Eighteen
We got off the subway in Manhattan. It was back to giant buildings and people walking everywhere. We walked around the lower east side looking for a bookstore. Hu Chin had lived in New York City for seven years now and he was leading. I was following behind talking to Jason about writing. John was talking to Petra. They seemed to get along. They were talking. Their mouths were moving — words were coming out — they were sporadically laughing. They seemed happy. I was talking to Jason; we weren't laughing. Jason talked about a vampire story I wrote and how it was cohesive and made sense. How he was surprised that I would write something that made sense. I told him I made sense now. He told me he still didn't make sense so he was writing poetry. I told him he would make sense one day. He said he was unsure that he would ever make sense. I said it would happen. He wasn't sure. I said he would get older and time would pass. Things would, pass and he would realize that things passed. It was all right, but sad. He said things had passed for him. I said more things would pass, but they would take longer to pass and he would be surprised how long it took and that you didn't even notice you were involved in something to begin with. I said that life and people mutate. You don't get more intelligent by getting older. Life doesn't progress. It doesn't start at one point and end up at victory. There was no victory. There were mutations. Little dialectic mutations of things turning into other things over long spans of time. History does not have attention deficit disorder. It is a slow grinding process; everything gradually coming to terms with new things, changing along with them to the point where we don't even notice it. He said 9-11 broke that rule. I said 8 years have passed. We have internalized it now. I said humans weren't fixed. We aren't alone either. We may feel alone at times. But we aren't. We are very dependent upon each other. You might go in your room, listen to sad music and cry while reading a book, but someone is out there supplying the electricity for you to do that; someone is growing, and shipping the food, for you to keep eating, so you can keep being sad. You have to work; you depend on owners, stock markets and all those little dirty stock brokers. You depend on truck drivers, construction workers, and marketers to sell the products that keep your job alive. You depend on doctors and nurses; you depend on schools teaching children. We depend on government even though we enjoy bitching about them; we love police, courts, prisons, laws, lawyers, and legislation. We are a dependent species, at the mercy of each other. I asked him if he had ever studied political statistics. He said no. I told him that what politicians look at are graphs with little dots, boxes and lines everywhere, symbolizing our wants and needs. Humanity is a bunch of particles, mutating endlessly, bouncing into each other, each particle with their own wants and needs. But there are other particles, with the same exact wants and needs, and those particles are the same as you. There are other particles with different wants and needs, and those are the other particles, some particles have this and some have that, and some particles have nothing. And they flow around the charts, going in and out of the boxes, making one bar higher than another, filling up one slice of the pie and making another slice smaller. Yes, you are condemned personally to take responsibility and make something of the life you've been given, but at the same time in the grand scheme of things you're a particle on a graph somewhere, being stared at and studied, with researchers in little offices making critical judgments on what these particles are doing and want. Jason said he felt like a particle. I said worse things have happened. He said that's true.
We got to the bookstore. Margo wasn't there. There was some sort of speech being given by an author of a book about military contracts. She stated that George W. Bush ruined America and had given military contracts out to all of his friends. That Bush was obsessed with giving federal tax money to his buddies. The worst thing was that the tax money didn't even exist. He actually took out loans to give money to his friends. Everyone was very happy to be shitting on Bush. Bush was a good person to hate. He was Republican. He was from Texas. He was white; he went to Harvard. He talked funny, he mispronounced words. He enjoyed baseball and golf. He hardly ever did anything right; he was completely human except for the Harvard thing. Jason and I went outside and stood on the sidewalk. It was cold and snow was falling. I said to Jason that I thought Bush was just the end result of Reagan and Clinton excess. Everybody had money and it made them apathetic and decadent and everybody seemed fine with it. Everyone played along. And this guy shows up, the king of decadence and nihilism, George W. Bush. Everyone was like, okay, whatever, because they were just as decadent and nihilistic. Jason said that Clinton didn't do anything about the stock markets; Clinton didn't care about regulating anything. All he did was get his dick sucked and tell wonderful stories about Arkansas. I said people act like this is something new. It started with Reagan, the banks became deregulated; everyone started dreaming up dreams that weren't based in reality. They took out loans instead of worked. They got credit cards instead of saved. There was no long term thinking, no long term sense of justice.