Minutes Before Oblivion

Asynchronous:  This post should fall after "Swells Intimidating,"  and before "Then It's KCSM," ten posts back or so. 

I’m trying to calm down.  It’s four P.M. Beijing time.  This would be an absolutely insipid thing to have a heart attack over.  I note that the word “attack” in heart attack has two “t’s” Double flat.  Double attack.  Double consonant slate slabs tossed towards me, reminding.  

All I wanted to do was get on line.  This proved straightforward with my phone.  United demanded my ”united” password.  It is one of dozens.  I didn't know it.  I signed in as a guest.  Later, I reckoned, I’d switch over to the laptop.  

Hillary had just bested Donald in the debates.  I needed reinforcement that this wasn’t just me but that this was broadly established fact.  I read an article or two on my phone, aching to get on my computer and read these things “properly” on a screen a bit larger than a Head & Shoulders label.  No.  No.  No . . . And no again.  United was just not going to let this happen.  You need to be a member to switch from one device to another.  I see.  So I tried to change my password and I tried to sign in as a guest again and pay twice and I pressed the call button twice and generally behaved like someone trying to master great distress.  

The United stewardess and then the bursar were all patient, to a point.  Then their message was basically to restart and barring this to give up. Two hours of pointless cursing and another sixteen ninety tries and another $16.99 later, I was on line, with my laptop.  I’m frustrated less by being off line and more by the degree to which I was completely absorbed by this. I could have been perfectly productive, off line.  And I note that the magic of being on line is so completely seductive that it casts the entire life I lived for my first thirty years as somehow completely intolerable when forced to endure it.  

I’m looking at the map and we’ve just crossed the Aleutians but no, we haven’t gotten to the Canadian coast yet.  We’re still just over water somewhere.  Per my earlier calculation it is at least four more hours.  There goes another cart.  These gals . . . ANOTHER . . . these gals are working it tonight. Carts on parade.  

Holden was all upset last night.  He had a prostitute up to his room.  Then, he faked an illness and asked her to leave.  She referred to him as “crumb bumb” and departed, as requested.  The elevator pimp Maurice later came back with the lady of the evening and knocked until his Holden unadvisedly opened the door and was roughed up into paying five more dollars for the service he never consummated.   It would all be another night in fiction except for the fact that I was mid-novel through a read to my twelve year old.  I read the book when I was twelve, as well.  I had to get a note by my teacher at the time to read that.  I did.  But I was mid-scene asking myself, “did I read this?”

I covered up a bit.  Moved over a few scenes.  I was reminded of reading Dostoyevsky’s “Notes From The Underground” to my older daughter around the same age.  There is the point in that short story where the protagonist taunts a prostitute about the life she is living and I can recall pausing, and dodging when I read that bit aloud, as well.   

Holden, for those of you, like me before yesterday, don’t precisely recall, doesn’t actually do anything with this lady.  She comes in.  He’s embarrassed.  She is attractive to him for a while as well, until she isn’t.  Holden makes up an excuse.  She insults him.  Leaves . Returns later with the pimp, who demands twice what he’s originally suggested and ultimately socks Holden in the gut and steals the money and leaves. I was already pretty sleepy, but I tried to explain some of this, as best you can, in the fading minutes before oblivion. 

With Holden as the narrator, it can only be a phallocentric narration.  And it is as dreadful a summary of male, teenage sexual frustrations as there might be.  We’re not supposed to condone or forgive Holden but there he is, impulsively, understandably, tragically.  As soon as the fantasy is materialized, he’s frozen.  It has suddenly become repulsive.  He wants it to stop.  There is no longer any desire to realize anything with this person.  He tries to dissolve it and then he is delivered a violent moral lesson; desire is dangerous.