systematic oppression of context

a wedding story.doc

2004-02-16T22:46:47Z

NATALIE
It's been, like, two years since I've seen you --

KATHLEEN
I saw you last night.

NATALIE
Yeah, but, that was the first time in two years, and it's only now now, so it's whatever, all right? Anyway, two years, theoretically we're all grown up, and you still always look like you're ready to punch me in the face. I totally miss that, you know? No one looks angry at me like you do.

(I think this is, syntaxtually, one of the most hilariously wonderful chunks of text I have ever given a character.)

regina sneered.doc

2004-01-19T03:51:58Z

On cable she saw reruns of the World Series. Roger Clemens threw a bat shard at Mike Piazza and Regina looked away.

"That's awful," said Cameron.

"Yes," said Regina.

Cameron meant it was awful that Clemens had thrown the bat. Regina meant it was awful that Clemens hadn't just thrown a punch. Cameron put his arm around her and squeezed her so tightly she thought he understood.

regina sneered.doc

2004-01-18T07:25:01Z

The boys said great tits and the girls said sort of a bitch but they rarely cut her class and their friends a grade below had all taken the note.

from the semester notebook

2003-11-30T03:02:05Z

These beats of sanity were more frequent than I've admitted. I cradle them now because I know that the longer I talk, the easier it will be to forget them. He mounts to murder while you and I digress to psychology. Wordplay was salve and siren for us. I'd have lost him early if it weren't for his command of language and disgust for the easy choruses of most discussion and sales. He knew he was unsound and he knew to be careful, for years he was more sensitive to his own dissonance than I was and there would be nights of my damp cloths and rubbed-shoulder assurances, all just to keep him as calm and brilliant as the retouched photo on lawns and cable-access.

They built entire developments to keep up with his sales.

holland park wars.doc

2003-10-20T03:51:18Z

There's a way you get when you lose all the time, a weird combination of denial and bitterness that gets under your skin each season and blankets like rock salt on a road until late January. I guess on some level we know it's just a game, but that's easier to believe when it's summer and the guys who are planning on breaking your heart are all at voluntary mini-camp somewhere. It's harder when they're right across the street. We watch the games in the living room, facing away from the Stadium, but swear to God sometimes I look over at Mom and she's looking at the television but she's leaning toward the Stadium, like the closer she is the better they'll be, or something like that, I don't really know. My brother Sammy--he's eight and hasn't quite caught on to the fact that the team won't ever have a snowball's chance in hell--is the saddest because he really believes in those sorry bastards. My Dad used to joke that Sammy would grow up thinking that football was like golf and it was better to score fewer points. Mom maintains that it's good for us to grow up knowing what it's like to be defeated, but I don't think she really believes that because in the off-season she's a Yankees fan.

Matthew came back to town on my eighteenth birthday.doc

2003-10-05T02:09:22Z

The first time I met Matthew, I was thirteen years old and on my way out of middle school. Matthew was graduating on a tech scholarship, which meant he only spent half-days in the academic building and the rest of his time in the metal and auto shop. I met him the day my enrichment class shot off bottle rockets on the old soccer fields behind the metal shop. My rocket, a hastily composed piece thrown together in between breakfast and the bus, crashed quickly and started a slow burn in a damp compost heap. The fire posed no real danger to anyone, but the smoke was so black that my enrichment teacher threw a fit and yelled at me to run to the shop and get a fire extinguisher. The shop was nearly empty, save for Matthew and a few of his friends, who were constructing some sort of complicated metal windmill. By the time the two of us made it back to the compost heap, the fire had burned out, and you couldn't tell my rocket from the teacher's lounge coffee grounds.

the problem is.doc (e&d II) (sick of this one, yet?)

2003-09-28T17:52:14Z

Co-ops were for granolas and I didn't ever expect to hear from Ethan again, the guy was skinny as hell and probably a junkie or a flake. Every morning I woke up tired and slept then every afternoon I woke up tired again. College M had canceled my e-mail account without telling me and there was the slightest chance that someone might have used that to get in touch with me, and I didn't know if I'd lost that chance or if they'd lost that chance for me. I left the house and Alanna was still on the couch. There was a gas station two miles away and I walked to it. I knew the cashier from high school but we didn't make a big deal of it. He didn't card me so I walked home with the case weighing down my arm and the paper bag. It didn't break, but I thought it might. Alanna was gone when I got back. I sat where she'd sat and drank until I fell asleep. It took three Saturday Night Live reruns. All with Ellen Cleghorne.

The problem is.doc (e & d +)

2003-09-02T03:09:00Z

I locked up, swept up, and sat on the curb in front of the theater with Ethan, who was watching a playback of his partial bootleg on the tiny camera screen.

"I'll have to come back for a real one," he said.

"You can't do that," I said.

"I'm not selling them," he said. "Movie's just amazing. I saw it five times. And what do you care?"

"I don't, really," I said. "Especially since I'll be fired after this."

"You think?" he said. "That woman seemed all right with it."

"No way," I said. "I brought cops in. She hates cops."

"It's just a job," said Ethan. "Get another one."

"Yeah."

"How old are you, kid?" he asked.

"Twenty," I said.

"So get over it," he said.

"What?"

"What, twenty? What's that?" he said, stowing the video camera back in the bag.

"Why, how old are you?" I said, irritated.

"Twenty-two," he said.

I stared at him.

"You've got two years on me," I said. "That's nothing."

"Yeah, but I got a job."

tiffany and louse get stolen.doc (extra vulgar for the weekend)

2003-08-30T19:27:59Z

Louise shrugs as though she doesn't care after all and exchanges Sonic 2 for Sonic 3. The girls play in silence, switching off lives in tacit agreement that the two-player mode on Sonic 3 is even weaker than that on Sonic 2.

"Know what really pissed me off, though?" says Tiffany as she watches Louise attack the game's third stage.

"When you lost the magnetic shield because you ran too goddamned fast and forgot about the fireball-spitting spikes?" says Louise, her eyes trained on the screen.

"They left the place a total mess."

"What?"

"The, you know, whoever. The people who took my shit."

Louise hides her smile and continues to stare at the screen.

"It's just, like..." says Tiffany. "It's not bad enough you gotta take my TV and shitty-ass DVD player and half my records?"

"The vinyl, too?" asks Louise.

"Yeah."

"Dicklickers."

monique.txt

2003-08-25T15:30:01Z

Monique was a transfer student from a Montessori school and on her very first day she pitched a fit when Miss Klubman told her that she wouldn't be allowed to continue exchanging recess for French lessons because French wasn't taught earlier than 7th grade. At this insult, Monique's cheeks reddened and she braced herself against a desk as though she was about to scream. We waited, clutching our phonics workbooks, delighted by the prospect of a truly dangerous new student. Monique sensed her audience and released the desk, suddenly, and began counting in French, each declarative syllable a proud, anti-public-school protest. Miss Klubman pacified her with a copy of Madeline and made a note to see if the school's enrichment teacher had any French flashcards tucked away. My classmates lost interest, but I was fascinated by Monique's technique and proceeded to follow her around until she consented to talk to me.

"Do you know French?" she asked.

"No," I said.

"Do you know your multiplication tables?" she asked.

"No," I said.

"I do," she said.

"Can you teach me?" I asked.

"No," she said.

I kept following her.

from "the problem is.doc" (e&d v. 2)

2003-07-02T04:34:11Z

My father sells fresh-cookie franchises for a living and can't cook a bit, but what he wants to tell me, what he really wants to instill in me now, is that the vocation that a man picks, Dmitri, is a vocation that a man lives, and he suspects that I have not been living my vocation. If I want to be Che Guevara, he is implying, I am better off out of school and on the streets. He doesn't want me to be Che Guevara, of course, he probably doesn't even want me to be Victor Hugo. It's just convenient that I made that phone call and ranted for thirty minutes about gross overpopulation and deregulation and blood for oil and globalization and patriarchy and the state and the people and the good of democracy in this chemical-regulated world. I couldn't live that vocation, I am too busy living within it. So now I want to tell him that my vocation is going to be Stoli and ramen and pirated software and lofted beds but the truth is that now that I realize I don't particularly like my father and maybe he doesn't particularly like me. I don't even know if it's worth it to make a joke at my own expense. Instead I nod and say I agree, first, and that I understand, second. Relief salts his face like a Virginia Beach riptide and he claps me on the shoulders like a father should.

(more from) A secretarial pool OF DEATH.doc (still in progress)

2003-05-16T02:19:48Z

LAURAL
Claire was out sick that day. Her alibi is the doctor she was visiting, but you know what I think? I think she...performed...for him. Do you catch me?

CHUCK
A tap dance.

LAURAL
She was an amazing dancer, they say.

CHUCK
Doctors love tap dancing. It's in the Hippocratic oath.

LAURAL
We all have our weaknesses.

CHUCK
Mine was the breaking ball.

LAURAL
.215?

CHUCK
Also the fastball.

A secretarial pool OF DEATH.doc (a work in progress)

2003-05-14T18:44:18Z

CHUCK
Who would want an office full of dead secretaries?

MARY
Who wouldn't want an office full of dead secretaries?

it would be easier to transcribe this tape.doc

2003-05-01T04:37:20Z

I went to college. I can quote Eliot and O'Neill and Nietzsche. I've even been to the opera. More than once. I liked the ballet better. I only went to the ballet once, though. A dancer fell. That wasn't why I liked it. Maybe I'd have been better off trying to be a dancer. At least then I could practice while I photocopied, do those bar stretches while holding onto a filing cabinet or something. There's not a lot to do with a head full of dead playwrights and philosophers while you're shredding three months worth of sensitive documents. Sometimes, mesmerized by the hum of the shredder, I'll start to think I'm beginning to understand those great oceans of longing and melancholy that all those writers seemed to harbor within themselves. Hamlet, you lazy bastard, I'll think, when did you ever fax a forty-page contract to Iceland?

I'm like a Dilbert cartoon, but ironically: passé and rumpled and not even that funny.

4/29/02, pink notebook.

2003-04-24T03:30:24Z

Don't tell me that Jesus came without warning or that this is a love song with a twist. I have been standing here three hours without a drink, without distraction, and without that carefully-threaded arm you promised to leave around my waist. Before just now I was going to let it slide, but you leave me with little choice. I think you have gravel in your lip gloss.

wedding ceremony.txt

2003-04-20T06:16:38Z

I flew to Chicago but I refused to let Frank pay. I sold a few first edition Salingers that my aunt had given me years ago, booked a last-minute flight online, and forwarded the itinerary to my mother with the notation that it was for a business trip. She wrote back and said she was proud of me: I'd never been on a business trip before. I left a vague message for my city girlfriends on my outgoing voicemail and told my boss I was flying out to the midwest for a family emergency. Frank didn't come up because no one knew who Frank was. I felt like I was managing an illicit affair. I felt like cameras were watching me. I heard my footsteps in Dolby.

red notebook, 5/6/02

2003-04-17T14:07:20Z

Let's not go out. Let's stay in and talk about the time we did go out. We had a good time. We ate oranges because it seemed like a good idea, and it was. Thirty cents seemed like an insanely good bargrain, but only because we didn't know the difference. Usually it's chocolate at a dollar. Of course thirty cents seemed like a bargain.

I wish we had oranges now. But we're staying in. There's a half-pint of Breyer's in the freezer. I don't know what you're thinking but I say I do just to get a rise. You ask me to explain and I duck the question on the way to the freezer. I do this because it's familiar and we are trying to be familiar tonight.

"I wish we had orange sherbet," I say.

ethan and dmitri.doc

2003-04-16T03:53:48Z

I call Alanna.

"Are you being his friend?" she asks.

"You sound like Sesame Street," I say.

"Sorry," she says. "But is it working?"

"I'm being nice," I say.

"Is that working?" she says.

"I don't know," I say. "Everything seems mostly the same."

"Maybe you should stop being nice," she says. "How's that for Sesame Street?"

elevator.txt

2003-04-14T14:15:50Z

There is a phone number in my pocket, scribbled in blue ink on the back of a drugstore receipt. The owner of the phone number gave it to me after a half an hour of flirting by smoke and barlight. I let him buy me drinks. His head was too small for his shoulders. I spent most of our time together staring at the muddy-puddle freckles sprinkled over his cheeks. They reminded me of a Judy Blume novel.

from a file marked "missing cat.doc." written for a fiction class. strongly disliked by same.

2003-04-14T00:52:49Z

She stopped as suddenly as she'd started and looked me straight in the eyes, keeping me pinned to the post with the threat of her acrylic claws.

"Give it back," she said.

"I dropped it, like, ten minutes ago," I spat. "Get off."

She slapped my face, hard like a soap opera, then righted herself and went to retrieve the phone from the sidewalk.

from a short piece in a file called "write what you know.txt"

2003-04-13T05:54:41Z

If she held out a map and told them to point to El Salvador, they wouldn't be able to do it. She wouldn't be able to do it, either, but she could still make her point. Her point would be that they had to know everything about their characters, even where El Salvador was. If that character was in any way related to El Salvador. She could pull out one of her own stories, maybe even one of the published ones that she was always reluctant to hand out because she was afraid they'd ask her if it had been published and she'd have to say yes and they'd ask where and she'd name the journal, and it might even be a famous journal, but they'd stare blankly and nod and she'd feel awful. So she always gave them unpublished works, or she'd lie about the published works. But she could pull out one of these stories to illustrate her point. She could have them read the one about the banker, and she could ask them if they knew what his profession was. He was a banker, of course, she knew that. But that was never mentioned in the story. So when they said they didn't know she would be triumphant and say of course they didn't know, because the reader doesn't need to know all that, but the author does, and she would then reveal that the character was a banker.

That would make her point, perhaps.