Sketch of New Jersey, August 2020 or Some Meditations During The Longest Power Outage I've Experienced in My Life

      A storm, short and fierce, knocked out the power around here for a few days. And suddenly one is deprived of conveniences and necessities probably taken for granted. I took the opportunity to try and not be so attached to them. My viewing of a documentary series about the Chicago Bulls, The Last Dance, was interrupted. Fine. My 2DS XL wasn't charged and it died after a mere hour of heroic combat with the Risen. (My fully charged 2DS served solely as a flashlight.) Fine. I could only read during daylight hours, outside, candlelight being insufficient, too harmful to the eye to risk, I felt. I worried for the books themselves. The new dehumidifier was off and, having discovered mold is a problem in the basement during the sultry New Jersey summer, they'd once more go unprotected from the blight.

Someone said it could be days before it came back.

I was at work when it hit. I'd paused to listen to the rainfall, mildly surprised that we weren't insulated from the sound. Three trash cans were placed around my area of the store where water dripped from the ceiling. The lights went out momentarily and came back, dim.  A generator, located outside near the receiving area, was providing partial electricity. (The next day, passing it by as I approached the back door, the noise it made as it operated, or labored, it seemed to me, brought to mind a tarmac. I plugged one ear.) 

On that first day, Miguel, my ride, didn't show. I began walking. Usually I don't expect to see many cars on the road I take but now there was a line of them. As a man drove past, he asked me if the lights were on in the store. The end of his sentence faded. He was gone before I looked up. 

My brother found me and pulled over. Once I was in the car, he explained that the traffic lights were out and everything was backed up. Cones had been set up to direct oncoming cars but one driver he'd seen drove through them. I told him about how someone was in the bathroom when the lights went out and - I felt sorry for the janitor.

The power outage fell on the day Miguel and I buy our groceries, so there wasn't much in the refrigerator to eat but there wasn't much to lose either. We used a lighter to turn on the stove. I ate eggs and drank tea without oat milk. My brothers and I sat in the living room until nightfall. They discussed Paterson as I idly constructed an airboat with my nephew's blocks. I ate a second ice cream.

At night, in bed early, drifting off to sleep in deeper darkness, I thought of prison, of solitary confinement. What if you were always deprived? What if you had only your thoughts to entertain you?

An unexpected gift awaiting me at work: no music. Its absence, coupled with the near-dark, made for a solemn (some might say gloomy) mood. Which is more appropriate in the days of the coronavirus than hearing, "Celebrate good times, come on! Let's celebrate!" for the nth time. Another gift: certain coworkers, having nothing to do, were sent home. I experienced a "good time" and celebrated.

(While we're on the subject, two other songs from the coronavirus playlist at the store: The Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony" and Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Relax.")

No electricity means no card payment. For lunch I went to a nearby Lukoil and had to pay in cash. Coronavirus-related infections and deaths continue to surge in the US. The state government order on wearing a mask was and is still in effect. A sign posted on the door says no entry if you aren't wearing a mask. The cashier, standing behind a transparent plastic screen placed only on one side of his work station, wasn't wearing a mask. I stood six feet away and waited. He asked me if I was going to step up to the register. I asked him if he was going to put on a mask. He made a show of patting himself, a show I recognized from my job, and shrugged. "Oh, I forgot to bring one. You want me to throw your change over?" 

Out of respect, I won't name the band whose t-shirt he was soiling by wearing it. Running low on cash, I set aside my candy product. Someone entered just behind me. He wasn't wearing a mask and eyed me warily for a moment. I turned away sharply. The cashier spoke to him casually, cheerfully. Nothing amiss. 

Our transaction was completed without eye contact and, once finished, I resolved never to go back.

Meals planned one day in advance, multiple grocery shopping trips. There were only a few bruised nectarines left. The freezer section was emptied out and blocked off with ropes and overturned grocery carts. Behind these makeshift barriers were puddles of water. Self-checkout accepted cards but didn't permit cashback. 

At home: No air conditioner. Proliferation of shadows by day. A few feeble lights against the darkness by night. A vague feeling that madness could set in. Preview of society's collapse.

My sister-in-law considered crossing state lines to store the frozen meat. 

For us, the power returned after a few days. Others weren't so lucky. Gradually, various stores I frequent became themselves again. I welcomed the light reservedly, appreciation tempered by a sense that there may come a day when the power goes out and doesn't return.

Sketch of New Jersey, July 2020 or If You Get Nothing Else From Reading This Column, Sort of Wearing a Mask is Not Even Sort of Helping

     Most customers at my job do this right. Complacency is common and urgency isn't but, okay, most people, 70% or so, wear a mask and wear it properly for a whole thirty minutes to an hour. As for the rest, let's leave aside those few who try to get away with wearing absolutely nothing to protect themselves and others from the coronavirus. Or those who honestly believe covering their faces with one hand works just as well. Right now I'm fixated on those who can only bring themselves to sort of wear the mask, often covering only their mouths, and go about their business as though everything is fine, convinced they're doing their part. Since wearing a mask improperly isn't effective, doesn't really help - after all, medical professionals (and common sense) say the virus can spread as easily through a sneeze as a cough and can pass through the nasal passages too - it violates the spirit of the government order still in effect in New Jersey. With this in mind, I told a woman to cover her nose too. She did so, quickly, as if to say, whoops, how'd that happen? But within minutes I caught her with her mask down again. I told her again to cover her nose too. The second time, as many are, she was outraged that I'd dare to insist: "It fogs my glasses, okay?"

It is recommended that kids two and under not wear masks (underdeveloped lungs, risk of suffocation). That isn't an invitation to expose kids to the virus. Nor does it mean that they're immune. But turn a corner and there goes a baby, exposed. I explained to one woman, who was shopping with two kids too young to wear masks and another adult, that she might want to come up with a plan that doesn't involve exposing them. (One adult, such as the one standing next to you, could watch the kids while the other shops?) She walked away before I'd finished, saying: "No worries!" I called after her: "It is a worry, though." Global pandemic is a worry. The absence of leadership is a worry. You are the worry.

Every day, people refuse to do this correctly. And to engage those who refuse to do this correctly is to come face to face with, to use a word I try not to reach for hastily, stupidity. Pure numbing stupidity.

A man in his 60s went by wearing his mask half down, only covering his mouth. I walked after him and said: "Excuse me, you need to have your mask over your nose too." He kept moving, gesturing near his face. I continued after him and repeated myself. He said: "What? You're going to follow me all over the store? Get the fuck away from me." If I had the authority, I would have ordered his crotchety ass out right there, where he'd be safe from being followed and we'd be safe from him. Unfortunately I don't and management only steps in if someone is practically flaunting his or her maskless face. 

Technically, one could lie and claim a respiratory ailment to avoid wearing a mask at all. We're not allowed to verify it. Study the text of the government order and one can find other holes. For instance, we're not allowed to turn customers away because we are essential. We provide alternatives for shopping in the store but nothing says the customer has to make use of them. With little enforcement, we're supposed to rely on the general public following the order on good faith. It's a hazardous job not just because we have more contact with people. It's hazardous because we're forced into contact with those who can't be bothered to follow the order and won't be stopped.

A woman had her mask down. I told her to put it fully on. She complied. Later, I noticed she had her mask down again. I told her again: put it fully on. Later still, I noticed she had her mask down again. A woman with her asked me a question. I answered and told the other woman again to put her mask fully on. As I turned my back on them, the woman asked me another question. I turned around. Her companion HAD HER MASK DOWN.

Directional arrows, large stickers for guiding foot traffic and minimizing the instances in which people are walking in tight spaces toward each other, have been placed through the store. It almost goes without saying that no one follows them. Except maybe by coincidence. 

Coworkers, who one would expect should care the most, are no better about exercising caution and obeying the rules, even when receiving something called "hazard pay." [Editor's note: though the job is no less hazardous, we've arbitrarily ceased to receive hazard pay.] I asked one manager about how to deal with a couple who brings a baby in and, with a shrug, he said, hey, if they want their kid to catch the virus.... As if to catch the virus is a problem for the individual only. In other words, months into the crisis, a man in charge of the day-to-day operations of the store doesn't seem to understand how a virus works. But every manager lets people get away with taking off the mask basically whenever they feel like it. And people gather for long stretches of time in our narrow breakroom without masks on. At the bottom of the stairs, in front of our sign-in keypad and the door, three people were chatting without masks on. I remained standing at the top of the stairs, waiting. Noticing me, they laughed to themselves as if to say: Here comes the killjoy, who takes this seriously. Another time I stopped and asked a coworker in the receiving area directly why he had his mask off. As coworkers passed back and forth next to us, he explained that he likes to have it off when he's by himself. I blinked. My bin and I moved on. I thought: Let's go, bin. You don't need to see this. Mask still off, he turned to speak to a manager, who also had her mask off and said: "He's the worst." A coworker, a kid, basically, his mask off, as usual, huddled in a group of three or four, wiped his nose on his hand as he speculated aloud about whether I'm an asshole or a retard. A prerecorded message intoned throughout the store, thanking all our team members.

The emergency arrives, the moment demands good sense, and a common sight is a shrug or what amounts to a shrug.

So I lasted a week trying to enforce the rules on my own. My arm wasn't broken, nor was I murdered for my trouble. I'm sorry to say I relied more on sharpness of tone, even rudeness (I don't ask, I don't say please, I don't say thank you because why should I?) than on a good cutting remark. (And again: I can't choose the best option, the most sensible and satisfying, booting someone into another dimension.) In my defense: Because they tend to go berserk when told to obey a life-saving government order, I can hardly get a sentence out. Don't get me wrong, I couldn't care less about angering anyone. With any luck, I angered them enough that they'll never come back. But facts and clever lines are wasted on blockheads who defend themselves with fiery nonsense and fatuities. And there isn't enough energy to deal with them all, every hour of every day, and do my job.

Now I only silently, though pointedly, observe the rules. Customers and coworkers give me strange or affronted looks as I stand what I estimate to be six feet apart, as a prerecorded message intones throughout the store asking everyone to stay six feet apart.

A fat man, mask pulled down, in keeping with our theme, yaks on his cell phone: "Ha! New Jersey will kill you before the coronavirus does!" Well, the state can take pride in recognizing the danger relatively early and attempting to respond adequately. As for the US as a whole, number one in infections, number one in deaths. The polls claim that most people in our country know this and what it means. As I take several steps back from yet another customer who stops a foot away from me and takes off his mask to ask me a question, I think: Do they?

Diogenes Comes Over for a Visit

     For me, one fact, and one fact alone, is enough to earn chief Cynic philosopher and key figure linking Socrates to the Stoics, Diogenes, legendary status: He lived in a jar. A large jar.

Marvelous.

If I'd been around back then I surely would have danced around and against his jar in tribute.

Not so long ago, with rent ceaselessly rising in California, far outpacing minimum wage, I considered living in a jar myself. Thmp! It was either that or New Jersey.

That's not what I came to discuss today! (Okay, final note, for the sake of clarity: Diogenes lived in no specific jar.) During my break, in my usual place, alone, in the forest, I remembered one of the philosopher's symbolic acts that were his specialty. Warm breeze, susurrus of trees, thick scent of grass, strange bird cries, and a hearty laugh: I could face the rest of my shift. It goes like this: Diogenes is invited to a luxurious home. He's warned not to spit. But Diogenes wants to clear his throat. What does he do? What else? He spits in his host's face. His explanation: He couldn't find any worse spot.

Hilariously offensive though it is, taken on its own, it's difficult to parse what Diogenes is trying to say here. I hate your face, person who welcomed me into your home? After work, I consulted the book I picked it up from, Diogenes the Cynic: Sayings and Anecdotes, an entry in the Oxford World's Classics series, in a translation by Robin Hard, who also provides generous notes. The book is arranged by, at times, juxtaposing multiple accounts of the same story. The anecdote about the philosopher's visit is one that's told again, in expanded form. To recap: Diogenes spits in his host's face. Here's the part I forgot: 

And when the man grew angry and asked why he had done that, he said that he could see nothing in the house that had been so neglected as its owner. For every wall was adorned with paintings, and there were images of the gods on the floor portrayed in magnificent mosaics and all the furniture was bright and clean, and the coverings and couches were beautifully adorned, leaving their owner as the sole thing there that could be seen to be neglected; and it is the universal custom in human society to spit in the worst available place.

Don't neglect yourself. Or else.

Notes on Notes

     Far from voluntarily letting it widely be known who they are, shit people tend to hide, as long as they can, to the extent that they can, using various means to do so, including literature. Hide and delude themselves and, best- (that is, worst-) case scenario, delude others. Someone who isn't terrible, who's had shameful lapses, suffered wince-inducing humiliations, has an off-putting personality trait, though not defined by them, can succumb to the temptation of devising a personal narrative that elides such unpleasantness completely too. The reason isn't necessarily to appear faultless before others, either, but to shield oneself from the relentless blows of memory or guilt or vigilance unchecked, consciously or unconsciously. To get through the day. Lichtenberg's aphorism applies, for different reasons, to both categories: "We burn all letters that contain a blunt truth." Nevertheless, for an accurate idea of what we're dealing with, the person and the reality, one can't adopt an undiscriminating policy of sending all unpleasant facts to the flames.

Frederick Exley's novel, A Fan's Notes (1968), seems to have been modeled closely, in broad outline, episodes, weaknesses, and obsessions, on the writer's life (down to the fact that the narrator is named Frederick Exley). One virtue of the book is that there's no sense of careful omission, fury always directed outward, never inward, a story told to sell the writer as hero or victim, comfortably above reproach. Thus Exley's (fictional) memoir has a charge that puts it ahead of the average autobiographical portrait, as it meets a requirement demanded by notable skeptics of the genre, Orwell and Bolaño: He coldly and humorously reveals embarrassing aspects of himself - and goes further. The book can't be described as self-serving. Exley declares himself a drunken mess and a lunatic and goes to some length to prove it.

The story mostly covers his 20s and the first half of his 30s. It's from his father, a man locally famous for high school football glory, that Exley picks up his life's aspiration to be ludicrously famous. It doesn't come close to working out. He watches football religiously. He drinks copiously, joylessly. He struggles to hold on to a job. He vegetates on the couch ("I shoveled one Oreo sandwich after another into my mouth, holding on to my tired penis for dear life"). He wanders from state to state. In the book's most harrowing chapter, he ends up in a mental asylum, where, with no explanation because the men in white outfits don't really know what they're doing, he's given electroshock treatment. 

The book is also, by definition, written in the narcissistic mode. It's worth mentioning because Exley is exceptionally narcissistic, the kind of writer I surmised early on (and seemed to have guessed correctly) who, because his main subject is himself, his own thoughts on what he's seen and who he is, has one book. I've found his type sooner or later exasperates, testing one's patience by losing focus and digressing frequently, since everything about his life, no matter how petty, is of equal fascination to him. The title of the book can serve as a sort of notice about its fidelity to a meandering form. None of the novel's themes - fame, bitterness, madness, the writing life, football - are sustained. In one episode, Exley burns his giant manuscript. Among other things, he despairs of its lack of structure. A Fan's Notes was his structural improvement! A friend of Exley's said his telephone conversations ran the same way, an endless monologue, with a hint of apology in his tone. One could argue then that the form, though it may not make the novel any easier to read, is mimetic.

I took several breaks. Exley is better in sentences and paragraphs and in his excellent opening chapter. Although that's not to say he's quite consistent, at times indulging in the kind of overwriting Borges labels pseudoexactitude, with an excess of adjectives and adverbs. And he describes himself as pedantic (and his colleagues at a school as stupid) but repeatedly makes certain minor mistakes: a couple times, a couple years. He's also a fan of Orwell but forgets "Politics and the English Language," using at least a dozen times a formulation Orwell ridicules: not infrequent, not unlike, not unintelligent, not unlike. To be fair, Orwell adds that he'll likely make the same mistakes again. Proud pedants, on the other hand, don't always read as though they ever have or ever will make mistakes. Exley isn't one of them.

To say the comedy is merely inconsistent would be going too easy on him, however. I can recall marking plenty of lines that made me chuckle. A laugh late in the book that comes to mind, representative of Exley's ne'er-do-well lifestyle: His buddy, a lawyer who's temporarily shut down his practice, is sponging off his girlfriend in Florida. Exley joins him to sponge too - so long that the lawyer begins joking that the couple have a baby. On Christmas Eve, the girlfriend is making a racket in the kitchen and the lawyer says: You're going to wake the baby! She finally explodes. A window is shattered. A police siren wails. The lawyer and Exley run for cover in the backyard. The lawyer says: "After all we've done for her." And yet more vivid are Exley's failed attempts at humor. Watching soap operas, he fantasizes about directing an actor to rape his female co-star. Elsewhere, a broad comic scene involving a woman he finds too butch and overbearing ends with him sucker punching her, knocking her out, whistling as he escapes. 

Despite insisting that countless parts of the novel are invented - the sucker punch reads like fantasy too - these...gags point to the unrepentant misogyny presented as caustic truthtelling or even hardearned wisdom that suffuses the whole book. It should be painfully familiar to anyone with knowledge of mid-20th century American literature, the prominence of the writer much concerned with announcing that he's a man by misogynistic standards. Exley is a relatively obscure manifestation of the now maligned specter. I flip to the page describing his sexual exploits: "I took them on the floor and on the couch and in the bathtub, took them with their summer dresses up around their ears, took them greedily, perfunctorily, pointlessly, took them while they wept and said no, no, no. Occasionally in a baseness of spirit, I acceded to their demands and withdrew the sweets of my sex, which only seemed to make them weep more heartily." What he'd like a father emasculated by wife and daughter to do is punch them a bit and kick them out the door. A young woman tearfully relates the story of being sexually assaulted, remaining with her assaulter, moving to the city to be with him, discovering that he's married with children. Exley kindly informs us of what she hasn't realized: she came to the city to be fucked. Women are pliant sexual objects or harridans to be cut down or Patience. 

His vision of masculinity contains a couple of instances of the era's gay panic as well - startling and convenient because they are also closely linked with what rather strongly suggests unacknowledged homosexual interest. He's disgusted by the discovery that men are blowing each other in the shadows of the mental asylum. Then he stays and watches. Back on the outside, he identifies gay men sharing a communal shower with him and "teases them," soaping and showing off his genitals. Har har, he thinks he's saying. Back in the mental asylum, in a less playful mood: "There was consolation in believing that someone had recognized these homosexuals as being ill, even more of a consolation in believing that they had committed themselves. They were not walking their pink poodles, leeringly clacking their eyeballs all over their made-up sockets, and 'slaughtering the innocents' along Third Avenue. Neither were they holding 'open meetings' with a view to persuading their legislators that they were just a bunch of jolly-good boys exercising a Hellenistic inclination." Early on he claims he's incapable of love. He comes closest to expressing it not during his courtship and eventual marriage, developments that go by in a blur, but while enjoying a football game with a group of men.

For every genuine insight, there are a few more I wouldn't call insights at all. The ratio is probably best reflected in every passage in which he considers himself in relation to America. Back in the mental asylum, he makes an observation about the country and the deviation from an ideal it can't face: 

These people were grotesques. On noticing this, I thought I understood: there was in mid-century America no place for them. America was drunk on physical comeliness. America was on a diet. America did its exercises. America, indeed, brought a spirituality to its dedication to pink-cheeked, straight-legged, clear-eyed, health-exuding attractiveness - fierce, strident dedication. ...Still, I saw the comfort America could purchase itself by getting rid of them. Meeting payment in kind, they delighted in rendering us hideous. If we did not have common humanity on America's level - the level of the advertising commercial - then they would bring to our countenances the ugliness of despair, and at that unhappy level we would come together and make our marriage.

Later he recounts a bout of impotence:

I went back to Chicago and replayed the memory of it; it was that day I first sensed that I had never loved Bunny Sue - I could not even put her features together - and that my inability to couple had not been with her but with some aspect of America with which I could not have lived successfully.

My eyes widen. My nostrils flare.

As for Exley's great struggle, I never managed to shed a single tear. "Life's bleak anonymity," "the hard fact of famelessness." His humor ultimately doesn't intervene when he's on the subject. For all the time he spends peering into his own life, the desperate pursuit is not deemed what it is: wrongheaded. Instead, reality, so cruel, eventually forces him to swallow the bitter pill of having to live as a nobody. His idea of a wretched fate is being a truck driver. (Meanwhile, as I write, the coronavirus proves beyond a doubt that America, the America he has the privilege of drifting through and pontificating upon, needs its truck drivers and other fameless sorts to survive and I'm sure it was the same then.) He's brutally honest about what he calls his putrefaction. That's a commendable start. The book ends with the image of a pasta-bloated Exley, having made it through a number of disasters, tentatively keeping madness at bay (in a time, it should be stressed, before the term "mental illness" seems to have been in use), off the couch and on the move, running. But without the reasoning necessary to rise above numerous crude, self-pitying, and shaky pseudotruths, it doesn't resonate as a triumph. He runs in place.

Dispatches

     It may come as a surprise, given what bleak associations it invariably summons now, but Michael Herr didn't really know what he was throwing himself into when he convinced an editor to send him out to cover the Vietnam War. He was a young writer, though years older than many of the grunts he writes about, with no relevant experience who harbored a desire for Hemingwayesque adventure. Within the first day of his arrival in the country he wanted to go home. But he stayed and survived and acquired a keen vision of mayhem. The book he published about 8 years after the events recounted, in 1977, unassumingly titled Dispatches, was greeted with acclaim and now appears to be widely considered a classic, not just of the war but of war writing itself. It is deserved. In less than three hundred pages, balanced perfectly between rambling and precise, feverish and lucid, Herr creates a total record of what he saw and especially what he felt during his sojourn in hell.

Why read about hell? Why now? Why ever? These questions linger like the memory of a couple of nightmares I've had since reading Herr's account. (Nightmares involving ghosts.) The first answer that comes to mind is simple: It happened. It's history. Closer: It's a major episode in the US's long history of spreading misery abroad. Which is true. Except the book isn't presented as information that can be kept at a safe distance, neatly filed away once finished. Another answer arises early on when Herr confesses to a base common impulse: You don't want to look but you want to look. So Herr commits himself to looking as much as he can at the horrific situation and rendering the diverse anecdotes and reflections he snatches back in fitting language, at once dextrous and crude. The book contains the product of the act but also the consequences and passes a trace of the whole deeply scathing experience on to the reader. That is its value. One isn't permitted a safe distance. Hell exists now. And there's no guarantee you won't be plunged into Herr's version of it someday. (If not another version of it.) Last answer: A refusal to forget those last two facts. You don't want to look yet you have to look.

Cormac McCarthy has declined, with few exceptions, all requests to discuss his work. His reason: "Everything I have to say is in the book." Strange to think of the writer of a book like Dispatches (which I suspect McCarthy would admire) going out to promote it and I can easily see why Herr would chafe at the attention and decline such requests too. It reads like the final word in a long and understandably one-sided conversation between two people, carried on late at night, at times as if the words were muttered or whispered, later the same night, when the speaker is alone with what he's dredged up. The book ends because he's collapsed.