Inflated with wine the other night, I said one or two unkind things about my grandmother (on my father’s side) which I regret now, not because I don’t think they’re true, as far as that goes, but because it’s not very gracious to speak ill of others when they’re gone, especially when they are family. I would like to say a couple of more flattering, or at least more sympathetic, words about her now.

The first, and probably the last, thing that should be said about my grandmother is that, as far as I can tell, she really did care about us in her own way. Our relationship was always perhaps a sort of generic one between grandparent and grandchild, nor do I suspect that her attitude towards and treatment of my brother and me would have been much different no matter what we were like. But, after all, her responsibility to us, ethically speaking, lay in that familial relation, and ethical duties tend by their nature to be general and impersonal. That our relationship didn’t evolve into something more personal and individual, as it did with my other living grandparents, is unfortunate, but it can’t really be considered blameworthy. She fulfilled her responsibilities and duties to her family, and I would be lucky to be able to say the same for myself.

Then, too, her family responsibilities were perhaps greater in some respects than that of many people. For one thing, she was the second wife of my grandfather, who already had a son by a previous marriage. His first wife had died, and he married my grandmother just before shipping out to Europe during the Second World War (the timing, as you might imagine, was not entirely a coincidence). So rather than the support of a husband and the prospect of children of her own, her first experience of marriage, and for several years thereafter, was: the burden of a life alone, and the necessity of supporting herself; the uncertainty of not knowing when, or if, her husband would come home; the anxiety of worrying about whether he might be killed or maimed; and the responsibility of raising another woman’s child. It was almost a kind of bait-and-switch: she went to the altar with a man, and got instead as a companion an alien child that she had to take care of.

And this was in some ways more typical of her marriage than a house full of family and kin, because while my grandfather did return home alive, he died relatively young, and she survived him by three decades. Unlike him, she never remarried. So you could say that her marriage greatly exceeded the bounds of her life together with her husband. She had friends, of course, and a male companion of sorts during her last good years, but they didn’t live together, it wasn’t the same thing as having someone to turn to when you hear strange noises in the night, having someone to eat with on windy evenings and to wake up with on sunny mornings. It’s strange, because I always thought of her as someone that could never stand to be alone, but alone is basically what she was for most of her life. At least part of this, her perseverance through the first absence, during the war, has to be credited to her devotion and loyalty. I don’t know whether this is also why she never married again, but it seems to me that, without any proof to the contrary, we ought to assume that it was.

Her life alone was not much relieved by visits from her surviving family members, since we did not particularly seek out her company in her declining years. I, for one, saw her, to be perfectly honest, as narrow-minded and prejudiced, which certainly wasn’t conducive to closeness. I worried about those traits because I perceived them in myself and tried to excise this heritage from my personality, which probably made me harsher towards her, unfairly so, to the point that I even saw her death the very week that I moved to Paris for a year as a symbolic sign of the possibility of breaking free of the provincial benightedness that she represented for me. This is not quite as unkind as it sounds, because, as I suggested, at least it shows an awareness that our criticism of others generally has its origin in our anxiety about our own defects, and in my case, at least, my hostility was really directed mostly at elements of myself as part of a conscious struggle to improve my character. And she was more than merely a symbolic proxy, because obviously there was very likely a causal connection between her possession of certain personality traits and my own. And yet I failed to draw the most obvious conclusion from this: if she passed on certain undesirable qualities to me, if, that is, they are heritable, then rather than being some gratuitous bit of malignity inflicted on me by her, as I somehow vaguely and irrationally felt them to be, she very likely got them in turn from some ancestor, and not by choice. So she would have had just as much right as me to regard herself as a victim of heredity, and may even, like me, have felt a certain amount of suffering at being subject to those flaws.

And in addition (to the extent that the mind is an extension of the body and analogies can hence be drawn with it), while the weaknesses and debilities of the body are manifold, except in a few crises of infection health is seldom improved by simply amputating parts of it. Rather, they must be nourished and strengthened. Of course I don’t mean that prejudice and narrow-mindedness should be nourished and strengthened. In order for the analogy to make any sense you have to view these, as I do, not as discrete traits but as failings of perception and sympathy, a weakness that in her case culminated in a full-scale wasting away of the mind in her last years. It might be somewhat in a person’s power to lower their risk of this happening through the cultivation of certain more (mentally) healthy and active habits, but much the same could be said about heart disease, yet we don’t blame someone if they contract that. This was an ordeal and a hardship of the same order for her and those around her (especially my father, who assumed ultimate responsibility for her care), and hence deserving of compassion. I’m not sure that I ever adequately felt or showed this to her while she was alive. I hope that at least perhaps I can now for those that still remember her.

I like to hear the rumble of thunder in the air, I think it shows that God is still hungry. He has no more need of inquisitors here on earth below: the weightlifters of the world are hard at work like snails salting their own pseudopods. Not only do they pull and poke and yank at themselves with racks, whips and pulleys in dungeons of their own devising, but most of the unpleasant things that come out of their mouths in the throes of a huge squat, for example, seem to almost take the form of thwarted prayers which have turned away from heaven’s direction like ingrown toenails. Why do I torture myself like this too? Maybe I’m haunting my own body. Sometimes I don’t feel quite aligned with it. I’ve started to think that travel is a continuous display of disloyalty to your home, but perhaps under your own skin there isn’t a home either. Progress doesn’t refine existence, it just magnifies it. Supposedly the king at Versailles would hold court while sitting on his commode. Big deal. Today you can sit in chair kind of like that, encased in a metal box, and let the toxic fumes spewing out the back shoot you down the highway at 70 mph. Since for humankind a vibration in the throat seems to be the appropriate response to virtually everything-love, a flower, attack from the air by bat-it’s a pity we can’t have a flaring of the gills as well.

Every prophet describing the rewards that await after death runs the risk of making promises they can’t keep, but they could at least stand to be clear about what they’re offering. When Mohammed offered the potential martyrs to his faith 72 virgins, which supposedly may also be translatable/interpretable as 72 raisins or grapes, he chose a fine time to get all cagey with his devotees. Even if they are real virgins, I’ve always thought applying to a liberal arts college with lots of English majors was a simpler and less destructive way to find more than 72 of them than blowing up a bus in Tel Aviv, though I’ve known more than one person who has probably thought about doing the latter after having a college application rejected. And then too I’m not sure you could find that many virgins at my undergraduate institution, but I attribute that at least in part to the decision of the founder, despite being named Philander, to erect the college as a seminary 50 miles from the nearest city in order to discourage the students from drinking or having sex, whereas in reality, with no city and hence no cultural activities to speak of within the next three counties, students now do virtually nothing else. But at least that attempt to impose chastity for religious reasons went less brutally awry. And those that do decide to kill themselves in some excessively dramatic way in order to get their virgins better hope that those virgins aren’t the other 71 guys that had the same idea.

Of course if it is just grapes, well, ordinarily I don’t feel like death is warranted to attain that which can be gotten as $3.99 blue light special at the supermarket. But how is it that any language or culture could get grapes and virgins confused in the first place? When are those two things interchangeable? I grant you they both bleed red when you poke them, but still. At least you can de-virginize the grape juice by making it alcoholic. So maybe the prophet is leaving a subtle clue that God is really just like one of the sleazy owners of what one of my friends calls “lady bars,” and all his promises, like theirs of “Ladies! Ladies! Hot! Hot!”, is really just a ruse to get people to come in and buy overpriced booze, and will eventually trickle away, like so many nights on earth, into excessive drinking and a disappointed wank-off.

Yesterday my parents and I went to an upscale Mexican restaurant, which blessedly broke the chain of indistinguishable enchilada-and-burrito shacks metastasizing throughout Denver. But this restaurant was the exception that proves the rule: as soon as the white tablecloths and red wine come out, the waiters and busboys drawn from the owner’s 25 teenage cousins, who are almost capable of growing a single mustache among the lot of them and who seem so intrinsic to the experience of the Mexican restaurant, immediately disappear. Actually, I kind of missed those guys. I didn’t even get to hear incomprehensible and barbaric Mexicali slang being hurled listlessly back and forth over the heads of the uncomprehending gringos, who naturally sometimes get intentionally or incidentally tarred by it en route. This is why I don’t agree with people that think that Spanish and English are just going to merge together seamlessly into one big homogeneous mass. Like in medieval England, where the all the farm animals had Germanic names, whereas the meat and other food delicacies were in French, even if they do ultimately create a combined polyglot I suspect English and Spanish will remain more neighbors than sexual partners, rubbing against each other but monopolizing different areas and regions of life, with English confining its influence to things like flowers, financial chicanery and the more esoteric sorts of sexual degeneracy, while Spanish dominates the realms of cleaning supplies, weed whackers and domestic abuse.

In this impudent little suburb, people stare at me all the time like real estate agents or child molesters. I feel picked out of a crowd. Today is my birthday, so I went to have a drink with a couple of friends at a boutique beer bar in Denver last night. We sat on the patio, a charade Coloradans maintain even though it has become an obsolete social custom, since instead of its usual progressivist, rationalist sunniness the climate has entered a Romantic or Modernist phase, with the perpetual gloom and mopey dampness of a uterus. With the little residual headache I have from last night, today I feel like a fetus being aborted.

A girl who was there with us asked if dogs are color-blind. That would represent a certain social ideal, but I have my doubts. What about like those racist dogs that have been trained to only bark at Mexicans? She also praised the nudist maniacs who staged some sort of semi-protest bike ride in Boulder the other day in support of their crusade to be allowed to always be on the go with no clothes on or something. With that as their ideal, the residents of a refugee camp are already living in a better world.

On the way home I couldn’t help nodding off in the front seat. My friend who was driving me said I looked like I was watching opera.

Many people assume that the Genesis story must be the work of a misogynist because of the supposedly nasty way it presents Eve, but I suspect the hand of a woman. The original sin comes about because of a woman eating when she’s not supposed to, then she persuades her heterosexual life partner to do likewise and they and their descendants have to spend the rest of eternity exercising it off. What man would have that much of a dietary hang-up? I also don’t understand how any modern day evangelists can read that and conclude that work and labor are as sacred as God’s own pet iguana. Isn’t the whole point that work and labor themselves are the punishment and payback for unredeemed miscreants? Yet they go about praising work like S&M enthusiasts contemplating being whipped and flayed in hell. If the Bible were really written in that spirit God would have been bragging about achieving full global employment after exiling Adam and Eve and having rid the Garden of welfare queens and social parasites.

Whatever, this is far from the only economic concept on which the usual social views are completely contradictory. The media, in particular, love to write stories about how peoples’ lack of confidence in the market and pessimism about the future will cause the collapse of the economy. And they seem incapable of looking both directions on anything. If inflation has stopped, we are in dire danger of deflation. If they were reporting on crossing a street, no one would ever make it to the other side. If no cars were coming from the left, they would announce that all the cars on the street must therefore be coming from the right, casting grave doubts on the possibility of ever making it past the lane divider. My theory, on the other hand, is that anyone will do any job with the right manipulation. For instance, scientists have been trying to cultivate special prokaryotes that can clean up oil spills and radioactive material by ingesting them. Whereas I’m pretty sure if you just added enough sugar and caffeine and carbonated the whole mess teenagers from near and far would come to lap it up.

When not flying around the world incessantly in private jets hectoring people to use less fossil fuels, Al Gore and his ilk may see themselves as trying to preserve the “pristine” places of the world, but even the most audaciously tall mountain or reprehensibly tick-filled forest is fenced in–by expectations, ideology and idées reçues. They are, in short, big clichés. Me, I dream not of saving points in space but moments in time that haven’t yet been cut and plowed and mowed over, but which my imminent employment severly endangers with regimentation. Like the pre-dawn, that dark Scandinavia-like continent where the wind blows and the sun refuses to shine. Or the period before a summer afternoon thunderstorm, when color shines from the plants particularly luridly, as if they were going to explode from within before getting swept away from without. These moments come and go so quickly, whereas the seeing eye unimaginatively remains, that I think perhaps the mind, like most other things that are able to last a long time, is the most insensitive rather than the most sensitive part of its environment, like the skull that endures after the eyes and nose and tongue and brain have vanished. Maybe these little moments of the day can only survive there, in the memory by transforming into a harder, lifeless form, like petrified wood, in which mineral deposits fill up the cell walls, replacing the meat of the tree with stone.

Although recently talk of “accountability” and “change” has engorged the sails of political blather in Washington like a giant erection, the plan to shut down Guantánamo while simply spreading the detainees around to different prisons around the world, as if Guantánamo’s particular genius loci had any intrinsic importance, puts me in mind of those McDonald’s McCafé commercials where coffee makes people feel better about their menial and/or degrading tasks. I have visions of CIA agents electrocuting the nads of some Iraqi car thief to gain information about the movements of the Taliban in western Pakistan–“torture.” Then, the same scene, but now with the agents holding mochas with whipped cream–“torturé!”

The reform impulse isn’t necessarily completely insincere; I doubt even the CIA agents imagined that their training would consist of a kind of bizarro reverse medical school. But the fact that the government apparently doesn’t plan on prosecuting anyone important enough to actually give a real order reminds us that the wheels of justice conform to the same rules that 18-wheelers do at the interstate weigh stations: how much you pay depends on how much weight you have to throw around. Lord knows we’ve seen that monogamy, the amusing idea that the blind wildfire of love should be directed with the precision, stability and exclusivity of property rights, is about the only principle in the name of which they are willing to call the headest of honchos to account. I suspect this is largely because, with the exception perhaps of a few of D.C.’s costliest and most decorated hookers, this kind of scandal only implicates the individual target, rather than the entire political class. The relative infrequency of other kinds of scandal is probably because the warring factions are only once in a while able to unearth shady dealings of their rivals that don’t involve their own side as well.

Yesterday I went to my brother’s graduation ceremony at UPenn. I recognized the stadium from that movie Unbreakable, and M. Night Shayamalan was a fitting patron saint for those three hours of action-packed rhetoric. Bridges were built, paths were blazed, the walls of Plato’s cave were flickered upon, marathons were planned, then abandoned, and above all, differences were made (or at least promised). Since a professor of classics was presiding over the second half, I was hoping for some application of the principles of Demosthenian oratory, or at least the recycling of a bit of rancorous invective against the Macedonians, but it was not to be.

I guess it doesn’t matter, the auditory element can’t be preserved in picture form, and most parents were there to create a photographic record of the specialness of their children by watching them dress up in identical formless robes and collect in a swarm of 10,000 to sit in rows and be harangued mass rally-style. I admire the principle of making the world’s most highly educated put on silly hats and get-up before they can receive their diplomas, but I find it interesting that girls go out and buy the most luxurious, colorful dresses, just to bury them under a big black burqa. They should just buy the ones whose two inches of hem will look the best peeking out from underneath some billowing pancho- or mumu-like contraption.

I’ve decided graduation ceremonies are a lot like funerals: people dress in black, drink slightly too much and listen to someone behind a pulpit tell lies about the departed or soon-to-be departed. Given the dogmas and clichés nesting them in our culture, every funeral should be happy and every graduation sad, but of course the opposite is generally the case. I guess if the dogmas came naturally to be believed, they wouldn’t need to be constantly repeated.

I see ads all over the city bragging about how McDonald’s uses grade A eggs. Let’s hope they’re not using the Harvard grading scale. Most people admit to not understanding economics, but it would take a psychic not to see the direction things are headed now. Religion and comedy are the tragically separated Siamese twins that could not survive apart, having one eye apiece and sharing all their vital organs. The 10 Commandments must have been thought up by someone who didn’t know gossip. Don’t look too much at faces looking back at you, they give you a distorted image of yourself. Get too big and powerful and you split into factions–even within a single person’s mind. The body is a concentration of destiny. I have the same relation to geometry that a drunk has to the lines of a street. The higher divinities shouldn’t need to actually exist to work their wills.

My name is there not for others to recognize me by but to help me recognize myself. Because as Joseph Brodsky hinted, the mind is totalitarian: whichever of the vying factions wins out in any particular internal debate insists on monopolizing not just the acquiescence but the volition of the entire self, and often manages to dupe the outside world as to the unanimity of the whole through that reverend organ of propaganda, the human voice. Or maybe not; I sometimes think writing aphoristically is like pressing coffee and only keeping the grinds. I’ve lost my taste for waking up in the dusty barrio of a hangover. At best, it flattens out, at the end of the day, into a mopey ocean climate.