet, it must have been a hundred degrees in my office. The sweat ran off my face. Impossible to write faux New Yorker stories with sweat running down your face. Easier to feel sorry for yourself.
KL is someone from the Well. I couldn’t imagine why he wanted to meet me – I still log on to the Well about once a day as a decades-long habit but I hardly ever post. The place has gotten boring plus I’m a famous Bad Girl there: many years ago I was in Rossney’s Secret Private Conference, the place where all the Well’s major luminaries went to write mean, snarky things about people not in the Secret Private Conference. When my pal Tom Mandel died, Rossney, Gans and cohorts amused themselves sprinkling arch, double entendres in the public conferences and ripping Tom to shreds in their own little private compound. And I just lost it. Understand that I sat by Tom’s bedside while he lay dying, his wife was afraid to sit vigil by herself. I heard the awful broken washing machines sounds of his breathing, watched the bubbles of gray mucous burble up from his rotting insides. When you start turning common household appliances into metaphors for live and death, you know you’re on the brink of major psychological decompensation.
Anyway, the Well in those days was not such a culture of goat-baiting. I just hated these people and their fucking elitist private conference – so I lashed out, posted some choice tidbits for all to read and enjoy. That famously genial media personality. He loves his cats and gardens! But he does not like you.
Bad move. But I wasn’t thinking strategically.
Anyway, I got the public approbation I deserved. My bust is right there next to Hitler and Idi Amin in the Well Hall of Shame, and ever since I’ve hovered in that nether realm with Lucifer to keep me company – someone who once was Good and occasionally will delude you with some stray insight or felicitous turn of phrase but who really wears the dog tags of the Forces of Darkness.
Fuck that.
I hated high school the first time too.
What I used to love best about the Well was not the "community" aspects at all but the message-in-the-bottle aspects – the fact that one could develop friendships with people whose life circumstances were very, very different from one's own. I felt enriched by that. It's an oddly antique model of friendship, reminiscent of Edwardian England, La Belle Époque, where one might meet the other person perhaps twice in a lifetime but write at length twice a day. These days it’s more like an online Rotarian club where people don’t even care particularly about writing well.
But there was KL wanting to meet me. We rendezvoused at the Lighthouse Bistro, my favorite restaurant, which turned out not to be so great a place to meet. KL is a fastidious eater and wanted brunch but all they serve is lunch. KL is a sweet guy, smart and droll, with an undercore of deep sadness – his parents were Holocaust survivors and all his life he’s been struggling to crawl out from under the terrible burden of their survivors’ guilt.
We talked a little about Judaism.
"I feel a very strong psychic pull," I said. "Kind of an inner voice saying, ‘There’s your tribe.’ Designated by what my pal Abe describes as the ‘lingua franca of sarcasm.’"
KL laughed. "Well, that’s true of Ashkenazy Jews, anyway. I grew up in an Orthodox household. Thirteen generations of rabbis."
"My great-great grandfather was a Polish rabbi," I said.
"Have you been to Israel?" he said.
"Not yet."
"And your husband… ?"
"Not a Jew. And I’d feel uncomfortable trying to get him to convert, or foisting the religion off on my children –"
KL raised his eyebrows.
"I believe very strongly that my children should be free to make their own spiritual connections," I said lamely.
"Well, that’s going to make things very difficult if you do go ahead with – let’s just call it a conversion. The Jewish religion is centered in the home." KL surveyed his sand dabs dubiously and raised his finger for the waiter.
The waiter was a flustered dark-haired kid doing everything wrong. KL had already had to bring him down several notches.
"Can I have some silverware?" KL asked in tones of exagerated politeness. "And possibly a few napkins?"
"Oh, sure," said the waiter, flushing. "Sorry, I forgot."
"I don’t think that young man has a future in the hospitality industry," I said watching his back. And I felt so guilty when KL laughed that I left the waiter an oversized tip.
KL is someone from the Well. I couldn’t imagine why he wanted to meet me – I still log on to the Well about once a day as a decades-long habit but I hardly ever post. The place has gotten boring plus I’m a famous Bad Girl there: many years ago I was in Rossney’s Secret Private Conference, the place where all the Well’s major luminaries went to write mean, snarky things about people not in the Secret Private Conference. When my pal Tom Mandel died, Rossney, Gans and cohorts amused themselves sprinkling arch, double entendres in the public conferences and ripping Tom to shreds in their own little private compound. And I just lost it. Understand that I sat by Tom’s bedside while he lay dying, his wife was afraid to sit vigil by herself. I heard the awful broken washing machines sounds of his breathing, watched the bubbles of gray mucous burble up from his rotting insides. When you start turning common household appliances into metaphors for live and death, you know you’re on the brink of major psychological decompensation.
Anyway, the Well in those days was not such a culture of goat-baiting. I just hated these people and their fucking elitist private conference – so I lashed out, posted some choice tidbits for all to read and enjoy. That famously genial media personality. He loves his cats and gardens! But he does not like you.
Bad move. But I wasn’t thinking strategically.
Anyway, I got the public approbation I deserved. My bust is right there next to Hitler and Idi Amin in the Well Hall of Shame, and ever since I’ve hovered in that nether realm with Lucifer to keep me company – someone who once was Good and occasionally will delude you with some stray insight or felicitous turn of phrase but who really wears the dog tags of the Forces of Darkness.
Fuck that.
I hated high school the first time too.
What I used to love best about the Well was not the "community" aspects at all but the message-in-the-bottle aspects – the fact that one could develop friendships with people whose life circumstances were very, very different from one's own. I felt enriched by that. It's an oddly antique model of friendship, reminiscent of Edwardian England, La Belle Époque, where one might meet the other person perhaps twice in a lifetime but write at length twice a day. These days it’s more like an online Rotarian club where people don’t even care particularly about writing well.
But there was KL wanting to meet me. We rendezvoused at the Lighthouse Bistro, my favorite restaurant, which turned out not to be so great a place to meet. KL is a fastidious eater and wanted brunch but all they serve is lunch. KL is a sweet guy, smart and droll, with an undercore of deep sadness – his parents were Holocaust survivors and all his life he’s been struggling to crawl out from under the terrible burden of their survivors’ guilt.
We talked a little about Judaism.
"I feel a very strong psychic pull," I said. "Kind of an inner voice saying, ‘There’s your tribe.’ Designated by what my pal Abe describes as the ‘lingua franca of sarcasm.’"
KL laughed. "Well, that’s true of Ashkenazy Jews, anyway. I grew up in an Orthodox household. Thirteen generations of rabbis."
"My great-great grandfather was a Polish rabbi," I said.
"Have you been to Israel?" he said.
"Not yet."
"And your husband… ?"
"Not a Jew. And I’d feel uncomfortable trying to get him to convert, or foisting the religion off on my children –"
KL raised his eyebrows.
"I believe very strongly that my children should be free to make their own spiritual connections," I said lamely.
"Well, that’s going to make things very difficult if you do go ahead with – let’s just call it a conversion. The Jewish religion is centered in the home." KL surveyed his sand dabs dubiously and raised his finger for the waiter.
The waiter was a flustered dark-haired kid doing everything wrong. KL had already had to bring him down several notches.
"Can I have some silverware?" KL asked in tones of exagerated politeness. "And possibly a few napkins?"
"Oh, sure," said the waiter, flushing. "Sorry, I forgot."
"I don’t think that young man has a future in the hospitality industry," I said watching his back. And I felt so guilty when KL laughed that I left the waiter an oversized tip.
