Resolutions

A new year is a beautiful thing, like a new friend with a new face. I am not sure if it is really good to be alive because I am getting older and my face looks worse than it did last year and many of the things I tried to accomplish this year turned out not to work. I also drink too much and I destroyed a perfectly good relationship because I don’t like being criticized. But so many people tell me that it is good to be alive and they have convinced me that I should resolve to think less about myself. You should think more about the world and less about yourself, they say. It is nice to have friends who are happy to be alive, who tell you that you should be happy because there is more to the world than just your own old face and your own crippling shame from whence you know not. I am happy to have old friends, but I resolve also to have new thoughts which will be like new friends with new faces.

Home

He realized that it was time to go. When he was at home the hours and days and weeks drifted away. He spent all day doing he remembered not what. It would exhaust him and at night he would find out who was where and go out drinking, and stay out late, until four or five in the morning, until he was sober again, and he could make the long drive home. He loved being home; he imagined he was suffering a terminal disease. The disease made everything easier because there was no hope. It was the kind of suffering that he knew he would long for again the moment it came to an end, like an orgasm. He knew it had to end, which made the suffering stop, but then he wouldn’t leave, which made the suffering go on.

John Hanson's Doubles

John Hanson liked to think of himself as doubled. When he had been a boy at the Minaki lodge he and his brother played a videogame called Kung Fu, in which two fighters moves across a two dimensional plane and produce sudden, deadly kicks or punches, as well as acrobatic leaps, which had to be expertly timed by moving two joysticks in different combinations. John thought endlessly about the game when he wasn’t playing it: pulling the joysticks apart made the fighter do a spinning roundhouse, tapping the left up and the right down then the left down and the right up did a flipping topspin kick. The moves in Kung Fu defined gravity and all logic. What thrilled him equally was the silence before the first blow, as the two warriors advanced and retreated, jumped forward or over their opponents, waiting for the right moment to strike. The matches were often over with only one move, which is why it had to be perfectly executed. Much preparation and deliberation were required. Executing a blow and failing to kill one’s opponent outright opened oneself up for an easy loss. The fact that there were two joysticks instead of the regular joystick and two buttons like most other games made him feel like he was playing two games at once, and the fact that the movements had to be combined in secret (and to his mind, infinite) ways meant that there was a mystic exponential growth of sophistication and technique involved in the doubling of anything. At night he would imagine what incredible spectacles he could make if he had another version of himself. He would perform incredible shows on stage, where he and his double would move in perfect synchronization, speak at exactly the same time, and then begin a battle to the death, in which almost an hour of silence would be concluded with one, deadly blow. Then it occurred to John that these spectacles would be dangerous, for if he was still in synchronization with his double, were he not able to control his two selves in different ways, he would be in danger of killing both versions of himself outright, meaning that there would be no more John Hanson at all. This fear coincided nicely with early puberty, when he began to think more of sex than of kung fu. He decided that a double of himself would also be ideal for giving and receiving sexual pleasure. In the act of love no one dies. But it would be a controversial thing to put on stage.

New Man

He woke up one morning feeling like a new man. People had described this feeling to him before, that feeling as if there was nothing in the world he could not do. He had no idea what he was going to do, or what it meant, or what he wanted in life. He didn’t really want to do anything, he was happy, but he felt as though if there was something he wanted to do, nothing could stop him from doing it.

Pebble and Clod

He was mysterious to her. It was partly because he earned over half a million a year and she was sure that no one could earn that much without having a mysterious and exciting job full of conflict and expensive lunches and beautiful secretaries. When he came to pick her up after a long day at work he smelled good and was clean and even the Land Rover always looked like it can just come from the car wash. She was glad that she was young and looked good because that’s what she had going for her. He had money and she was beautiful, she could put on blue jeans and an old T-shirt and her skin would just glow. He worshipped every part of her. She reminded him of the kinds of women he had wanted as a child, like the girls on his older sister’s field hockey team, young and strong and sweaty and stronger than the boys, girls who would never love him unless he drove a beautiful car one day and showered them with luxury. In fact, he was a heart surgeon, which required hours and hours of painstaking and difficult work, 6am mornings, 30 minute lunches, stress pills and two personal trailers, caffeine pills or Adderall to work, and valium to sleep. It was worth it. He had two hours of happiness a day. Ten minutes of that was when the nurses looked at him in admiration after a difficult operation, or when a patient thanked him for saving his life. The other hour and fifty minutes was time spent with her each night, when he picked her up, and she kissed him and over an expensive meal complained about her dad’s business and her difficult sister, then the thirty minutes of lovemaking they had in his apartment on the thirtieth floor the size of two tennis courts with windows for walls. He was always asleep by 1045pm, and she stayed up until 1am, watching old movies, drinking brandy, and chatting with brother in LA on the phone.

A girl and a bear

I remember her. She was a bit of a bitch back then but I heard she’s a lot nicer now. She lost her looks, some acne scarring or whatever, and then she started to care about people. That’s a good thing. It makes her a lot more attractive in my book. I think of her now with a baby bear, you know, pulling some fishing line out of its lungs, making sure the bear is OK and making the bear feel comfortable. In fact, to be honest, I like to think of her and I and that baby bear getting it on together in the woods. I mean, the bear is just watching: her and I are the ones getting it on. I’m kissing her and she’s got her hands all over me and the bear is just watching. The bear doesn’t leave because she pulled the fishing line out of its lungs, and the two of them are, like, best friends. Which means that if I do get with her I have to be aware that I’m getting with the bear – I mean, metaphorically – that the bear and her are a package. Anyway, I’m going to give her a call.

Cancer

She never thought cancer would change her life. It didn’t in any of the ways she would have expected. She didn’t find that she loved her husband or her kids more; she didn’t realize that life was short and to take better care of her parents; she didn’t feel a sense of solidarity with others suffering from cancer or others who had been through the same radiation treatments as her. Rather, she discovered an interest in pornographic literature and bowling. The former because she befriended and old woman there who had written many famous pornographic novels and had no shame about dying and would feel herself up at night while talking dirty. The latter because the whole time she was in the cancer ward she just wanted to buy a machine gun and kill people and run away and die somewhere and she told herself that if she ever got out of this fucking mess and got another chance to live she would go bowling and sleep with a bowler because bowlers, she always thought, were happy and uncomplicated and didn’t own machine guns and would appreciate pornographic literature.