Statues and Miniature Golf

[mallorys_camera]

In the course of a long phone conversation with Clark last night, he made reference to Robert Heinlein's definition of love. It's a good definition so I will repeat it here: Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.

(I think the quotation must be from Stranger In a Strange Land, which is really the only one of Heinlein's novels to deal with interpersonal relationships.)

By that definition, I only love two people: Max and Robin.

And one person loves me: Max.

###
Plenty of people like me, though. Meaning they would prefer to see me happy rather than sad.

On Wednesday I met up with BB, and we tromped around a part of Greenpoint we hadn't explored before. Near Box Street, we came upon a vacant lot littered with plaster statues. The statues were really incredible, almost like the frozen victims of Pompei. I couldn't imagine how they had come to be there, why the artist had abandoned them like that – he or she had poured such obvious love into their creation.

You see how the vandals have already tweaked this guy's dick off. Or maybe it was the termites.

This kind of urban exploration, sifting through the garbage and the flowers, is really one of my favorite things in the world to do and BB is the perfect person to do it with. He knows how to annotate.

Back at his flat we ate, we chatted, we got high, he tweaked the computer. He got a sudden leg cramp so I gave him a massage.

BB is a big guy with a heavily muscled back. Bit of a challenge finding those intercostals. I wondered what he would do if all of a sudden I had started tracing his spine with kisses instead of fingers. I wondered if that was really what I wanted to do. Honestly? It didn't say No to me and it didn't say Yes to me. It didn't even say: This will change your relationship. I suspect that if we started having sex, it would be one more thing that we would add to the venue – eating, chatting, getting high, urban exploration, and fucking or sucking or fingering – but that the essence of the relationship would remain the same.

"We have moved into the sibling zone," he laughed. "You know, really, I need to find you a husband."

And I thought: Yes! That's right. I'd like to get married again. I really want one person to be my primary playmate. I want to be tracked. I do not want to negotiate.

BB did something extraordinarily nice for me: He loaned me a computer so I can play video games! Huge 20 inch screen iMac on long-term loan. I was up till three in the morning playing the Sims. I'm breeding my Job so I can torture him with plagues and locusts because Goddam! I am a spiteful and malevolent God.

In other news, I worked out an arrangement with the CA tax crew. I'm going to have to work more to fulfill my end of the bargain. Which hardly seems possible: I work so much already. Except that when I'm working, half the time I'm not working. I'm reading news, I'm chatting or texting with pals, I'm watching other lives scroll across Facebook. Big news there is that the kinda, sorta pal with Stage IV colon cancer has Fallen In Love with a really sweet-faced woman with a luminous countenance. We're talking full-blown romantic LUV here, the kind where invisible rose petals rain down from heaven, the happy couple is encircled by the kind of hush that in nature comes only before a thunderstorm, and great cosmic lessons are learned. I am happy for him, and I hope he doesn't die.

Anyway, I could probably be more productive if I stopped allowing myself to be distracted. At this point I don't think I have another choice, at least for the next few months.

On Sunday, I accompanied the housemates to a concert at a park that doesn't exist according to Google maps. This is the same tyranny that Simon Winchester pointed out about Microsoft Word's dictionary: Power is always most manifest in selection; if the words don't exist in Microsoft Word's dictionary, pretty soon people stop using them and then they really stop existing. If the park doesn't exist in Google Maps, pretty soon people stop going there.

We'd gone to hear the symphonic brass band-cum-orchestra. They mostly did show tunes. It took me three days to get It's a Hard Knock Life out of my head.

The strangest thing about this park was the cluster of what I took to be decorative Halloween gravestones from a distance. I strolled over and they turned into little markers depicting the history of the Universe. Nearby was a booth manned by a nervous guy in over-sized Poindexter spectacles who smiled at me hopefully as I approached.

"What is this?" I asked.

"Well, it's a miniature golf course!" he said.

There was a rack with what looked like croquet mallets but no miniature golf clubs that I could see.

"It's a game," he added helpfully.

"Right. Well. Yes. Miniature golf."

"And you can buy a book too. See? Here's a book that tells all about it."

I'm not sure what this set-up was, some entrepreneurial project gone horribly wrong or an educational project that nobody in the world cared about but Mr. Poindexter. But the little markers were quite charming, and if I'd had my wallet on me, I would have emptied it out and given him the entire $4.37 or whatever it was that stood midway between me, penury and my next paycheck.

Probably a good thing I didn't have my wallet on me.

Comments

[ccjohn.livejournal.com]

We often think alike, or use similar references this pleases me. :)

I like the statues. The woman's expression, it is difficult looking at it. I don't wear clothes when I'm home alone a lot because who the hell cares, it's comfortable. The woman to me is home alone and the expression is too real -- something like a mirror.

Us adults don't socialize nude much outside sex. Sometimes I have flashes, like the ground breaks and I see for real. I know, somehow, because we don't socialize with the opposite sex nude, as at a party we are doing ourselves dangerous psychological harm. We're fracturing ourselves. We have a need to know who we are, that we are part of others by feeling not thought. It's in her face ... the statue.

[millysdaughter.livejournal.com]

I actually see her as a battered woman who has given up hope that anyone will ever help her.
Her expression makes me feel both sad and guilty.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I didn't get that from her at all. She's fierce, she's strong, she's relaxed. An abused woman wwould never be able to sit naked in a relaxed pose like that with her legs spread. I also thought the artist had an obvious affection for this subject -- not necessarily present in the other statues in this set (only one of which I showed.)

I like the statue very much.

[ccjohn.livejournal.com]

This is interesting. I've been saving this set of comments, to come back to & I'd already decided I'd look again at the statue (first one, the woman) & decided I'd find I imposed my mood on it before, what I said before was just a mood already there given what looked like an excuse. No. My reaction is the same. She is home, alone, not wearing clothes because it doesn't matter if she does or doesn't. I realize I'm looking at it the same way -- thank you. You've done this before, you somehow made me consider how I'm looking at it -- hard now to word it:

I look top-down. I see her face first, like reading top-to-bottom and I know I'm considering how naked she is but it's like I bounce back off that to her face, the apprehension of what's not her face, I have to force my eyes down and that doesn't make sense. I can't keep them down they're magnetized to her face. I don't think she's aware her legs are spread, she is way, way lost from her physical experience. Her face says she needs someone to tell her how she looks. She is absent other people.

You have me 100% busted on artist's affection for subject. She looks real. Meaning not art, not a statue, like a 3D snapshot of one moment, made outta rock.

I guess she's idealized, but I'm not anywhere sure of it. I still come out the same place. She is naked by herself at home & has been awhile. She felt liberated, it was vaguely comical moving laundry or something, but she hit the adult fact. She's fixed there. There is supposed to be a counterpoint, she thinks. I'm complementary, it's exactly right but where's what I match against?

This is not in New York. No way. If that statue is real, the photo's real & that statue stays permanent, it is awesome, outstanding, that is on my mind all the time, like today on the bus, there it is at the fore. This is the thought I have, a regret. That WS installation at the Armory downtown, thought I'd go, a friend just wrote it rattled the crap out of him & he can't get the grossness of it gone from his mind. Think I won't go. I'm talking about the Garden of Eden, OK?, it's a feeling, not a concept: before it's a myth, it expresses some quality we all share, that all the people before, knew the way we do. We used to have this deal where life, all the time we were naked and really enjoyed that, we were all set. There wasn't anything to worry about. Not wearing anything you felt great, that was it, people were just around, that was good too. If that perfect moment, in your skin ever changed it was soft, like putting out your finger for a butterfly, or it was delight. I experience this feeling as absolute. Adam and Eve. Yeah from time to time we wake up out of civilization or whatever this sad case is & miss life like that, & try cleaning the kitchen naked etc. but alone you wind up with her look on your face. Or I do.

I don't get strong from this at all, or anything like fierce, to me she doesn't know her legs are spread, she's relaxed because she's barely sure she's anywhere. I recognize something -- the perspective you speak from. My subjective impression, no more but brings back a memory. There was this book the Joy of Sex. Kind of defiantly positive. It was fun, everyone I knew looked through it a LOT of times but joy no too much thought in it.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

I like this statue a lot actually. To me, the expression on her face is a kind of, Yes, you have my permission to look at me.

[ccjohn.livejournal.com]

No kidding? The statue that says that, I like it already but this one, her face to me says no one sees me. She's sad. She wants to be seen, but it's not from joy. It'd give her hope.

When I say I wish we didn't wear clothes, it's so we never have to look like this again, life's all clear and we're happy. Do you, personally, care one way or the other about this? The friends I have here, most of them share the feeling I have but what do you think?

[robby.livejournal.com]

You're just living with the wrong tribe.

[ccjohn.livejournal.com]

Never seen anything like that. I get that it opens with a hunting party because life like that, you have to be hunting food almost every second you're awake. But there was one woman, painted red, with the men in the first shot, then we don't see women at all, last minute or two, women mothering kids and staying close to home, that's it. The lack of women is so extreme I can't make sense of it. Hunting party hunting party repeat repeat right got it, wait one girl out with the guys, painted bright red, camera ignores?

Tribe'd be great. I find someone from my tribe, you'll be the first to know. She likes the idea I think, frisson yeah but I'm too unlike anyone not to be somehow lying. It's so much worse. I'm not lying. It'd be a rest. We don't rest much.

[ccjohn.livejournal.com]

Savage irony. It'd mean the most, with her to rest and be a person. We have a unique understanding. No one was supposed to pass the tests. I'm not supposed to be possible. The statue's of us both. The picture here, should be. Sorry Patrizia talking about someone else I know.