Drunks are friendly when they're drunk, and drunks are hostile when they're drunk, which drunk it is it all depends upon.

But I can write. I can do that okay. And it sometimes intimidates me. But not so often. I read the first page of Jonathan Safran Foer's newish Novel, extremely loud and somethingish close or something to that effect. And that intimidates me. Because he is so young! And he is married. And a vegan jew. And he lives in Brooklyn. If I ever get up off my duff and go visit Will and Johanna in Brooklyn I am going to see if I can stalk him and take care of that "wife." But why?

My dad used to take me to the highschool where he taught with him sometimes when I was little. And I remember seeing shelves with lots of copies of the same books. It was like a really boring library. They would have 30-40 of the same books for students stored in these weird little rooms along with the audio/visual stuff that my dad would steal so we could watch videos or so he could shoot home movies or, at one time, his documentary on the Modoc Wars and, at a another time, his alter-ego Hans Vonribbentroff reading the Ginger Bread Man with his heavily phony german accented voiceover he used while he recorded turning the pages of a picture book of The Ginger Bread man that we had at home. But I remember thinking that those hightschool books were books that I would read when I was older and in highschool. But one time my dad and I were at the school, it was usually because he had to get something that he forgot and he would ask me, "Do you want to go to school with me?" and most of the time I would say "no." because I would be watching The Facts of Life or some other crap but sometimes I would say yes, surpising myself as much as my dad probably, and one time I saw rows and rows of Catcher in the Rye which had a burgundy cover with yellow writing. I think the version was printed in 1986 because I still have the copy that he gave me and it indicates that it was printed on or after 1986. He gave me Catcher in the Rye and told me to just read the first page and if I liked it I should read the whole thing. And the first page of that book is really really great.

"If you really what to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."

And then he goes into this stuff about his older brother, D.B. And I had this older brother and this older sister who I sort of had some warped impressions of since they were both quite a few years older than me. But my dad gave me this book when I was 10 and I was just starting to get an idea that things were not what they seemed.

About D.B. -
"He used to be just a regular writer, when he was home. He wrote this terrific book of short stories, The Secret Goldfish, in case you ever heard of him. The best in it was "The Secret Goldfish." It was about..." And that's where the first page ends. So of course I had to keep reading to find out what "The Secret Goldfish" was about. And of course when you are ten and all the books you've read are all judy blume and beverly cleary and suddenly there's this voice that is by turns adult and childish like you but not like an adult pretending to sound like a kid, like a real kid, like you, like how you think about your stupid phony parents and how you worship and hate your siblings, but not in a "i'm going to learn a life lesson about not hating my phony parents or not hating my brother and sister" because this isn't going to be resolved in any kind of life lesson sort of way. At least not in way I had been accustomed to. And maybe books aren't just a whole bunch of preachy trite cutesy crap and your brother and sister don't know anything more than you do and your parents know even less than that, and not in a "I think I know everything because I'm ten" way but in a real way, in a literary way, in a universal way. Sort of depressing, when you think about it. For a girl of ten. And it was. It was crippleingly depressing.


So this Jonathan Safran Foer kid writes in his first page, which I find amusing, and this is after this whole thing about tea kettles singing and training your anus to talk when you farted so that you could train it to say "wasn't me!" he goes on with this:

"What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboarded down the street at night you could hear everyone's heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone's hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don't really want to know about. That would be so weird, except that the placed in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies woudn't have had time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York City Marathon it would sound like war."

I like the part about the marathon sounding like war.

And the rest of it too. The suspense is killing me. I hope it lasts. That's the thing about starting to read what seems to be a really good book. It never lasts.

I've been thinking lately alot about the strange sense of constants I had when I was a youngster. For an example of what I mean by this I would like to tell an anecdote about myself. Fancy that. Another anecdote about myself. I don't remember how old I was, but I think that the "new" car is an 87 or an 88 now so maybe I was at the same age as when I read Catcher in the Rye. Wouldn't that be funny? Maybe that's why I'm reminded about all this stuff at the same time, because it happened at the same time. Anyway, the car that I am referring to is my grandmother's big grey something or other car. I don't know what kind it is because I'm not into cars. But she and my grandpa used to have this really cute little two door orange sportsy kind of car when I was young. I loved it. I thought of it just like the dukes of hazard car, which was a show I wasn't permitted to watch due to the fact that it was crappy. My parents had strange standards of what was okay for me to watch and what wasn't, mostly based on what they thought was really crappily put together t.v. that just sucked and was painful for them to watch. But really well made funny porn, had such a thing been around in the eighties, or if say , The Sopranos or Deadwood or Six Feet Under had been on in the eighties, they wouldn't have had any problem with me watching that. But I loved this orange car my grandma and grandpa had and when I heard they had gotten this new car and gotten rid of the the old one I was really pissed off. And upset. And I STILL miss that car. I can remember what it was like to sit on the cream colored pleather-like interior, painful in winter and summer, pleasant in spring and fall. And I remember being absolutely shocked, torn asunder, when I realized that this car would not be their car forever. And I had never been able to jump through the window feet first, not even once, even though I had asked to on several occasions. Can you believe that shit? I can't.

That was a rather long anecdote in order to introduce what may be a shorter one. The old neighbord has desolved and I am having a post-modernist moment in my life much like I did with the orange car betrayal in which I realize that the idea I had about my neighborhood is so far far far away or behind or ahead of what it really is or was. And it has been changing for years, and the more it changes the more I realize it was never like I remember it. And in so far as it is ludicrous to feel personally wronged by the fact that my grandparents were able to afford a new nice car for like the first time in their lives, it is ludicrous to feel this forlorn nostalgia that has been recently triggered for my picturesque neighborhood with the seedy underbelly that never was and worsened by the fact that the De La Fuentes are moving. I could try to explain how this makes me feel but the fact is, they can move if they want. They are probably moving somewhere really nice with a lot of land and now that they don't have 4 children at home, they probably don't need a big two story victorian house that is entirely impracticle and involves a lot of annoying upkeep, frozen pipes in the winter, electricy problems, general age and decay and oldness. Maybe they are moving into a nice brand new home where there are more modern comforts.

But it is more change, and I don't like it. Because they aren't the only ones. The Harmses left a few years ago and the people that moved into their house painted it and changed things about it that are subtle but very noticible to me and now they are selling the house. And the Evils moved, which was a very freeing, wonderful, overwhelmingly weightlifting feeling, especially for me for reasons I can't begin to go into, but still strange, and I am actually more reminded of the Evilness in their absence than I was when things were as they always were and they lived there. And what is left of the Bacons are moving. Sir Lawrence Bacony, as he would introduce himself to me when he called my dad on the phone, died a couple years ago of a heart attack. His widow is selling the house now. And the old woman Ruth, who bought the house next to the Bacons many many years ago but who I still think of has an interloper, is selling her house. I still think of it as the LeBaron's house, the family who lived there until I was bout 6 or 7. The Fioruccis are now occupying two houses on the block and I am perhaps stupid to believe that they are probably not going anywhere. Even though I know that I can't rely on these things to be the constants in my life that I depend on emotionally to bring me back to a place of home, I can't help it. So they'll probably move too, and I'll be shocked all over again.

And The Catcher in the Rye that I read when I was ten changed every year when I reread it, which I did every year until into college. And if I reread it now, it would be completely different. For instance, his brother was not really a prostitute when Holden says, "Now he's out in Hollywood, D.B., being a prostitute." What he was was a sell out, a phony, out in hollywood writing shitty movie scripts instead of writing great short stories. But for years and years I thought it meant that his brother was out in Hollywood, being a prostitute. It made the whole thing a little more interesting.

The reason I won't ever learn this lesson, that there are no constants, is because I don't realize how much I rely on these constructs of youth, or even remember them, until they are threatened or gone. In short, Home is not where the heart is. Home is not where you hang your hat. Home is an illusion, lunch at home, doubly so.