What if you could only say exactly what you mean?
Would you still want to be selfless, or would sometimes you be
able to fill the longing, and to care
And all you did was sit around and breathe the
sounds like eyes closed make a symphony.
Would there still be infinity to work for?
And what if things were perfect, and your characters were friends
And your thoughts are hardly startled,and you think you've reached the
part where calmness takes its toll
Can you reach into your
innermost depths, retrieve something that's the essence of you,
something terribly familiar, but altogether

Do people actually put banana slices in their cereal, or is that just in commercials? If so, how does everyone know that?
Joel had always thought that the cross section of a banana looked somewhat like a face, as if by cutting it in half one could see the true feelings of the banana. On his cereal today he neatly arranged ten screaming faces.

Heather opened her eyes a sliver, awoken by the sound of something she didn't want to know about coming from Delia's room. Unfortunately through her veil of eyelashes the first sight her eyes fell on was the green blanket piled on the radiator across the room, which evoked feelings too incendiary for her to pretend she wasn't awake. This blanket represented to Heather either absolute proof or absolute disproof of divine justice. Several years ago, Heather and Delia's grandmother had given them blankets for Christmas. They weer suede on the outside and downy on the inside. She gave Delia the lily pad green one and Heather the brick red one. Blind to the utility and obvious beauty of the gifts, Heather was immediately enraged--engulfed in her rage--because her room, and all the things in it, were shades of pink, while Delia's things were so haphazard and eclectic that any color would do. She managed to bury her horror at this lapse in judgment and was able to behave civilly to the whole family, no less to Delia and Grandma herself, both of whom were completely oblivious of anything wrong. It became apparent to Heather in the ensuing celebration, as her mind raced uncontrollably through all the possible logistics that could have caused this nightmarishly minor faux pas, that one of two things was almost incontrovertibly true: either the universe really was spontaneously set into motion by an exponentially unlikely chain of events, beginning with stars and reaching up through Heather's hellish present, because this kind of sublime mistake of chance could only be manifested in the most random and detached of worlds; or, there exists an all powerful deity and he, she or it had maliciously and intentionally caused Grandma to accidentaly switch the nametags on the identical boxes, and then to forget whose was whose anyway (and probably wonder, how much could it matter?), thereby plunging Heather into the fires of contemptuous indignation and forcing her to ruminate, for several years now, almost obsessively on the possibility of a God bigger than the universe and Its coexistence with pointless suffering, infinitely more passionately than she ever had before the blanket incident.

And so began poor Heather's day; she shuffled out to the miniscule kitchen to distract herself from her morning depression by making tea.

Delia's multi-colored bush of hair seemed particularly alert today.

Yes, Delia and Heather are cousins, though they are as different as their reactions to the fraternal blankets. Heather is often mistaken for an anemic preteen while Delia, tall and generously endowed, looks as if she is trying to push her flowers to their pigmentations' limits by visual stimulation alone. After dinner, she had casually observed to Heather, "I already have something lily pad green. Want to trade?" Somehow, this reversal of fate contributed nothing to her breakneck existentialism.

"Can you work in the shop today?" asked Delia. Her voice generated overtones akin to an opera singer's, though she spoke without theatricality or pretension. In fact she had no idea at all she sounded like a mezzo soprano, which only added to her charm, to people who notice these things.

Heather made her wait until she had microwaved her tea, stirred in a ghastly amount of milk and used this concoction to clear the cocoon from her mouth before she answered.

"You need me to?"

Quite convinvingly: "I'd love you to. There about a half dozen weddings next week, and they all want the biggest arrangements we have. Are you free?"

Delia is an anomaly. She is remarkably bright, yet impossibly stable. She both thinks about and is at peace with the world. She enjoys tending to flowers and so she manages a florist shop. Vibrant colors lift her spirit so she surrounds herself with them. Large engines trouble her so she drives a compact car. In fact she is so stable and intelligent that she knows she is both, and tries to share her good fortune, primarily with Heather.

Heather instantly recognized a way to distract herself from her inevitable mid-afternoon depression. Something to do! Something necessary!

Delia turned toward her.

"Do you feel okay?"

Her eyes were fixed on the wall and her hands groped at her stomach. Lips moving soundlessly, she lurched forward as if dry heaving. She was standing in a puddle.

"Oh my gosh," muttered Delia and instinctively jumped forward to accompany her friend to a sitting position.

"Heather," she said, "did you even know you were pregnant?"

Disclaimed

Characters seem to be exempt from morality. Mariel Nicosovic--as a character, not a human being--has no obligation to notice or work to alleviate the poverty in her backyard, or to reflect on the absurdly inflated death rate around the corner from her mansion. It is her duty as a character, only existing from the outside, to tirelessly spend her efforts on the upkeep of her preposterously large house, hiring people to train the domestic help, ignoring her kids, buying new boots every season, and appearing at important social functions, all within the same universe--the same zip code--as young black men who are more likely to either murder or be murdered than learn long division.

The premise is: M.N. does not care about the cycle of violence. But that's okay, because she has such a distinct personality.

To tell a story--a made-up one--about a world of people whom the plot depends on to be ridiculous and nonsensical is to detach oneself from the events and to wash one's hands clean of moral responsibility. In other words, a plot that derives from its characters' inability to act humanely condones immorality by immortalizing it.

Is it necessary to be a solipsist for your life to be a good story?

For instance, the novel Trainspotting is about a bunch of heroin addicts. If they all made the right decision (to stop using heroin), there would be no Trainspotting. Trainspotting, arguably, is a good thing--first, if only because it is a book, and books are objectively and inherently good; and second, because it is a good book, well-written, innovative, imaginative, highly enjoyable, insightful. Why is it acceptable to suspend morality for the higher cause of a good book? It only encourages suspending morality in one's own life. Either: it is necessary to have an outlet, a way of exploring the path, the results of immorality, so that people do not suppress their wandering thoughts; or, it is an atrocity to invent evil and bring it so close to daily life that it is at times hardly separable. Or, people who are most susceptible to the invented immorality of novels are the least likely to read them, so it doesn't matter.

thoughts on the isolate

Today I came to a realization so startling that it can only be described as blog-worthy, I suppose (I mean that tongue-in-cheek, but it's true that this is my first time using The Hour as a journal). Anyway, at training this afternoon we had to say something about ourselves that people wouldn't know by looking at us, so I said I was born deaf, because it was the most interesting thing I could think of that didn't sound like I was bragging. It occurred to me (hours later) that people might have taken that to mean I was deaf for several years, or something, because I neglected to explain that it was due to an ear infection, not deafness as a curse itself, and only lasted a couple weeks. For those same reasons, of course, I almost never think about it. But while playing the piano and silently cursing my ringing ear I suddenly saw it from a different perspective: "I got my hearing back. It's not perfect, but I don't know what I did to get it back at all."

What black thing should I wear today? wondered Jessi, coming dangerously close to wry self-awareness before being distracted by her reflection. She was painfully close yet still acutely far from realizing that she could fulfill the dual roles of spectator and star simply by talking, and listening, to someone.

You might wonder, what was Joel doing in Ghana that whole time? Why, he was writing a poem. He scribbled it from start to finish in one sitting, then spent the next two months tirelessly revising it; then he copied it for his own records on the back of a pay stub and put it in a hardcover Zadie Smith novel for safekeeping.


I was right: I broke the chains
(or stretched them) and reached the edge--clearly I saw
not the sun but the inside of yet a larger cave. With larger shadows

Like kittens raised in darkness I have only ever seen the cave wall. For one thousand years I have only seen a cave wall. Did my eyes develop only to the contours of a cave wall? Can
I see anything else? I can imagine something else--

The kittens, at least, are unafraid of darkness. I myself am quite accustomed. In fact, the darkness even takes shape for me and my eyes see light around it--

Who's hallucinating? I don't see anything that's not here. I think.

I reattach the chains, return to my place, content (deny)
having something to want.

The important thing is not to get arrogant. (How did I know what a sun was?)

What bothered Heather about the unfortunate situation of giving birth was not so much that the child had no eyes, but that he was blind, and what nauseated her about his blindness was that there was no hope for the reinstatement of his sight, and what was most unstomachable about that was that her body had failed to create for its fetus an integral body part that would so concretely and irretrievably dictate the baby's life. How could she have failed so miserably at something that was so completely beyond her control? How could she be expected to make any right decisions on an overtly conscious level when her own uterus, without any input from her, had so tragically and unspeakably failed her?

Furthermore, it was her own physiology that had betrayed her, first by refusing to honor the cardinal rule of pregnancy--that its afflicted gain weight--and then by neglecting to form, without explanation or apology, two organs which are so terribly relevant to a person's upbringing. Heather was now sublimely afraid of her own body, which she now knew had the power to unleash untold suffering on an innocent being, and it was only a matter of time before it turned such unharnessed aggression against her.


Joel's living room had hardwood floors. In his bedroom the carpet was red with cloud-like shapes carved into the threads. The cupboards were smooth and white and the ceiling was white too. The kitchen floor was the same hardwood as the living room but had been covered with a pattern of metallic blue and purple to look like a calming ocean at sunset. Sometimes Jessi claimed she had an artist's temperament, as if her painting ability was not an end but justification of her atrocious behavior. The painting was very convincing and for longer than Joel realized, Jack did not think that water had to be wet. The soft, round pools of light on the kitchen floor, where Jack spent a great deal of time, mirrored the amorphous, unlabeled images floating in his mind, and they gave him a sense of profound agreement between the worlds within and outside him. Thus he grew up, thanks to Jessi's artistic caprice, with both an unshakable spiritual tranquility and a fundamental misunderstanding, neither of which were known to Joel.