BLOCKQUOTE.org

My God, you can stay more or less happy doing your work and enjoying the flesh and the company of friends until you get a glimpse of the way poor people perceive the world.

Archimedes Nionakis in Andre Dubus's "Land Where My Fathers Died"

It’s the same for the way wealthy people perceive the world.

And the moderately affluent, I mean the ones who go in for nice big fenced-in yards. These ones, along with the concealed carry set. But more and more too it’s the commuters who find SUVs attractive, you know, in case there’s an accident. Then too, it’s the guys who get hepped up when dudes check out their girls, and it’s the girls who call the dudes creeps to keep them away. But it’s also the nominal creeps themselves, microaggressed from years of hearing they’re creeps.

Basically it’s anybody who hasn’t learned how to live with people, that is, how to maintain a peace. Before long anyone with a mind for other people’s problems feels the affliction as an affliction and speaks up or speaks out, though speaking is only naming the problem by a new name; it’s nothing like resolution.

School counselor.

1.

“and my therapist says, [redacted],” she says.

“Your therapist?” I ask. Winter, bare trees, overcast.

“My therapist,” she says.

“[redacted] mentioned seeing a therapist,” I say.

“So do [redacted] and [redacted]. And [redacted],” she adds, “and [redacted] and [redacted] have the same therapist.”

“Am I the only one in the group not seeing a therapist?” I ask.

“We get six weeks of it included with tuition,” she says. “Maybe you should give it a try,” she says.

2.

A lounge of browns and grays, institutional cushioning, recycled computers, secondhand magazines. I ask for the restroom. The receptionist smiles. I take a candy. The skies are oppressive. They’ll call to schedule.

3.

My footfalls grind salt into the steps. Thick gray air. The receptionist directs me to the lounge. I take a candy. She smiles.

Intake is a room of desk lamps. He reviews my answers to the questionnaire. History of depression? “No,” I reply. Medications? “None.” Feelings of hopelessness? “I’m in grad school.”

Beat.

Shoulder laugh.

Support system? “My parents. And a couple friends up north. My best friends. They’re great, I love them.”

Beat.

“You … ‘love’ them?” he asks.

Beat.

“Yeah,” I reply.

Beat.

Scribbling on his legal pad. He looks up at me looking at him. There’s a question on my face. He leaves it there. He has more questions.

School counselor.

Her office radiator clangs. She leans to gape at me through Coke bottle lenses. Her alto is a rattle and her teeth are all wrong. “I’m afraid I’ll always be alone,” I say. I am nineteen. “Maybe you’re supposed to be alone,” she erupts with a grin. Some then-undiscovered part of me recoils. She pulls two weeks of Paxil from a drawer and eyes my guitar case — she knows my instructor. “Tell him I said hello.” He is wincing, fifteen minutes later, and then he looks at me, and casts a kindly smile. Then he says we should tune up.

Back inside my dorm I turn the Paxil over in my hands. In an instant the box becomes a portal to the future. It’s the kind of future that I can make a definite choice about, right then and there. Post-its slide to make the box a place inside my desk, in case I change my mind. I don’t.

Electronic records.

The customer database at our town’s video rental shop had a blank in the account screen where clerks could leave their coworkers a note about a customer. Every so often, after scanning somebody’s member card, you’d see the corner of a clerk’s mouth curl.

When I think about the future, I imagine it turning out something like that.

The same everywhere, everywhere the same.

Instead of questioning the political value or editorial meaning or basic validity of a distributed media presence, we are struggling to iron out the wrinkles between technologies that threaten the integrity of the way things look. At the dawn of the age of the behemoth, this strikes me as an extremely small view of the world.

Jessica Helfand, "Bigger, Better, Weirder: Age of the Behemoth," in Screen, 2001

Heat. Heat and air so thick the windows won’t let in a cross breeze because there is no breeze. Thick hot air. At ten p.m. the moon wears a wide hazy halo. The neighborhood is winter quiet nodding off on a summer night. Air conditioners rattle. Overhead an airplane shrieks. Beside a garage an ancient couple jitters on their canes. A young mother jaywalks in the orange light. Two dark shapes pass by together under trees. My mind shifts and spins. I finger my keys. I give thought to driving, anywhere, wherever, wherever. I wonder about keying cars, the sound of it, the hand-feel. For a moment meaning stops meaning, words stop, stopping stops stopping, all things hanging and stagnant. Not a cat, not a rat, no shuffling, no sound. Then a step, another. One key, turn, then the other, turn. Stair light off, in, the fans churn. Toothbrush, water glass, two cubes, a third cube. Tuesday Wednesday Thursday on and on like Monday, the forecasted, the promised, threatened same. They say once long ago residents dragged their pillows to the parks to escape the night heat, as though it wouldn’t meet them there.

“It’s so nice to see young faces!” she said.

“It’s so nice to see old faces!” I said.

Close enough.

Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable — which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.

Marilynne Robinson's John Ames in Gilead

The urban experience.

Elbow to elbow, shoulder to shoulder on a midwinter El. In the morning rush, when you set your ears on the sound, sniffles rise like crickets in a meadow, all at once surrounding you — at every possible distance, in every possible direction.