Esther Press

30



At the mall in Syracuse, they stand by the railings that prevent people from falling through the holes in the levels, where people can look up or down and see other levels and other people. There are four floors.

Some time ago, a couple of people committed suicide by jumping over these railings. One of them landed in the food court.

I once stood above a food court in the Mall of America and looked down, and was struck, strangely, by the high amount of tinfoil that covered hamburgers. I could see the burgers sitting inside the half-wrapped, unwrapped, or wrapped tinfoil—variously eaten or uneaten. I also noted the different carton sizes of fries.

I was at the mall just yesterday here in Syracuse, and I again saw the police loitering around the railings on different floors. Partly occupied with a new word I didn’t want in my head—giftables—I watched the police.

I thought how impossible it was to stop people from killing themselves. There were only usually two police to a large area of railing. One could just hop the waist-level railing at any moment, and the police wouldn’t be able to do anything.

The largeness of the mall matched with the many opportunities for jumping to one’s death, and the small police staff, made the situation seem helpless. It was really how helpless the police seemed that impressed me.

Were they protecting the suicide from him- or her-self?

Were they protecting other mallgoers, other consumers, from witnessing a messy death?

Would the suicide make the food court a dangerous place—looking out for falling bodies—or just one haunted by the prior acts?

Would a suicide lessen or improve sales?

And which stores would be effected more than others?

Or, perhaps, a customer being hit by a falling body would result in a lawsuit? Perhaps the entire mall would be at fault.

But no one knew.

29


Shifting sentences around doesn’t equal avant-garde. Collage, badly written, can be as uninteresting as a New Formalist poem that sentimentalizes things we were told already.




28


My mother’s opinion that things will get better. My questioning, internally: It can get worse, of course, logically.




27



The book reviewer who explains what a text means is in a delusion unto a fiction. This is not to say not to utter, but one must be aware of the grasping artificiality of articulating. Language, to me, is as abstract as paint or musical notes. Language gives us a sense of something, but the assigned meanings to the words crumble as one advances and uses them. This little bit of writing I’m doing is making some sense, or so I or it think/s it is, but there are senses beyond this. If we could envision a sentence, for once, not as a train of thought but as a collapsing-and-standing world of hidden remarks and references then we might stop assuredly explaining and start experiencing.

26


Of course.

25


Anti-lodestars all around all around all.




24


The wise-ass persona is a mask like any other. One wonders who's forcing one to hold that mask in place for positioning the who below to whom one refers.


23


From two different notebooks, two different dreams, two different notes, two different men in dreams. In the first dream note, a man mentioned something was in a corpse cupboard. In the second dream note, a man said, The moon's a fuckhole from long ago.

22


I can usually tell who's a Catholic and who's a drunk. A Catholic thinks mainly, to a fault, about others. A drunk thinks mainly about himself or herself. Catholic drunks think mainly about what others have done to them.

21



Total number of nuclear missiles built by the United States, 1951-present: 67,500

Conservative estimate of nuclear weapons built by the United Kingdom: 150

Conservative estimate of nuclear weapons built by Israel: 100

Estimated number of nuclear weapons built by North Korea: Anywhere from 4 to 24

Estimated number of nuclear weapons built by Iran: 0

Estimated number of nuclear weapons built by Iraq: 0

20


When speaking in language and another person says something is something...you have at least two options: to laugh heartily or to run very quickly away...there is a lot of anger in is.



19


Watching Bill Morrison's film Decasia: The State Of Decay, amid the haunting music and decaying images, the repeated, insistent thought of we are only barely here.




18


The most audacious act was her wearing white not just on her wedding day but on any day, for that matter.

17

Deserving of some note: Hakarl. Hakarl is rotten, fermented shark meat that is buried in sand for months. It is then exhumed, stinking like it should, and cut into strips. One eats the strips and washes it down with a local Icelandic beer or liquor.




16


Remembering walking down State Street in Madison, Wisconsin, with M. It was crowded and we passed and were passed by many people. As a group passed by one could catch just the briefest part of their conversations. Two seemingly university woman passed by and all we heard was, "So are we shopping or are we eating?" Upon hearing this, I said to M. or he to me that these were really the two options in life in the United States.

15


Many aphorisms aren't worth remembering.

14


Assistant murderers can tell jokes on television and lead nations.



13


The best thing that could be said of him was that he did not know himself like others did.




12


With a serious Norwegian face, my friend's father telling him repeatedly as a boy: "Think before Do! Not Do before Think!"

11



To say she is dead to me, one must know who she is, what is is, what dead is, what to is, and who me is (as opposed to who one is). At every point, it becomes a jumping off into a nothingness. Into a nothing-game. Into a something that disappears.


10


In Catholic school as a boy, I remember running down the stairs, through the wide hallway of the first floor to catch my bus, as I was late. Just as I was set to descend the eight or so extra steps down to another landing that would take me outside, the principal, Sister Josephine, a severe creature, stepped in front of me at the top of these steps and yelled to me, "No running in the halls!", as I advanced. I didn't have adequate time to stop fully on my own, however. I stopped at the last second, my arms flying, until I braced myself unconsciously against her body. I was so frightened of her, and was now extremely close to her. She looked down at me and repeated that there was to be no running in the halls. I was so taken aback by her presence and her authority that I just stood there, as a short silence grew. It was then that I "came to", so to speak, and realized that one of my hands had landed and still remained exactly on her pubis region. I realized it and she did as well, but she continued staring at me firmly. With delicacy, I pulled my hand away, apologized to her for running but not for my hand, and walked down the steps and then outside to the bus. To this day, I can still somehow "feel" the tautness in the middle of her skirt.

9


It is sometimes whispered in dark corners: Neither James Joyce nor Gertrude Stein had an MFA.




8

Remembering a meeting with a job counselor with whom I became friends. We were speaking of different jobs, scanning the papers and job offers she had received, when we came upon one for an x-ray technician. I gave it some thought for a few seconds, which seemed to bother my friend/job counselor. When I didn't respond soon enough for her, she helped the situation to its conclusion by saying, "Do you really want to touch all those people everywhere?"




7

It would seem logical that there must be some people not looking for answers for their lives, etc.



6


Why is it that when I hear someone quoting another person in critical prose I have the image of someone walking with crutches?