A Confession of the Digital Age
I still have a subscription to the New Yorker
There is something mentally taxing about surfing the Internet. In the last hour I have probably read at ten or fifteen articles, even though I just logged on to check the headlines and my Facebook page before bed. I have consumed a lot of information—a indulged lot of content, but I still feel a foreboding sense of emptiness. I will still crawl into my bed and feel compelled to read a magazine or a novel before I go to sleep.
Maybe I am just of the old school. I’m only 24, but still I do feel like at the end of the Net generation. I can, for example, remember a time when the Internet was a foreign concept. I remember the first website I visited—it was MuchMusic.com. I was like 12.
Don’t get me wrong, now 12 years later I am now fully immersed. I haven’t read a real daily newspaper in years. On the rare occasion that I buy a CD—at a concert for example—I will immediately burn it to my computer, forgetting that the physical copy ever exited. But there are certain things that still perplex me.
With newspapers, the shift was easy. You read a newspaper the same way you read online—spastically, sporadically. You rarely ever get fully immersed. Articles on adjacent pages constantly draw your eye the same way links and scroll bars do. But magazines are different. I don’t really know why, but they are.
Slate Magazine’s Culture Gabfest—a weekly podcast panel discussion from Slate.com—had a discussion last week about the future of the magazine. Being that Slate is itself an online magazine, the conclusions were obvious: the magazine—which is essentially a collection of interesting articles, opinions, photos, ect—is and will survive the digital age. You know the argument—the Internet will get better with more bandwidth and so too will Internet magazines at using that bandwidth. Being someone who sees the future headed in precisely this direction, I couldn’t help but agree with Slate. I’m an optimist. But there is just one thing that still gets me: it feels different.
There is a lot of talk about shortening attention spans and the Internet shrinking our brains and all that, but for the most part I find it hard to believe. At the very least, I can admit that our brains are evolving—that our minds our adapting to new and different ways of receiving and analyzing art, culture, and the like. And maybe that is just it. Maybe long form journalism will not survive and my one-day career as a magazine writer is fucked. Maybe our brains are evolving away from the kind of writing that I have spent the better part of my adult life to imitate.
I guess this is both a confession and plea. Despite being a man of the future, who gets most of his information online, I like to read the New Yorker offline. That’s the confession. The plea is this: please someone figure it out soon; please, Internet save me!!!!
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
(Planet S Magazine, December 31st, 2009)
The Changing Face Of Friendship
SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES MEAN MORE — AND LESS — FRIENDS THAN EVER BEFORE
by Charles Hamilton
Another night, and once again I’m neurotically checking my Facebook account — sifting through friends’ photographs, reading their innocuous updates on the news feed, clicking on funny links and scrolling through the chat list to see if there is anyone worth talking to.
Right when I’m about to close the window, a friend from high school messages me — and when I tell him I’m writing an article about social networking sites, he laughs out loud at the coincidence. At least, I think he laughed out loud — I can’t really tell, since he lives in a different city and we haven’t actually seen each other in years. We haven’t really talked either, we’ve just typed back and forth. If it weren’t for Internet, I would be hard-pressed to claim that he was actually my friend.
Which brings us to the issue at hand.
There’s no doubt that social networking websites (also including the likes of Myspace and Twitter) have dramatically altered the social landscape in the last decade — and not one of them has had more effect on the modern conception of “relationships” than Facebook.
Since its inception, Facebook has grown from just under one million users in 2004 to over 350 million today. According to the website’s own statistics, the average user spends more than 55 minutes on the site per day, and one-tenth of all users update their status every day.
All that “Face” time (sorry…) has turned it into one of the most profitable websites around. The company’s worth is estimated at $10 billion, and huge software giants like Microsoft have invested hundreds of millions of dollars into it, betting that it will soon surpass Google as the number one destination on the web.
Evidence of Facebook’s success can be seen everywhere. The common phrase “I’ll Facebook you,” for example, has earned its place in the long list of grammatically incorrect Internet verbs — right up there with “Google it.” Facebook messaging (or Facebooking) is well on its way to replacing email, while Facebook event promotion is outshining the effectiveness of postering for rock shows. Overall, it’s become more than just a way to keep in touch — it’s become a lifestyle, and in some cases, an obsession. (Trust me — I’ve even found myself thinking in “status updates” now and then.)
But perhaps the most fascinating thing about the popularity of Facebook isn’t what it says about our collective attention deficit, our predilection for exhibitionism and voyeurism or even our love for the idea of social media. It’s what it says about what we now consider to be “friendship.”
For example, I have 895 friends on Facebook — and according to the website, that’s six times more than the average user. But does this mean I’m more popular than the average user? Does this mean I have more meaningful or intimate relationships than the average person? Do I actually have more friends?
Probably not. Sigh.
Much has been written about Facebook and its affect on friendships, with everyone from psychologists to Internet pundits weighing in. The argument usually goes like this: on the one hand, you can keep in touch with people from around the world in an easy and accessible way — hence, Facebook is improving friendships. On the other, the ease of being a virtual “friend” (not to mention the fact that some people apparently compete to have the most “friends”) is devaluing the idea of friendship. Or, to put it another way, in the same manner that Google and Wikipedia, for example, provide us with more accessibility to information than ever before yet possess the very real potential to make society dumber, Facebook is making our friendships less genuine.
People like American literary critic William Deresiewicz have taken that line of criticism further, claiming that Facebook is causing the very nature of friendships to devolve — essentially saying that once we decided to become friends with everyone, we forgot how to be friends with anyone. Fair enough, perhaps: the vast majority of the 895 “friends” I have on Facebook aren’t in fact close friends of mine — and generally, they aren’t even people I know very well.
Deresiewicz even goes as far as to claim that these aren’t real people; instead, they’re “little dehydrated packets of images and information.” His Facebook friends, he says, are “no more my friends than a set of baseball cards is the New York Mets.”
It’s hard to disagree: there are many people I never see in real life, but I follow them on Facebook because their online lives are interesting (more interesting, probably, than their real lives). Still, at least for me, it’s hard to say that Facebook is devolving or devaluing the idea of friendship. I mean, I still have “real” friends, don’t I?
Looking at it from a more positive perspective, the rise of Facebook coincided perfectly with my early adulthood — those few awkward years where more like-minded people replace those “not really your friend” friends you had in high school. Facebook was the perfect tool for me to separate myself from the latter group in a relatively guiltless fashion — even though I’m really just reading their innocuous updates, I don’t feel like I’ve abandoned them completely.
And that, in fact, is the thing I love about Facebook (and ironically, perhaps, the thing that might just prove much of what critics have said): I can keep in touch without actually touching. It’s friendship at a distance, where the awkward obligations to acquaintances no longer exist. I still get birthday wishes from old bosses or people I knew from high school, and I still send them — even though we all had to be reminded by the little box in the corner of the screen.
As inane as it perhaps is, Facebook lets us know that the world is still going on — that we still exist in a society of people who consider us friends, even if they aren’t friends in the flesh, so to speak. Just to be clear, I do have real friends, in real life. Some of them have Facebook and some of them don’t, but this doesn’t play heavily into the relationships we maintain. Still, I like Facebook: I like looking at photos and posting links and getting messages from people I never really see anymore.
Overall, I remain at a loss to say whether or not that’s bad thing. I guess virtual life can sometimes be just as complicated as the real thing.
The Changing Face Of Friendship
SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES MEAN MORE — AND LESS — FRIENDS THAN EVER BEFORE
by Charles Hamilton
Another night, and once again I’m neurotically checking my Facebook account — sifting through friends’ photographs, reading their innocuous updates on the news feed, clicking on funny links and scrolling through the chat list to see if there is anyone worth talking to.
Right when I’m about to close the window, a friend from high school messages me — and when I tell him I’m writing an article about social networking sites, he laughs out loud at the coincidence. At least, I think he laughed out loud — I can’t really tell, since he lives in a different city and we haven’t actually seen each other in years. We haven’t really talked either, we’ve just typed back and forth. If it weren’t for Internet, I would be hard-pressed to claim that he was actually my friend.
Which brings us to the issue at hand.
There’s no doubt that social networking websites (also including the likes of Myspace and Twitter) have dramatically altered the social landscape in the last decade — and not one of them has had more effect on the modern conception of “relationships” than Facebook.
Since its inception, Facebook has grown from just under one million users in 2004 to over 350 million today. According to the website’s own statistics, the average user spends more than 55 minutes on the site per day, and one-tenth of all users update their status every day.
All that “Face” time (sorry…) has turned it into one of the most profitable websites around. The company’s worth is estimated at $10 billion, and huge software giants like Microsoft have invested hundreds of millions of dollars into it, betting that it will soon surpass Google as the number one destination on the web.
Evidence of Facebook’s success can be seen everywhere. The common phrase “I’ll Facebook you,” for example, has earned its place in the long list of grammatically incorrect Internet verbs — right up there with “Google it.” Facebook messaging (or Facebooking) is well on its way to replacing email, while Facebook event promotion is outshining the effectiveness of postering for rock shows. Overall, it’s become more than just a way to keep in touch — it’s become a lifestyle, and in some cases, an obsession. (Trust me — I’ve even found myself thinking in “status updates” now and then.)
But perhaps the most fascinating thing about the popularity of Facebook isn’t what it says about our collective attention deficit, our predilection for exhibitionism and voyeurism or even our love for the idea of social media. It’s what it says about what we now consider to be “friendship.”
For example, I have 895 friends on Facebook — and according to the website, that’s six times more than the average user. But does this mean I’m more popular than the average user? Does this mean I have more meaningful or intimate relationships than the average person? Do I actually have more friends?
Probably not. Sigh.
Much has been written about Facebook and its affect on friendships, with everyone from psychologists to Internet pundits weighing in. The argument usually goes like this: on the one hand, you can keep in touch with people from around the world in an easy and accessible way — hence, Facebook is improving friendships. On the other, the ease of being a virtual “friend” (not to mention the fact that some people apparently compete to have the most “friends”) is devaluing the idea of friendship. Or, to put it another way, in the same manner that Google and Wikipedia, for example, provide us with more accessibility to information than ever before yet possess the very real potential to make society dumber, Facebook is making our friendships less genuine.
People like American literary critic William Deresiewicz have taken that line of criticism further, claiming that Facebook is causing the very nature of friendships to devolve — essentially saying that once we decided to become friends with everyone, we forgot how to be friends with anyone. Fair enough, perhaps: the vast majority of the 895 “friends” I have on Facebook aren’t in fact close friends of mine — and generally, they aren’t even people I know very well.
Deresiewicz even goes as far as to claim that these aren’t real people; instead, they’re “little dehydrated packets of images and information.” His Facebook friends, he says, are “no more my friends than a set of baseball cards is the New York Mets.”
It’s hard to disagree: there are many people I never see in real life, but I follow them on Facebook because their online lives are interesting (more interesting, probably, than their real lives). Still, at least for me, it’s hard to say that Facebook is devolving or devaluing the idea of friendship. I mean, I still have “real” friends, don’t I?
Looking at it from a more positive perspective, the rise of Facebook coincided perfectly with my early adulthood — those few awkward years where more like-minded people replace those “not really your friend” friends you had in high school. Facebook was the perfect tool for me to separate myself from the latter group in a relatively guiltless fashion — even though I’m really just reading their innocuous updates, I don’t feel like I’ve abandoned them completely.
And that, in fact, is the thing I love about Facebook (and ironically, perhaps, the thing that might just prove much of what critics have said): I can keep in touch without actually touching. It’s friendship at a distance, where the awkward obligations to acquaintances no longer exist. I still get birthday wishes from old bosses or people I knew from high school, and I still send them — even though we all had to be reminded by the little box in the corner of the screen.
As inane as it perhaps is, Facebook lets us know that the world is still going on — that we still exist in a society of people who consider us friends, even if they aren’t friends in the flesh, so to speak. Just to be clear, I do have real friends, in real life. Some of them have Facebook and some of them don’t, but this doesn’t play heavily into the relationships we maintain. Still, I like Facebook: I like looking at photos and posting links and getting messages from people I never really see anymore.
Overall, I remain at a loss to say whether or not that’s bad thing. I guess virtual life can sometimes be just as complicated as the real thing.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Dreaming of Places Called Mars
Why I am sitting in the only smoking section left in the state of Arizona
Why do I have grin that reads don’t mess with me
I still taste like Texas
Why do all these license plates outside my window read
I would rather be flying
Why do I believe that by drinking copious amounts of iHop
I can grow wings
Tell me
Why I am flying west
Why I am following the stars to California
Tell me
Tell me of those games we used to play while lying on our backs
Drawing dragons and elephants in the clouds
When we made maps with the stars
Imagined intergalactic wars between celestial empires
Comprised of constellations that we did not know the names yet
Tell me
How did we forget
How did we get here from then
When exactly did this happen
When did my lips start talking of tragedy
When did they stop kissing my mother
When did I start to bother with grocery lists and girlfriends
Tell me
When did it become pretentious to pretend
To imagine that we are something that we are not
Like an astronaut whose job it is simply to fly up
And bare witness to the clusters of carbon doing their infinitely
Cyclical slow dance in the silence of space
Tell me
When did the universe stop making you dizzy
When did we start to believe in gravity
When did my pockets become heavy with the spare change left over from my mediocre life
And Tell me
When did we stop
When did stop building love from lego blocks
When did we stop imagining mountain tops
And when did we stop climbing everyday
When did we start to believe them when they say that life is uphill battle
When we know full well that even worse is the way back down again
How did we get here from then
When did this happen
When did we become a generation of muted ventriloquists
When did we stop breathing life into inanimate objects
When did I start writing eulogies to people and things that have not died yet
Why do I want to live for an eternity
Tell me
Is it so I can watch the world end
Is it so I can write naked poetry to nobody like I did when I was kid
Before I learned geography
Before I knew where California was
When I still dreamed or places called mars
Before the lights of the stage became so bright that I could no longer see the stars
Why do I have grin that reads don’t mess with me
I still taste like Texas
Why do all these license plates outside my window read
I would rather be flying
Why do I believe that by drinking copious amounts of iHop
I can grow wings
Tell me
Why I am flying west
Why I am following the stars to California
Tell me
Tell me of those games we used to play while lying on our backs
Drawing dragons and elephants in the clouds
When we made maps with the stars
Imagined intergalactic wars between celestial empires
Comprised of constellations that we did not know the names yet
Tell me
How did we forget
How did we get here from then
When exactly did this happen
When did my lips start talking of tragedy
When did they stop kissing my mother
When did I start to bother with grocery lists and girlfriends
Tell me
When did it become pretentious to pretend
To imagine that we are something that we are not
Like an astronaut whose job it is simply to fly up
And bare witness to the clusters of carbon doing their infinitely
Cyclical slow dance in the silence of space
Tell me
When did the universe stop making you dizzy
When did we start to believe in gravity
When did my pockets become heavy with the spare change left over from my mediocre life
And Tell me
When did we stop
When did stop building love from lego blocks
When did we stop imagining mountain tops
And when did we stop climbing everyday
When did we start to believe them when they say that life is uphill battle
When we know full well that even worse is the way back down again
How did we get here from then
When did this happen
When did we become a generation of muted ventriloquists
When did we stop breathing life into inanimate objects
When did I start writing eulogies to people and things that have not died yet
Why do I want to live for an eternity
Tell me
Is it so I can watch the world end
Is it so I can write naked poetry to nobody like I did when I was kid
Before I learned geography
Before I knew where California was
When I still dreamed or places called mars
Before the lights of the stage became so bright that I could no longer see the stars
for sailor dan
I once met a sailor who had never been to sea
I used to see him almost daily outside to shop where I would stop to buy a pack of cigarettes
And I would give him one
He would tell me that he used to be in navy
That he sailed a Spanish Galion across the Atlantic and back again
You see, I knew that he was lying but I part of me
A part of me wanted to believe him
Because this landlocked sailor
He was also a magician
I once saw him roll a joint with one hand
Saw him turn his monthly welfare checks into a navy pension plan
His name was Dan
And he used to draw the same picture over and over again
It was a perfect replica of that Spanish Galion
He started by doodling them on napkins before bumming enough spare change
To buy some big pieces of bristol board and a black pen
By now he’s probably drawn thousands of them
Every hipster kid in my home town has a copy
He used to sell them for a few bucks or a cup of coffee
But honestly I don’t think that’s why he drew that ship
And think truthfully, he wanted to sail away on it
He already had the sailors cap and the long beard that was going grey
And on a good day the vastness of the prairies resembles an ocean
And if you squint your eyes hard enough
You can ships rolling over the canola yellow horizon
And Dan, Dan could be captain of that Spanish Galion
I can see him now just off the starboard bow
Barking orders to squigy kids like they were his deckhands
Looking to me like I was his first mate and together we would sail towards the harvest moon
Testing fate
Smoking cigarettes covered in salt water as waves of wheat fields came crashing down on us
We would navigate our way through the dust kicked up from farmer’s feet
Dodging icebergs carved from hay bails and sheaves of wheat
Because we were the centre of the universe
We could see the end of the earth horizon in every direction
And together we would unearth that anchor of alcoholism and in-affection
Pull it up by its roots
And cast off into a sea of impossibility
A place where the same black pen drawing the same black lines over and over again
Can make homeless dreams a reality
A place where we can be sailor
Even though we’ve never been to sea
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Eliot's Apocalypse
Eliot’s Apocalypse
A Short Story by Charles Hamilton
Eliot Aster’s world ended exactly two months, two days, twelve hours, and ten minutes before it was supposed to. Moments before his untimely death he was sitting at his computer scratching his head and watching the flakes of dandruff settle between the spaces in the keyboard. In his other hand, he held a lit cigarette. He had just finished masturbating. Twelve years, two months, and ten days earlier, when he was dating Dee, he had enjoyed smoking after sex. And since then it was as if his body had become accustomed to receiving nicotine after an orgasm. But there was something pathetic about smoking after a climax that was induced by watching Internet porn, and he knew it. He wished that he were smoking with a woman he was in love with. He wished he were smoking after having sex with Dee. That was the last thought that ever ran through Eliot Aster’s head.
The world was supposed to end on December 21st, 2012. Well, actually Eliot figured it would end at exactly 4:01am Baltimore time December 22nd, 2012 because that was when the last of the cities in the Hawaii-Aleutian time zone would hit 12:01am on December 21st. He’d been counting down the days.
Eliot was not a conspiracy theorist. By the year 2011, the apocalypse was common knowledge. Science had long declared that on the winter solstice of the year 2012 the poles would reverse and massive magnetic shifts, radical weather changes, and rapidly rising oceans would destroy the human race. Either that or the eruption of a super volcano would scorch the earth’s surface, melting every humanoid in its path. Or interstellar radiation would make sure all humans died a slow, agonizing, and cancerous death. Eliot had his own personal favorite apocalyptic theory and it went something like this: at that particular point or moment in the space time continuum the Earth’s alignment with other celestial bodies within the Milky Way would cause the planet to be consumed by a gigantic black hole. There would be no suffering. The end would simply be an all-consuming nothingness. Eliot liked that.
It wasn’t just science that predicted Eliot’s apocalypse. December 21st, 2012 was the end of the 5,125-year Mayan calendar. John the Divine had predicted that day as the beginning of the Second Coming in the Christian Book of Revelations. So had Nostradamus, and certain interpretations of the I Ching. The end was integral part of mass consciousness. Pakistan and India were perpetually on the verge of nuclear war. Parts of the Middle East had already become atomic wastelands. Countless television stations clogged the airways with reruns of their End of Days specials. The end, it seemed, was everywhere.
People had many different reactions to the end of the world. They usually went something like this: Some held vigil outside of Holy grounds in Jerusalem. Some danced naked in the streets of New York and Amsterdam. Some built bomb shelters, and hoarded batteries and clean drinking water. But for the most part the people of Earth did nothing revolutionary or even out of the ordinary in the face of the apocalypse. They went to work, drank their soy cappuccinos, and came home every night to watch television. For all intents and purposes life had continued on the same way it had for the last 130,000 years, ten months, and twenty days.
Eliot had waited the entirety of his thirty-two year, three month, and thirteen day existence for something to happen to him. For as long as he could remember he fantasized about zombies, nuclear holocausts, and impending ice ages. This wasn’t because of any deep-seated misanthropy or contempt for civilization. He wasn’t one of those extremist environmentalists who believed the world would be better off without human beings ruining it. No, Eliot didn’t care about any of that. He was just really bored. He desperately wanted something extraordinary to happen to him. He drew pictures of the Earth melting over and over again in his notebook. He drew black holes. The apocalypse, it seems, was extraordinary enough a thing to capture his imagination. And besides, he figured that if the world were to end he wouldn’t have to worry about that bump on his inner thigh. He wouldn’t have to quit smoking. And most of all he would have an excuse to talk to Dee again.
Fourteen years, two months and twelve days before the end of the world Eliot met Dee. He was traveling Europe the summer before college. They were both in Berlin at the time. They were both admiring Soviet the bullet holes on an old rusted copper statue of some long dead Keizer. As she bent over her thong was showing out the back of her tight blue jeans. Eliot couldn’t help himself. He just had to make conversation. Their first interaction went something like this:
“Pretty crazy how they just leave them like that,” he mumbled. “The bullet holes I mean.”
“I guess they do it so they will always remember,” she said without turning around. She was speaking English. That was a start.
“Do you ever wonder where the bullets go when people fire guns off into the air? You know like cops breaking up riots or whatever. They have to come down somewhere don’t they?” She was now fully erect. The both of them were standing side-by-side looking at the bullet-ridden statue. He had no idea what her face looked like. He couldn’t muster the courage to look directly at her.
“What an odd thing to say,” she said, glancing momentarily in his direction. He strained his eyes to look at her, not wanting to make his gawking too obvious, but trying desperately to see if she was beautiful as his mind’s eye had made her out to be. “But I guess you’re right. Where do those bullets go?” There was a short pause as if she were considering the question seriously. “I guess by the time they get all the way up there maybe they evaporate or something. Or maybe they don’t have as much speed on the way down as they do coming up.”
“I guess. But you know if you drop a penny off the Eiffel Tower it can gain enough speed to kill someone.”
There are over fifty deaths every year caused by stray bullets in Baltimore alone. In America as a whole, the number had to be in the thousands. Remembering that first conversation, Eliot often wondered if any of those deaths were caused by policemen scaring off angry mobs that believed the world was ending, or bullets from the twenty-one-gunshot salute at funerals for soldiers’ who had died in the fight to prevent nuclear war.
Like Berlin, Eliot’s home country America had lots of bullet holes. Of course, they weren’t the kind you left in the sides of statues to remind you of dead wars. They were in apartment building walls covered by drywall mud. They were in the redbrick houses and abandoned warehouses that populated Eliot’s neighborhood. There were bullets lodged everywhere in America.
Dee face had crinkled when she laughed at Eliot’s jokes about the apocalypse or his desire for zombies to roam the earth. Her freckles had that a way of maintaining innocence, even when joking about death. Their jokes usually went something like this:
“Seriously, zombies would be really cool. We would just fuck off to Canada, raid a shotgun store and fish and hunt and make babies for the rest of our lives.” This was, in fact, closer to Eliot’s fantasy than even Dee ever imagined. This was also closer to what would actually be Dee’s real life than Eliot ever imagined.
“How many babies do you think I could pop out before menopause?” The answer, Eliot would later find out, was three.
This was thirteen years, three months, and ten days before the end of the world. It was 1999 and Eliot hadn’t read or heard anything about 2012. He was more preoccupied with Y2K and the possibility of a worldwide computer meltdown. He had also been watching a lot of old zombie movies.
Dee and Eliot had run into each other almost a year after their initial encounter Berlin. Eliot was going an art college in Baltimore and Dee was going to Med School at John Hopkins. Neither of them knew very many people in town. They didn’t really even know each other, but after the usual adolescent courtship of drinking coffee, they moved on to alcohol. Two weeks into their friendship, Eliot lost his virginity. He was twenty years old. Two weeks after that he was in love.
In the ten years, five months, and twelve days since Dee left him, Eliot had spent a lot of time masturbating and watching pornography. He needed pornography to keep him focused. He hadn’t been with a woman since Dee left. He strained to conjure up her face in his fantasies. He couldn’t remember what she looked like naked, and without the porno videos to keep him focused he often he found his thoughts drifting towards minute, asexual objects. Highway lines or the isles of potato chips at the convenience store he worked at. The swirls he etched into the countertop with his key when he was bored. The guy behind the bar at the greasy spoon where he eat his breakfast every morning. The crazy women with matted hair who would come into the store to buy a pack of Marlboro Lights and a Snickers bar every evening at 11:45pm like clockwork. Other times, his thoughts would conduct themselves into lists of the things he had to accomplish the next day. He should phone his mother and wish her a happy birthday. He wondered what the soup is going to be tomorrow? His lungs hurt and he shouldn’t smoke so much. He wondered if he would meet the girl of his dreams before the world ended. All this and he would still be hard. Was he actually jerking off about stale coffee and Formica countertops? This is what life before the apocalypse amounted to. This is why Eliot was so bored. This is why he believed everything he read about 2012. This is why he was counting down the days.
The last thing she said to him was this: “I don’t ever want to see you again. Even if you are the last man on earth.”
Even though it was a tired cliché, Eliot was frightened the intensity in her voice. He remembered thinking that she really meant it. That was ten years, seven months, and thirteen days before the world was supposed to end. Ten months and twelve days before his world actually did end, Eliot had decided to go look for Dee. He wasn’t yet the last man on Earth, but there was a chance that he could be. Besides he had nothing to loose. And if the world was actually going to end, neither did she.
Eliot’s last September on Earth was a cold one. The weather had become unpredictable. He put on a pair of long underwear for the first time since grade school. He thought about Dee’s thong sticking out the back of her pants. He didn’t bother giving notice to the convenience store. He didn’t think it really mattered. Nothing really did now except finding Dee.
So eleven months and twelve days before the world was supposed to end he bundled up in his gas-stained work coat, stuffed all of his possessions, including his book collection and laptop computer, into two large format garbage bags, and he left the bullet holes in his Baltimore apartment for the last time before boarding a bus for Canada.
It took exactly one day, twelve hours, and two minutes to arrive cross the Canadian border, and another two days, ten hours, and twelve minutes for Eliot to hitchhike to Brooksby, where Dee was living. She was, it seemed, living his dream: fishing, hunting, and making babies. She was way up north where zombies couldn’t get her.
His last ride into Brooksby was by far the most interesting. The driver had lived and farmed in on the Canadian prairie his whole life. The end did not scare him. His name was John and he was the last person Eliot would ever have a conversation with. That conversation went something like this:
“There doesn’t seem to be much hysteria around here does there? I mean people do realize that in few months this will all be over.”
“My wife doesn’t believe it will actually happen. She won’t even let me tell our three young ones. With good reason I suppose. But I reckon some people around here do. We do have cable you know,” he paused for a moment, as if testing Eliot’s American sensibilities. “Most of them just don’t care, I guess.” In Eliot’s hometown the end of the world had brought with it mountains of souvenir t-shirt vendors, holy gurus, and fiber-optic Jesus statues. There didn’t seem to be any of that here.
“What do you mean they don’t care? That seems completely insane.” It was completely insane and Eliot knew it. He also knew that he too was completely insane for believing that the human race would act otherwise in the face of impending doom.
“We all knew it was coming. We all knew that one day we had to die. Now we are just hunkering down for the worst of it.”
Eliot had to admit to himself that somewhere in the back of his mind he wanted the end to fulfill some Hobbes-like fantasy. He wanted people to be at each other’s throats, rioting, smashing windows. He wanted them to be murdering and raping each other around every corner. He wanted there to be more bullet holes. Instead they were just going on with their lives. They were making up in their beds morning even though they knew they would just be going back to sleep and messing them up that night. They were paying their taxes even though they knew the government would soon be extinct. It all seemed so futile.
Barely making eye contact with the clerk, Eliot got himself checked in to a motel a mile or so outside of Brooksby. It was one of those places that still advertized colour TVs and air-conditioning on the dilapidated sign out front. The room was yellow and tobacco stained. The sheets were made of cardboard, and the sink was cracked. It looked like the black holes from his notebook. He thought about what John had said about people not caring that the world was ending. He thought about Dee and what kind of house she lived in. He wondered if she was happy. He wondered if she believed that the world would end. He wondered why she moved to Canada. He remembered a conversation they had about it once. It went something like this:
“I think it’s a good thing that I have gun. I mean I can protect myself, and you if anyone tries to break in. Baltimore is scary place you know.”
“Eliot listen to yourself for a second. Do you ever think about why Baltimore is scary place? Could it be because people have guns?”
“Yeah, but they do and we’re here now.”
“Think about it for a second, though. In Canada they don’t have guns the same way we do, so they don’t need guns. I see it like this. Bear with me for a second. I was at this party once. It was the middle of winter so everyone was taking their shoes off at the door. Everything was fine until the party got a little bigger and some guy walked in with his muddy shoes on. Then everyone had to put their shoes on or else their socks would get all muddy. Do you see what I’m saying? The only reason we need guns is because some asshole walked into our party with his muddy shoes.”
All it took was some asshole with muddy shoes to get Dee to move to Canada where there weren’t as many bullet holes, and where it was customary for people to take off their shoes before entering a house.
There wasn’t any one reason why she left him. It was a combination of things. It was her not him. It was because they grew apart. It was because he wanted to world end and she wanted to save it. It was because he was a struggling artist and she was on her way to become a successful doctor. It was because three years, and twenty-three days seemed like the maximum amount of time a couple could stay together if they weren’t going to be with each other until the end of time.
In the next room, Eliot could hear the pounding of the bed’s backboard against the wall. The tacky nature painting above the colour television vibrated a bit. Above the air-conditioner, he could hear the exaggerated moans of a woman, and beneath it the subdued grunts of a man who seemed too proud of his every thrust. Despite himself, Eliot found he was aroused. He tried a first to imagine himself in there, but soon gave up and pulled out his laptop computer.
He still had his headphones on so he didn’t hear when the next motel door over was kicked open. A woman was faking an on-screen climax so he didn’t hear the cocking of John’s shotgun. He didn’t hear him scream Dee’s name in anger. He didn’t hear John call her a slut, or a whore, or a bitch. He didn’t hear any of that. In Eliot’s mind, Dee was that same freckle-faced woman with a thong sticking out the back of her pants. In his mind she was the same as she had been for the past twelve years, two months, and ten days. He did hear the gunshot, but by that time it was too late. The bullet made a whole in the wall the size of a small coin. It made a similar sized hole in Eliot’s face, before lodging itself in the drywall next to the color television. And there it remained and the world went on without him. It went on, at least, for another two months, two days, twelve hours, and ten minutes.
A Short Story by Charles Hamilton
Eliot Aster’s world ended exactly two months, two days, twelve hours, and ten minutes before it was supposed to. Moments before his untimely death he was sitting at his computer scratching his head and watching the flakes of dandruff settle between the spaces in the keyboard. In his other hand, he held a lit cigarette. He had just finished masturbating. Twelve years, two months, and ten days earlier, when he was dating Dee, he had enjoyed smoking after sex. And since then it was as if his body had become accustomed to receiving nicotine after an orgasm. But there was something pathetic about smoking after a climax that was induced by watching Internet porn, and he knew it. He wished that he were smoking with a woman he was in love with. He wished he were smoking after having sex with Dee. That was the last thought that ever ran through Eliot Aster’s head.
The world was supposed to end on December 21st, 2012. Well, actually Eliot figured it would end at exactly 4:01am Baltimore time December 22nd, 2012 because that was when the last of the cities in the Hawaii-Aleutian time zone would hit 12:01am on December 21st. He’d been counting down the days.
Eliot was not a conspiracy theorist. By the year 2011, the apocalypse was common knowledge. Science had long declared that on the winter solstice of the year 2012 the poles would reverse and massive magnetic shifts, radical weather changes, and rapidly rising oceans would destroy the human race. Either that or the eruption of a super volcano would scorch the earth’s surface, melting every humanoid in its path. Or interstellar radiation would make sure all humans died a slow, agonizing, and cancerous death. Eliot had his own personal favorite apocalyptic theory and it went something like this: at that particular point or moment in the space time continuum the Earth’s alignment with other celestial bodies within the Milky Way would cause the planet to be consumed by a gigantic black hole. There would be no suffering. The end would simply be an all-consuming nothingness. Eliot liked that.
It wasn’t just science that predicted Eliot’s apocalypse. December 21st, 2012 was the end of the 5,125-year Mayan calendar. John the Divine had predicted that day as the beginning of the Second Coming in the Christian Book of Revelations. So had Nostradamus, and certain interpretations of the I Ching. The end was integral part of mass consciousness. Pakistan and India were perpetually on the verge of nuclear war. Parts of the Middle East had already become atomic wastelands. Countless television stations clogged the airways with reruns of their End of Days specials. The end, it seemed, was everywhere.
People had many different reactions to the end of the world. They usually went something like this: Some held vigil outside of Holy grounds in Jerusalem. Some danced naked in the streets of New York and Amsterdam. Some built bomb shelters, and hoarded batteries and clean drinking water. But for the most part the people of Earth did nothing revolutionary or even out of the ordinary in the face of the apocalypse. They went to work, drank their soy cappuccinos, and came home every night to watch television. For all intents and purposes life had continued on the same way it had for the last 130,000 years, ten months, and twenty days.
Eliot had waited the entirety of his thirty-two year, three month, and thirteen day existence for something to happen to him. For as long as he could remember he fantasized about zombies, nuclear holocausts, and impending ice ages. This wasn’t because of any deep-seated misanthropy or contempt for civilization. He wasn’t one of those extremist environmentalists who believed the world would be better off without human beings ruining it. No, Eliot didn’t care about any of that. He was just really bored. He desperately wanted something extraordinary to happen to him. He drew pictures of the Earth melting over and over again in his notebook. He drew black holes. The apocalypse, it seems, was extraordinary enough a thing to capture his imagination. And besides, he figured that if the world were to end he wouldn’t have to worry about that bump on his inner thigh. He wouldn’t have to quit smoking. And most of all he would have an excuse to talk to Dee again.
Fourteen years, two months and twelve days before the end of the world Eliot met Dee. He was traveling Europe the summer before college. They were both in Berlin at the time. They were both admiring Soviet the bullet holes on an old rusted copper statue of some long dead Keizer. As she bent over her thong was showing out the back of her tight blue jeans. Eliot couldn’t help himself. He just had to make conversation. Their first interaction went something like this:
“Pretty crazy how they just leave them like that,” he mumbled. “The bullet holes I mean.”
“I guess they do it so they will always remember,” she said without turning around. She was speaking English. That was a start.
“Do you ever wonder where the bullets go when people fire guns off into the air? You know like cops breaking up riots or whatever. They have to come down somewhere don’t they?” She was now fully erect. The both of them were standing side-by-side looking at the bullet-ridden statue. He had no idea what her face looked like. He couldn’t muster the courage to look directly at her.
“What an odd thing to say,” she said, glancing momentarily in his direction. He strained his eyes to look at her, not wanting to make his gawking too obvious, but trying desperately to see if she was beautiful as his mind’s eye had made her out to be. “But I guess you’re right. Where do those bullets go?” There was a short pause as if she were considering the question seriously. “I guess by the time they get all the way up there maybe they evaporate or something. Or maybe they don’t have as much speed on the way down as they do coming up.”
“I guess. But you know if you drop a penny off the Eiffel Tower it can gain enough speed to kill someone.”
There are over fifty deaths every year caused by stray bullets in Baltimore alone. In America as a whole, the number had to be in the thousands. Remembering that first conversation, Eliot often wondered if any of those deaths were caused by policemen scaring off angry mobs that believed the world was ending, or bullets from the twenty-one-gunshot salute at funerals for soldiers’ who had died in the fight to prevent nuclear war.
Like Berlin, Eliot’s home country America had lots of bullet holes. Of course, they weren’t the kind you left in the sides of statues to remind you of dead wars. They were in apartment building walls covered by drywall mud. They were in the redbrick houses and abandoned warehouses that populated Eliot’s neighborhood. There were bullets lodged everywhere in America.
Dee face had crinkled when she laughed at Eliot’s jokes about the apocalypse or his desire for zombies to roam the earth. Her freckles had that a way of maintaining innocence, even when joking about death. Their jokes usually went something like this:
“Seriously, zombies would be really cool. We would just fuck off to Canada, raid a shotgun store and fish and hunt and make babies for the rest of our lives.” This was, in fact, closer to Eliot’s fantasy than even Dee ever imagined. This was also closer to what would actually be Dee’s real life than Eliot ever imagined.
“How many babies do you think I could pop out before menopause?” The answer, Eliot would later find out, was three.
This was thirteen years, three months, and ten days before the end of the world. It was 1999 and Eliot hadn’t read or heard anything about 2012. He was more preoccupied with Y2K and the possibility of a worldwide computer meltdown. He had also been watching a lot of old zombie movies.
Dee and Eliot had run into each other almost a year after their initial encounter Berlin. Eliot was going an art college in Baltimore and Dee was going to Med School at John Hopkins. Neither of them knew very many people in town. They didn’t really even know each other, but after the usual adolescent courtship of drinking coffee, they moved on to alcohol. Two weeks into their friendship, Eliot lost his virginity. He was twenty years old. Two weeks after that he was in love.
In the ten years, five months, and twelve days since Dee left him, Eliot had spent a lot of time masturbating and watching pornography. He needed pornography to keep him focused. He hadn’t been with a woman since Dee left. He strained to conjure up her face in his fantasies. He couldn’t remember what she looked like naked, and without the porno videos to keep him focused he often he found his thoughts drifting towards minute, asexual objects. Highway lines or the isles of potato chips at the convenience store he worked at. The swirls he etched into the countertop with his key when he was bored. The guy behind the bar at the greasy spoon where he eat his breakfast every morning. The crazy women with matted hair who would come into the store to buy a pack of Marlboro Lights and a Snickers bar every evening at 11:45pm like clockwork. Other times, his thoughts would conduct themselves into lists of the things he had to accomplish the next day. He should phone his mother and wish her a happy birthday. He wondered what the soup is going to be tomorrow? His lungs hurt and he shouldn’t smoke so much. He wondered if he would meet the girl of his dreams before the world ended. All this and he would still be hard. Was he actually jerking off about stale coffee and Formica countertops? This is what life before the apocalypse amounted to. This is why Eliot was so bored. This is why he believed everything he read about 2012. This is why he was counting down the days.
The last thing she said to him was this: “I don’t ever want to see you again. Even if you are the last man on earth.”
Even though it was a tired cliché, Eliot was frightened the intensity in her voice. He remembered thinking that she really meant it. That was ten years, seven months, and thirteen days before the world was supposed to end. Ten months and twelve days before his world actually did end, Eliot had decided to go look for Dee. He wasn’t yet the last man on Earth, but there was a chance that he could be. Besides he had nothing to loose. And if the world was actually going to end, neither did she.
Eliot’s last September on Earth was a cold one. The weather had become unpredictable. He put on a pair of long underwear for the first time since grade school. He thought about Dee’s thong sticking out the back of her pants. He didn’t bother giving notice to the convenience store. He didn’t think it really mattered. Nothing really did now except finding Dee.
So eleven months and twelve days before the world was supposed to end he bundled up in his gas-stained work coat, stuffed all of his possessions, including his book collection and laptop computer, into two large format garbage bags, and he left the bullet holes in his Baltimore apartment for the last time before boarding a bus for Canada.
It took exactly one day, twelve hours, and two minutes to arrive cross the Canadian border, and another two days, ten hours, and twelve minutes for Eliot to hitchhike to Brooksby, where Dee was living. She was, it seemed, living his dream: fishing, hunting, and making babies. She was way up north where zombies couldn’t get her.
His last ride into Brooksby was by far the most interesting. The driver had lived and farmed in on the Canadian prairie his whole life. The end did not scare him. His name was John and he was the last person Eliot would ever have a conversation with. That conversation went something like this:
“There doesn’t seem to be much hysteria around here does there? I mean people do realize that in few months this will all be over.”
“My wife doesn’t believe it will actually happen. She won’t even let me tell our three young ones. With good reason I suppose. But I reckon some people around here do. We do have cable you know,” he paused for a moment, as if testing Eliot’s American sensibilities. “Most of them just don’t care, I guess.” In Eliot’s hometown the end of the world had brought with it mountains of souvenir t-shirt vendors, holy gurus, and fiber-optic Jesus statues. There didn’t seem to be any of that here.
“What do you mean they don’t care? That seems completely insane.” It was completely insane and Eliot knew it. He also knew that he too was completely insane for believing that the human race would act otherwise in the face of impending doom.
“We all knew it was coming. We all knew that one day we had to die. Now we are just hunkering down for the worst of it.”
Eliot had to admit to himself that somewhere in the back of his mind he wanted the end to fulfill some Hobbes-like fantasy. He wanted people to be at each other’s throats, rioting, smashing windows. He wanted them to be murdering and raping each other around every corner. He wanted there to be more bullet holes. Instead they were just going on with their lives. They were making up in their beds morning even though they knew they would just be going back to sleep and messing them up that night. They were paying their taxes even though they knew the government would soon be extinct. It all seemed so futile.
Barely making eye contact with the clerk, Eliot got himself checked in to a motel a mile or so outside of Brooksby. It was one of those places that still advertized colour TVs and air-conditioning on the dilapidated sign out front. The room was yellow and tobacco stained. The sheets were made of cardboard, and the sink was cracked. It looked like the black holes from his notebook. He thought about what John had said about people not caring that the world was ending. He thought about Dee and what kind of house she lived in. He wondered if she was happy. He wondered if she believed that the world would end. He wondered why she moved to Canada. He remembered a conversation they had about it once. It went something like this:
“I think it’s a good thing that I have gun. I mean I can protect myself, and you if anyone tries to break in. Baltimore is scary place you know.”
“Eliot listen to yourself for a second. Do you ever think about why Baltimore is scary place? Could it be because people have guns?”
“Yeah, but they do and we’re here now.”
“Think about it for a second, though. In Canada they don’t have guns the same way we do, so they don’t need guns. I see it like this. Bear with me for a second. I was at this party once. It was the middle of winter so everyone was taking their shoes off at the door. Everything was fine until the party got a little bigger and some guy walked in with his muddy shoes on. Then everyone had to put their shoes on or else their socks would get all muddy. Do you see what I’m saying? The only reason we need guns is because some asshole walked into our party with his muddy shoes.”
All it took was some asshole with muddy shoes to get Dee to move to Canada where there weren’t as many bullet holes, and where it was customary for people to take off their shoes before entering a house.
There wasn’t any one reason why she left him. It was a combination of things. It was her not him. It was because they grew apart. It was because he wanted to world end and she wanted to save it. It was because he was a struggling artist and she was on her way to become a successful doctor. It was because three years, and twenty-three days seemed like the maximum amount of time a couple could stay together if they weren’t going to be with each other until the end of time.
In the next room, Eliot could hear the pounding of the bed’s backboard against the wall. The tacky nature painting above the colour television vibrated a bit. Above the air-conditioner, he could hear the exaggerated moans of a woman, and beneath it the subdued grunts of a man who seemed too proud of his every thrust. Despite himself, Eliot found he was aroused. He tried a first to imagine himself in there, but soon gave up and pulled out his laptop computer.
He still had his headphones on so he didn’t hear when the next motel door over was kicked open. A woman was faking an on-screen climax so he didn’t hear the cocking of John’s shotgun. He didn’t hear him scream Dee’s name in anger. He didn’t hear John call her a slut, or a whore, or a bitch. He didn’t hear any of that. In Eliot’s mind, Dee was that same freckle-faced woman with a thong sticking out the back of her pants. In his mind she was the same as she had been for the past twelve years, two months, and ten days. He did hear the gunshot, but by that time it was too late. The bullet made a whole in the wall the size of a small coin. It made a similar sized hole in Eliot’s face, before lodging itself in the drywall next to the color television. And there it remained and the world went on without him. It went on, at least, for another two months, two days, twelve hours, and ten minutes.
In the Key of Jonathan
“I’ll do it!” he choked. “Whatever you want, man, I’ll do it.” My hands were tied tightly around his scrawny neck, my thumbs pressing firmly on his larynx. It looked like a scene from a bad gangster movie. I was playing the part of the cold, rugged tough guy, and Jonathan – once my hero, my neurotic mentor – was playing the part of the helpless, innocent victim. His head was draped over the edge of the balcony, and with a simple push I could have thrown him over, headfirst. His thick-rimmed glasses lay half broken on the cement. One of the lenses was smashed out, and I was perched on top of my now squinting victim in true tough guy fashion, sweating profusely. If I had been wearing a button-up instead of a t-shirt, my top three buttons would surely have been undone. And had I been wearing a gold chain, I’m sure it would be visible through my forest of chest hair. That is, if I actually had any chest hair. But aside from those tough guy details, at this moment I had everything I wanted. I was at the climax. I could have tossed Jonathan off this balcony, twelve stories down if I wanted to. I could have smashed his face in with my fists if I wanted to. I could have pulled the pen from my back pocket and shoved it into his temple if I wanted. I was the lead character in my own private gangster novel. I was calling all the shots. I could have done anything to Jonathan. Anything I wanted. But it wasn’t until he screamed out, “What the fuck do you want from me?” that I realized I had absolutely no idea.
I’d like to preface the rest of the story by making it clear to you that I am not a writer. Not by nature at least. I wasn’t one of those kids who spent his childhood alone with his books, lost in the imaginative world of fiction because the real world was too much to bear. I wasn’t the victim of too much bullying, too much loneliness, or too much parenting. My glasses weren’t stitched together with masking tape. I wasn’t ugly or skinny and I didn’t have bad skin. I was normal. My childhood was normal. My parents were divorced, but in this day and age that is hardly a prerequisite for the kind of self-loathing and neurotic indulgence commonly associated with insightful writing. If I was self-loathing or neurotic, it had more to do with the substances I ingested throughout my high school years than it did with a predisposition toward depression, self-reflection, or an over-active imagination. To be honest, I don’t really have an imagination at all.
I’ve spent the better part of my adult life overcompensating for this lack of creative insight. I carry around a leather-bound notepad like Hemingway. I started smoking cigarettes in my last undergraduate year because I read Camus. I spend my afternoons holed up in coffee shops reading the New Yorker, hoping someone will notice that I look intellectual. I read books in the bathtub like Proust, but I always end up splashing around and getting the pages wet. Really, I’m not an intellectual. I’m not a writer. I’m just faking it. I’m just filling in the gaps.
My stories never amount to anything. I have never amounted to anything. And no matter how many times I change his name or his occupation, my lead character is always me, and the setting is always my lackluster existence. My life is boring. Nothing ever happens to me worth writing down. And this is my excuse for never being able to write interesting stories: nothing ever happens in my stories because nothing ever happens in real life. I’ve succeeded in convincing myself that it is not my lack of imagination, but rather the monotonous, unimaginative progression of the everyday that makes me, and the stories I write, completely uninteresting. There was just nothing to write about. Of course, that was the truth until I met Jonathan.
Unlike me, Jonathan is a natural writer. He plays the part perfectly: the Jewish intellectual type with thick black glasses, messy hair, and a mystique about him that suggests that he spends a lot of time drinking alone – which he does. He told me. Single-malt scotch on ice. He also told me that while drinking alone, he spends most of his nights locked up in his apartment reading over his ex-wife’s most recent novel, correcting her style and making notes wherever he imagines there to be a reference to himself, their sex life or anything to do with their relationship. I sometimes wonder now, on nights when I am alone, if Jonathan will ever do the same thing to these pages, if he will ever read them and if he will hate me for writing them.
If he ever does come across this confession, Jonathan will probably sue me for copyright infringement. I have a habit of adopting other people’s style. I get their voices stuck in my head when I’m writing. One week I’m reading William Gibson pretending that I can write science fiction. The next week it’s Tolstoy and I’m pretending to have insights into the lives of adulterous, nineteenth century women. When I wrote this, when all this happened, I was reading a lot of Jonathan. It is written in the key of Jon.
I met Jonathan at the airport on a cold day in January. Amidst a crowd full of modestly dressed mid-westerners, clad mostly in pullover jackets, blue jeans, and work boots, Jonathan was easy to spot. He was probably the only Jewish person in our entire town. If there were others, they were not the outspokenly nerdy, bookish types whose psychosis and self-abhorrence you could sense from a mile away. They were not the kind of Jewish people that I had grown accustomed to by watching Woody Allen movies. Jonathan, on the other hand, was straight out of Deconstructing Harry. He was way overdressed and obviously uncomfortable in his puffy, Gore-Tex parka, which looked completely foreign on his frail, urbane frame. I got the impression that he believed he was heading on an expedition to the arctic, not a speaking engagement in the middle of the prairies.
“Are you Charlie?” he asked as I approached him in the white light of the airport terminal. I had waited until after he had retrieved his bags, not wanting our first conversation to be one of those painfully awkward ones standing in front of carousel. I had imagined myself standing there, asking him over and over again, ‘Is that one yours?’ ‘How about that one?’
“Jonathan I presume?” I was trying desperately to sound collected and unrehearsed. Not only was this the first real Jewish writer I had ever met, it was also the first real celebrity. While I was waiting for his flight to come in I had thought up a handful of witty conversation starters and opening lines. But when it came time to introduce myself I couldn’t remember any of them, and instead came off sounding dull and subservient. “I have a car waiting out front. Do you want any help with your bags?”
“I just have the one here so I should be fine.” I offered to roll it for him. It was only twenty feet or so from the carousel to the front doors and maybe another five to the car, but I figured his arms must have been tired from flying all day. I said as much, hoping to sound witty, but I don’t think he heard me.
When I told him I had a car waiting out front, he probably imagined I had a limo, a driver, and a bottle of scotch waiting for him. At the very least he could have expected a nicer car. Instead, it was a rusted ‘93 Honda Civic littered with snow encrusted fast food wrappers, cigarette butts, and a heating system that barely worked. I figured that picking him up in layman’s style would let him know that I was down to earth.
The drive was full of the usual banter, which I had been accustomed to in my years of ass kissing. Where was I from originally, what’s my thesis on, why do I live in this depleted college town in the middle of nowhere – the usual out of town speech. He was friendly and awkward, but there were very few dry spells in the conversation, which was nice because if there had been, I don’t believe either of us would have known how to start one up again.
Back at the hotel, I got him checked in and asked if he needed anything. I went back to my room with the promise to pick him up in an hour or so for drinks and dinner after he got himself settled in.
If it weren’t for this first cigarette, I don’t think Jonathan and I would have ever become friends. He would have given his speech, the writing students and I would have applauded, and he would have gotten on his plane and this story would have never been written. And Jonathan would never have met Teegan.
Before Teegan, things were running smoothly. Jonathan and I were friendly. We joked together over drinks. We related about books we were reading. We talked about his life in Montreal, and he told me I reminded him of a friend of his there and that he felt comfortable around me. My storyline had rising action. Now all I needed was a climax.
It was outside the hotel, in the smokers’ lounge, that Jonathan first met the girl who would ultimately lead to the unraveling of my well-constructed narrative – the narrative that I had imagined Jonathan to complete. Teegan was in my writing workshop and was unconventionally beautiful. She had thin seventies-style hair with protruding bangs that looked like a mix between Robert Plant and a young Diane Keaton. She wore vests and old-fashioned blouses and had long beady necklaces. She smoked slims and hardly ever wore eye makeup. Over the years, my nostalgia for the hippy generation – for the revolution, for the protest, for Pink Floyd and the Beatles – had manifested itself in an affinity for seventies pornography. And Teegan, everything from her hair to her breasts – which I had never actually seen but could only imagine suited her demeanor and the rest of her outfit – were straight out of the ‘70s nudey tapes I used to steal from under my dad’s mattress.
“Are you who I think you are?” she asked sheepishly before lighting her menthol slim. “So your Jonathan --- ”
“This is Teegan.” I interrupted. “She’s one the students from the workshop.”
“That’s crazy. I was just going for a walk to get some fresh air.” She held up her smoke, immediately recognizing the irony. It was, of course, intentional. It was just as intentional as her accidently following us outside for a cigarette. She knew perfectly well who Jonathan was. We had read one of his stories in class, and like me she had been obsessed ever since.
I imagined that Jonathan would be immediately put off by this outward display of idol worship. But through the smoke that hovered just above his lips, he managed a small laugh and a half smile. This was big for Jonathan. Laughing and smiling at strangers were not common traits of a sardonic, alcoholic storyteller. This was out of character.
All she had to say was, “I’m looking forward to your talk,” and Jonathan invited her into the hotel lounge for a drink. I was paying of course. It seems that he too had a thing for seventies pornography.
My attempts to punctuate their conversation with clever anecdotes were complete failures. All I ever managed was the occasional, “That’s hilarious” or “What a funny story.” Truthfully, I wasn’t finding any of this hilarious or even remotely funny. Jonathan was mine and she was stealing him from me. Teegan was mine and he was stealing her from me. Anyway you looked at it, I was getting fucked. And not in the way they did in those tapes.
Teegan had the habit of peeling her beer bottle labels off and folding them into little paper cranes. It was something she picked up in elementary school and had stayed with her right through until she hit drinking age. She folded one and offered it to Jonathan. “That’s adorable,” Jonathan was saying. “Really, that is really adorable.” I could tell that he wanted to say that she too was adorable, but like me could never work up the courage.
Her face flushed red every time she spoke to him. With every one of his responses it would cool again, as if every one of the capillaries on her face had been spared embarrassment. Soon she started calling him Jon. I hadn’t worked up the courage to go beyond Jonathan.
They both laughed at every available opportunity. And then they would laugh some more and I was forced to laugh along with them. I didn’t know what else to do. I had nothing adorable to say to him. No witty remarks or cheap parlour tricks to grab his attention. I was an intellectual mute with no imagination and nothing important to say to anybody.
His speech, of course, was great. In front of an audience, Jonathan was just as endearing and clever as he was in print. He told the story about Jon from the Garfield comics eating his lasagna in-between the panels so as not to starve to death. He told us about being in a stand-up comedy karaoke bar and getting booed of stage for not delivering the punch lines on time. But despite his comic tone, these were just filler. They were the needless back-story that let us all know how clever Jonathan was. I was looking for something more. My story needed a climax. And Teegan was ruining my best chance at ever getting one.
You see, what really pissed me off about Teegan wasn’t that she wanted Jonathan. It wasn’t that she eventually got Jonathan. That was inevitable. Sure I was a little mad that Jonathan – who only hours earlier had confessed that I was his friend – was hitting it off with, and would probably eventually sleep with, the girl I wanted to sleep with, but that happens to me all the time. I would say it happens almost weekly, actually. No, what really got to me was that because of Teegan, Jonathan wasn’t doing anything. She was rendering him useless and uninteresting. My story was dissolving before my eyes and I hadn’t even had a chance to write anything down.
After his speech, we went out to a bar. The whole time Jonathan was making out with Teegan in the corner, drinking the scotch I paid for, or getting his ass kissed by writing students. He was turning my story into a cliché about betrayal and heartbreak, and how all your favorite idols turn out to be losers just like you. I wanted something original. I needed some action. I couldn’t bear the thought of going home without a story to tell. If I had an imagination I would have been able to make something up. I would have been able to make Jonathan into an interesting character. But I didn’t have an imagination. I was not creative. In order for me to tell an interesting story, something interesting actually had to happen to me. I needed Jonathan to be that something.
Twelve beers and a two-six of scotch later, we were back in my hotel room, acting like literary rock stars. Liquor bottles, pizza boxes, and cigarette butts littered the carpet. The muted television was playing the first installment of The Godfather. Jonathan and Teegan were cuddled on the couch, just waiting for the night to wane on far enough so they could make their exit. I imagined this is how rock stars must feel when they get the sense the party has to eventually end.
I was out on the balcony counting the cigarette butts smooshed into the snow, trying to determine which ones were mine, when I noticed the party was ending. Those three Golds was certainly mine, I thought. That menthol, though, must have been Teegan’s. That bitch. I watched them through the glass, curled up on the end of the painfully uncomfortable hotel couch, their legs hidden beneath a blanket, doing who knows what with their hands. Jonathan’s stories were more often than not about his childhood, and in my mind his character was an asexual pubescent oscillating between the ages of twelve and thirty-two years old. To imagine him caressing the inner thigh of another human being made me uneasy. He was again acting out of character.
Half way through my second cigarette, Jonathan caught a glimpse of my smoke and, like any addict, the sight of a nicotine fix tempted him to the balcony. Teegan resisted the urge.
“This has been really fun man,” he said. “The most fun I’ve had in long time, probably since my divorce.”
“No problem.” I disinterestedly lit my third. “Your talk was really great.” This is what my story with Jonathan had amounted to: small talk and empty compliments; both of us simply faking our way through a dull conversation because we were scared of silence. Like the rest of my life, Jonathan was boring, uninteresting, and unimaginative.
Have you ever read that Kurt Vonnegut novel, Breakfast of Champions? Anyway, it doesn’t really matter. The point is at the end of the book, Vonnegut is at a completely loss. He doesn’t know how to end it so he writes himself into the story. Like Vonnegut, it seems I too am scared shitless of endings. Even though I spend entire novels flipping to the back of the book, counting in my head how many pages I have left, when I get there I’m scared to read the last paragraph. That is how I felt at that moment, like Vonnegut sitting in that cocktail lounge watching his great story fall to pieces. I had to do something.
I leapt at Jonathan’s neck and within moments he was on the ground, his glasses were broken and I was on top of him. He was looking up at me with squinting bewilderment. Through his groans he managed to choke out the words that have been swirling in my mind to this day: “What the fuck do you want from me?”
Teegan must have noticed that we had disappeared from view because a few seconds latter, right after Jonathan’s perplexing question, she screamed another, equally perplexing one in my ear. “What the fuck are you doing Charlie!” I heard her but it took me a while to process the enormity of the question. I really had no idea. What was I doing? What was I planning to do with Jonathan now that I had him pinned? Was this my story? Was this my climax? “Get off of him!” she yelled.
With the help of some other writing students, Teegan eventually managed to rip me from his Jonathan’s pale frame. They held me down on the hardwood as she and Jonathan left the room. I can only imagine that they went back to his room where she dressed his wounds before they made sweet passionate love. Only afterwards, while smoking in bed, would they contemplate my actions, would they wonder what had gotten into me, would they wonder what my story was all about.
I’ve been reading Jonathan’s work endlessly since we met, wondering if he will ever mention our evening together, if I will find it interesting enough to write about. But in all the short stories and newspaper columns since, there’s been nothing about our encounter. After reading and rereading Jonathan, however, something did occur to me: Jonathan does write about his own life. In fact, he does so almost exclusively. His lead character is always a thinly disguised version of himself. His setting is always a thinly disguised version of his monotonous everyday life as a writer and newspaper columnist. Jonathan, as person and as character, is completely uninteresting and boring. He like me is after all. His life is nothing more than an unimaginative procession of meaningless events. But he still manages to write brilliant stories. He doesn’t go out of his way to make his life interesting; he just has an interesting way of telling stories about it. And I think that is what I wanted out of Jonathan. This was the climax I always imagined. I somehow believed that through Jonathan, I could harness the creativity and courage to render my life into something imaginative. In the end, maybe I did.
I’d like to preface the rest of the story by making it clear to you that I am not a writer. Not by nature at least. I wasn’t one of those kids who spent his childhood alone with his books, lost in the imaginative world of fiction because the real world was too much to bear. I wasn’t the victim of too much bullying, too much loneliness, or too much parenting. My glasses weren’t stitched together with masking tape. I wasn’t ugly or skinny and I didn’t have bad skin. I was normal. My childhood was normal. My parents were divorced, but in this day and age that is hardly a prerequisite for the kind of self-loathing and neurotic indulgence commonly associated with insightful writing. If I was self-loathing or neurotic, it had more to do with the substances I ingested throughout my high school years than it did with a predisposition toward depression, self-reflection, or an over-active imagination. To be honest, I don’t really have an imagination at all.
I’ve spent the better part of my adult life overcompensating for this lack of creative insight. I carry around a leather-bound notepad like Hemingway. I started smoking cigarettes in my last undergraduate year because I read Camus. I spend my afternoons holed up in coffee shops reading the New Yorker, hoping someone will notice that I look intellectual. I read books in the bathtub like Proust, but I always end up splashing around and getting the pages wet. Really, I’m not an intellectual. I’m not a writer. I’m just faking it. I’m just filling in the gaps.
My stories never amount to anything. I have never amounted to anything. And no matter how many times I change his name or his occupation, my lead character is always me, and the setting is always my lackluster existence. My life is boring. Nothing ever happens to me worth writing down. And this is my excuse for never being able to write interesting stories: nothing ever happens in my stories because nothing ever happens in real life. I’ve succeeded in convincing myself that it is not my lack of imagination, but rather the monotonous, unimaginative progression of the everyday that makes me, and the stories I write, completely uninteresting. There was just nothing to write about. Of course, that was the truth until I met Jonathan.
Unlike me, Jonathan is a natural writer. He plays the part perfectly: the Jewish intellectual type with thick black glasses, messy hair, and a mystique about him that suggests that he spends a lot of time drinking alone – which he does. He told me. Single-malt scotch on ice. He also told me that while drinking alone, he spends most of his nights locked up in his apartment reading over his ex-wife’s most recent novel, correcting her style and making notes wherever he imagines there to be a reference to himself, their sex life or anything to do with their relationship. I sometimes wonder now, on nights when I am alone, if Jonathan will ever do the same thing to these pages, if he will ever read them and if he will hate me for writing them.
If he ever does come across this confession, Jonathan will probably sue me for copyright infringement. I have a habit of adopting other people’s style. I get their voices stuck in my head when I’m writing. One week I’m reading William Gibson pretending that I can write science fiction. The next week it’s Tolstoy and I’m pretending to have insights into the lives of adulterous, nineteenth century women. When I wrote this, when all this happened, I was reading a lot of Jonathan. It is written in the key of Jon.
I met Jonathan at the airport on a cold day in January. Amidst a crowd full of modestly dressed mid-westerners, clad mostly in pullover jackets, blue jeans, and work boots, Jonathan was easy to spot. He was probably the only Jewish person in our entire town. If there were others, they were not the outspokenly nerdy, bookish types whose psychosis and self-abhorrence you could sense from a mile away. They were not the kind of Jewish people that I had grown accustomed to by watching Woody Allen movies. Jonathan, on the other hand, was straight out of Deconstructing Harry. He was way overdressed and obviously uncomfortable in his puffy, Gore-Tex parka, which looked completely foreign on his frail, urbane frame. I got the impression that he believed he was heading on an expedition to the arctic, not a speaking engagement in the middle of the prairies.
“Are you Charlie?” he asked as I approached him in the white light of the airport terminal. I had waited until after he had retrieved his bags, not wanting our first conversation to be one of those painfully awkward ones standing in front of carousel. I had imagined myself standing there, asking him over and over again, ‘Is that one yours?’ ‘How about that one?’
“Jonathan I presume?” I was trying desperately to sound collected and unrehearsed. Not only was this the first real Jewish writer I had ever met, it was also the first real celebrity. While I was waiting for his flight to come in I had thought up a handful of witty conversation starters and opening lines. But when it came time to introduce myself I couldn’t remember any of them, and instead came off sounding dull and subservient. “I have a car waiting out front. Do you want any help with your bags?”
“I just have the one here so I should be fine.” I offered to roll it for him. It was only twenty feet or so from the carousel to the front doors and maybe another five to the car, but I figured his arms must have been tired from flying all day. I said as much, hoping to sound witty, but I don’t think he heard me.
When I told him I had a car waiting out front, he probably imagined I had a limo, a driver, and a bottle of scotch waiting for him. At the very least he could have expected a nicer car. Instead, it was a rusted ‘93 Honda Civic littered with snow encrusted fast food wrappers, cigarette butts, and a heating system that barely worked. I figured that picking him up in layman’s style would let him know that I was down to earth.
The drive was full of the usual banter, which I had been accustomed to in my years of ass kissing. Where was I from originally, what’s my thesis on, why do I live in this depleted college town in the middle of nowhere – the usual out of town speech. He was friendly and awkward, but there were very few dry spells in the conversation, which was nice because if there had been, I don’t believe either of us would have known how to start one up again.
Back at the hotel, I got him checked in and asked if he needed anything. I went back to my room with the promise to pick him up in an hour or so for drinks and dinner after he got himself settled in.
If it weren’t for this first cigarette, I don’t think Jonathan and I would have ever become friends. He would have given his speech, the writing students and I would have applauded, and he would have gotten on his plane and this story would have never been written. And Jonathan would never have met Teegan.
Before Teegan, things were running smoothly. Jonathan and I were friendly. We joked together over drinks. We related about books we were reading. We talked about his life in Montreal, and he told me I reminded him of a friend of his there and that he felt comfortable around me. My storyline had rising action. Now all I needed was a climax.
It was outside the hotel, in the smokers’ lounge, that Jonathan first met the girl who would ultimately lead to the unraveling of my well-constructed narrative – the narrative that I had imagined Jonathan to complete. Teegan was in my writing workshop and was unconventionally beautiful. She had thin seventies-style hair with protruding bangs that looked like a mix between Robert Plant and a young Diane Keaton. She wore vests and old-fashioned blouses and had long beady necklaces. She smoked slims and hardly ever wore eye makeup. Over the years, my nostalgia for the hippy generation – for the revolution, for the protest, for Pink Floyd and the Beatles – had manifested itself in an affinity for seventies pornography. And Teegan, everything from her hair to her breasts – which I had never actually seen but could only imagine suited her demeanor and the rest of her outfit – were straight out of the ‘70s nudey tapes I used to steal from under my dad’s mattress.
“Are you who I think you are?” she asked sheepishly before lighting her menthol slim. “So your Jonathan --- ”
“This is Teegan.” I interrupted. “She’s one the students from the workshop.”
“That’s crazy. I was just going for a walk to get some fresh air.” She held up her smoke, immediately recognizing the irony. It was, of course, intentional. It was just as intentional as her accidently following us outside for a cigarette. She knew perfectly well who Jonathan was. We had read one of his stories in class, and like me she had been obsessed ever since.
I imagined that Jonathan would be immediately put off by this outward display of idol worship. But through the smoke that hovered just above his lips, he managed a small laugh and a half smile. This was big for Jonathan. Laughing and smiling at strangers were not common traits of a sardonic, alcoholic storyteller. This was out of character.
All she had to say was, “I’m looking forward to your talk,” and Jonathan invited her into the hotel lounge for a drink. I was paying of course. It seems that he too had a thing for seventies pornography.
My attempts to punctuate their conversation with clever anecdotes were complete failures. All I ever managed was the occasional, “That’s hilarious” or “What a funny story.” Truthfully, I wasn’t finding any of this hilarious or even remotely funny. Jonathan was mine and she was stealing him from me. Teegan was mine and he was stealing her from me. Anyway you looked at it, I was getting fucked. And not in the way they did in those tapes.
Teegan had the habit of peeling her beer bottle labels off and folding them into little paper cranes. It was something she picked up in elementary school and had stayed with her right through until she hit drinking age. She folded one and offered it to Jonathan. “That’s adorable,” Jonathan was saying. “Really, that is really adorable.” I could tell that he wanted to say that she too was adorable, but like me could never work up the courage.
Her face flushed red every time she spoke to him. With every one of his responses it would cool again, as if every one of the capillaries on her face had been spared embarrassment. Soon she started calling him Jon. I hadn’t worked up the courage to go beyond Jonathan.
They both laughed at every available opportunity. And then they would laugh some more and I was forced to laugh along with them. I didn’t know what else to do. I had nothing adorable to say to him. No witty remarks or cheap parlour tricks to grab his attention. I was an intellectual mute with no imagination and nothing important to say to anybody.
His speech, of course, was great. In front of an audience, Jonathan was just as endearing and clever as he was in print. He told the story about Jon from the Garfield comics eating his lasagna in-between the panels so as not to starve to death. He told us about being in a stand-up comedy karaoke bar and getting booed of stage for not delivering the punch lines on time. But despite his comic tone, these were just filler. They were the needless back-story that let us all know how clever Jonathan was. I was looking for something more. My story needed a climax. And Teegan was ruining my best chance at ever getting one.
You see, what really pissed me off about Teegan wasn’t that she wanted Jonathan. It wasn’t that she eventually got Jonathan. That was inevitable. Sure I was a little mad that Jonathan – who only hours earlier had confessed that I was his friend – was hitting it off with, and would probably eventually sleep with, the girl I wanted to sleep with, but that happens to me all the time. I would say it happens almost weekly, actually. No, what really got to me was that because of Teegan, Jonathan wasn’t doing anything. She was rendering him useless and uninteresting. My story was dissolving before my eyes and I hadn’t even had a chance to write anything down.
After his speech, we went out to a bar. The whole time Jonathan was making out with Teegan in the corner, drinking the scotch I paid for, or getting his ass kissed by writing students. He was turning my story into a cliché about betrayal and heartbreak, and how all your favorite idols turn out to be losers just like you. I wanted something original. I needed some action. I couldn’t bear the thought of going home without a story to tell. If I had an imagination I would have been able to make something up. I would have been able to make Jonathan into an interesting character. But I didn’t have an imagination. I was not creative. In order for me to tell an interesting story, something interesting actually had to happen to me. I needed Jonathan to be that something.
Twelve beers and a two-six of scotch later, we were back in my hotel room, acting like literary rock stars. Liquor bottles, pizza boxes, and cigarette butts littered the carpet. The muted television was playing the first installment of The Godfather. Jonathan and Teegan were cuddled on the couch, just waiting for the night to wane on far enough so they could make their exit. I imagined this is how rock stars must feel when they get the sense the party has to eventually end.
I was out on the balcony counting the cigarette butts smooshed into the snow, trying to determine which ones were mine, when I noticed the party was ending. Those three Golds was certainly mine, I thought. That menthol, though, must have been Teegan’s. That bitch. I watched them through the glass, curled up on the end of the painfully uncomfortable hotel couch, their legs hidden beneath a blanket, doing who knows what with their hands. Jonathan’s stories were more often than not about his childhood, and in my mind his character was an asexual pubescent oscillating between the ages of twelve and thirty-two years old. To imagine him caressing the inner thigh of another human being made me uneasy. He was again acting out of character.
Half way through my second cigarette, Jonathan caught a glimpse of my smoke and, like any addict, the sight of a nicotine fix tempted him to the balcony. Teegan resisted the urge.
“This has been really fun man,” he said. “The most fun I’ve had in long time, probably since my divorce.”
“No problem.” I disinterestedly lit my third. “Your talk was really great.” This is what my story with Jonathan had amounted to: small talk and empty compliments; both of us simply faking our way through a dull conversation because we were scared of silence. Like the rest of my life, Jonathan was boring, uninteresting, and unimaginative.
Have you ever read that Kurt Vonnegut novel, Breakfast of Champions? Anyway, it doesn’t really matter. The point is at the end of the book, Vonnegut is at a completely loss. He doesn’t know how to end it so he writes himself into the story. Like Vonnegut, it seems I too am scared shitless of endings. Even though I spend entire novels flipping to the back of the book, counting in my head how many pages I have left, when I get there I’m scared to read the last paragraph. That is how I felt at that moment, like Vonnegut sitting in that cocktail lounge watching his great story fall to pieces. I had to do something.
I leapt at Jonathan’s neck and within moments he was on the ground, his glasses were broken and I was on top of him. He was looking up at me with squinting bewilderment. Through his groans he managed to choke out the words that have been swirling in my mind to this day: “What the fuck do you want from me?”
Teegan must have noticed that we had disappeared from view because a few seconds latter, right after Jonathan’s perplexing question, she screamed another, equally perplexing one in my ear. “What the fuck are you doing Charlie!” I heard her but it took me a while to process the enormity of the question. I really had no idea. What was I doing? What was I planning to do with Jonathan now that I had him pinned? Was this my story? Was this my climax? “Get off of him!” she yelled.
With the help of some other writing students, Teegan eventually managed to rip me from his Jonathan’s pale frame. They held me down on the hardwood as she and Jonathan left the room. I can only imagine that they went back to his room where she dressed his wounds before they made sweet passionate love. Only afterwards, while smoking in bed, would they contemplate my actions, would they wonder what had gotten into me, would they wonder what my story was all about.
I’ve been reading Jonathan’s work endlessly since we met, wondering if he will ever mention our evening together, if I will find it interesting enough to write about. But in all the short stories and newspaper columns since, there’s been nothing about our encounter. After reading and rereading Jonathan, however, something did occur to me: Jonathan does write about his own life. In fact, he does so almost exclusively. His lead character is always a thinly disguised version of himself. His setting is always a thinly disguised version of his monotonous everyday life as a writer and newspaper columnist. Jonathan, as person and as character, is completely uninteresting and boring. He like me is after all. His life is nothing more than an unimaginative procession of meaningless events. But he still manages to write brilliant stories. He doesn’t go out of his way to make his life interesting; he just has an interesting way of telling stories about it. And I think that is what I wanted out of Jonathan. This was the climax I always imagined. I somehow believed that through Jonathan, I could harness the creativity and courage to render my life into something imaginative. In the end, maybe I did.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
I Blame the Internet
In the midst the greatest credit crisis in history, I’ve done something
really stupid – I went out and got myself a credit card.
How could I be so naïve? What compelled me to enter into a world I
had spent the better part of my adult life avoiding? And why now, when
the ship is about to sink, did I buy myself a first class ticket?
There is one simple answer: the Internet.
There are over 74-million credit cards in Canada – that’s more than
two for every adult over the age of 18. Canadians owed over $800
billion in credit card debt and are paying $22 billion in interest
rates every year. We use our little plastic cards to buy everything
from groceries, to clothing, to electronics and videogames. But
nowhere does the credit card dominate more than online.
You can buy almost everything online – t-shirts, CDs, porno videos,
books, even groceries that get delivered to your door within the hour.
But there is a catch – they won’t accept cash. And, more often than
not, the only form of money they do accept comes in the form of a
16-digit credit card number.
Since an early age, I have avoided the world of credit cards, the stock
market, and anything to do with banking besides my checking account.
While my some of friends were investing in RSPS and Mutual Funds, and were
religiously following the ebb and flow of commodity prices, I was still
wondering what those ominous acronyms stood for. I knew nothing about the
complicated world of Wall Street. I knew that there was some sort of
correlation between real money and those numbers and indexes you see on
the news, but I couldn’t figure it out. The Dow Jones Industrial, TSX,
Enron – these things meant nothing to me. Was Wall Street even a real
street? And what the hell were all those guys in those bright coloured
vests yelling about? Honestly, the details are still fuzzy.
As I got older I tended to disguise this ignorance by claiming a conscious
objection to credit world. I was a financial anarchist. I was going to
live my life under the radar. No mortgage, no credit rating, no stock
market, no loans – nothing that would associate me with the man. But
eventually, the man managed to suck me in through my computer screen.
I was never one of those crazy online shoppers. I don’t have an eBay
account. I don’t order the latest New York fashions from an online
boutique. I don’t seek out obscure records from obscure labels in
Austria. Until last week, the only “products” I ever got online I got
illegally by downloading them. Ironically, downloading illegally is what
pushed me to get a credit card.
Since torrent sites have essentially replaced most other peer-to-peer
software like LimeWire and Kazzaa, it is getting even harder to find
relatively obscure music. I am part of few invite only networks, but even
then finding entire spoken word poetry albums can be difficult. Apple’s
iTunes is kick ass for this kind of stuff, but the only way you can open
an account is with a credit card. Similarly, I was getting really into
eBooks and while you can find some on torrent sites, hyper nerdy sci-fi
collections or open-source textbooks dominate the selection. There was
none of the literature I was looking for – no Philip Roth, no Leo Tolstoy,
no Saul Bellow. The only way to get these books was to pay for them on
sites like Amazon.com. And, like iTunes, the only way you can order them
is with a credit card. This was the straw that broke my conscious credit
objector back. And so, with much reluctance, I filled out an online form
and got myself a credit card.
There are many factors contributing to the current financial crisis.
Among other things, bad bank loans and mortgages, poor government
oversight, and a faltering manufacturing sector have lead most of the
world’s major economies into recession. But at least part of the blame
for this credit crunch has to be shouldered consumer, as relates directly
to the massive increases in personal debt.
Since the mid-80s, credit card debt in Canada has more than tripled. As a
nation, we are spending more and going more and more into debt. This is
due at least in part to increased online spending.
There are other ways of paying online, such as PayPal – which can be set
up to take money right out of your bank account – but at the most popular
online stores like Amazon and iTunes, the card dominates. This is just
another step in making our purchases more abstract and less real. Not
only are we spending money we haven’t earned yet, we are spending in this
fantastical, consequence-free world that is the Internet. This kind of
thinking is fuelling our debt culture.
So far I’ve only spent $20 on my card. Both purchases were online. To
resist the temptation to spend, I keep the card in my desk drawer at home
and don’t bring it with me in my wallet when I leave the house. But every
time I see an online ad, or am offered a membership to some pay-only site,
or I see that Kanye West has a new remix album, I know that I have to the
power to purchase, but also the potential to go seriously into debt.
really stupid – I went out and got myself a credit card.
How could I be so naïve? What compelled me to enter into a world I
had spent the better part of my adult life avoiding? And why now, when
the ship is about to sink, did I buy myself a first class ticket?
There is one simple answer: the Internet.
There are over 74-million credit cards in Canada – that’s more than
two for every adult over the age of 18. Canadians owed over $800
billion in credit card debt and are paying $22 billion in interest
rates every year. We use our little plastic cards to buy everything
from groceries, to clothing, to electronics and videogames. But
nowhere does the credit card dominate more than online.
You can buy almost everything online – t-shirts, CDs, porno videos,
books, even groceries that get delivered to your door within the hour.
But there is a catch – they won’t accept cash. And, more often than
not, the only form of money they do accept comes in the form of a
16-digit credit card number.
Since an early age, I have avoided the world of credit cards, the stock
market, and anything to do with banking besides my checking account.
While my some of friends were investing in RSPS and Mutual Funds, and were
religiously following the ebb and flow of commodity prices, I was still
wondering what those ominous acronyms stood for. I knew nothing about the
complicated world of Wall Street. I knew that there was some sort of
correlation between real money and those numbers and indexes you see on
the news, but I couldn’t figure it out. The Dow Jones Industrial, TSX,
Enron – these things meant nothing to me. Was Wall Street even a real
street? And what the hell were all those guys in those bright coloured
vests yelling about? Honestly, the details are still fuzzy.
As I got older I tended to disguise this ignorance by claiming a conscious
objection to credit world. I was a financial anarchist. I was going to
live my life under the radar. No mortgage, no credit rating, no stock
market, no loans – nothing that would associate me with the man. But
eventually, the man managed to suck me in through my computer screen.
I was never one of those crazy online shoppers. I don’t have an eBay
account. I don’t order the latest New York fashions from an online
boutique. I don’t seek out obscure records from obscure labels in
Austria. Until last week, the only “products” I ever got online I got
illegally by downloading them. Ironically, downloading illegally is what
pushed me to get a credit card.
Since torrent sites have essentially replaced most other peer-to-peer
software like LimeWire and Kazzaa, it is getting even harder to find
relatively obscure music. I am part of few invite only networks, but even
then finding entire spoken word poetry albums can be difficult. Apple’s
iTunes is kick ass for this kind of stuff, but the only way you can open
an account is with a credit card. Similarly, I was getting really into
eBooks and while you can find some on torrent sites, hyper nerdy sci-fi
collections or open-source textbooks dominate the selection. There was
none of the literature I was looking for – no Philip Roth, no Leo Tolstoy,
no Saul Bellow. The only way to get these books was to pay for them on
sites like Amazon.com. And, like iTunes, the only way you can order them
is with a credit card. This was the straw that broke my conscious credit
objector back. And so, with much reluctance, I filled out an online form
and got myself a credit card.
There are many factors contributing to the current financial crisis.
Among other things, bad bank loans and mortgages, poor government
oversight, and a faltering manufacturing sector have lead most of the
world’s major economies into recession. But at least part of the blame
for this credit crunch has to be shouldered consumer, as relates directly
to the massive increases in personal debt.
Since the mid-80s, credit card debt in Canada has more than tripled. As a
nation, we are spending more and going more and more into debt. This is
due at least in part to increased online spending.
There are other ways of paying online, such as PayPal – which can be set
up to take money right out of your bank account – but at the most popular
online stores like Amazon and iTunes, the card dominates. This is just
another step in making our purchases more abstract and less real. Not
only are we spending money we haven’t earned yet, we are spending in this
fantastical, consequence-free world that is the Internet. This kind of
thinking is fuelling our debt culture.
So far I’ve only spent $20 on my card. Both purchases were online. To
resist the temptation to spend, I keep the card in my desk drawer at home
and don’t bring it with me in my wallet when I leave the house. But every
time I see an online ad, or am offered a membership to some pay-only site,
or I see that Kanye West has a new remix album, I know that I have to the
power to purchase, but also the potential to go seriously into debt.
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