The City She Was

Museum of Lost Acquaintance

3 For About Five Minutes in the Aughts I put up notice on the Internet where misspellers wrote the most compelling notes. They wore industrial eyeglasses and ironic T-shirts and trucker hats and often forgot their wallets. One taught me about science fiction porn while we lay on his silk leopard-print sheets. After that, a Nugent look-alike, then a mapmaker in Alaska and that old-timey going-nowhere correspondence; I thought I’d tell our kids about our cute meet over Thanksgiving in the new fifties. I watched films that made me feel old because of choice feminism contradictions and wrote poems about the city’s howling lunatics in technology and snark dialect compost. And then, and then, and then. Met a lunatic on Craigslist. Concerned about starts,I stuffed his inbox with amendments and bloated metonymy. This happened for months. This happened while I healed from pneumonia, from broken bones, from agoraphobia. Drinking beer gave me a panic, so whiskey. Divorce ephemera, safe doors and pre-midlife. I collected fancy pens and yeah, I’m working on an article about animé and Marxism. Pills made me shaky, but I filled myself with pills because they made me shaky. Attended dotcom parties thrown by post-Stanford nerds in tucked-in shirts, such Adam’s apples. They gave away fonty tchotchkes for Internet pet stores and other terrible ideas. Just one hayride after the next and only tickling and stalker calling, the hang-up thing. We’d work on it, we’d patch it up. My action item, my best of bread. I met the lunatic and we did it until it outlived its hipness, until it was Eastern European. We did it until the buildings came down. We did it until the affect was moot, until the recipe got muddled. We did it until I turned into myself, until the whole city turned into itself. We did it until the line got too long and therapy turned me down. I’m talking Beginning of the Decline of Our Smug Empire. I’m talking about the rise of a collective posture for the skittering tower of our time. 4 Pills This one softens the soul cartilage. This one makes the red lights green. I have bought enough powder to make a tiny little cartoon cat. Mitsubishi, Batman, Teletubby, Toyota: I love you. I love the Earth and forgive it. I love you: guy at the weird apartment playing South Park video games, guy with tennis scholarship and the guy who has a grandmother who’s dying because you all carry. You make me love helicopters and dust. This one makes me throw up, but then I listen to Pink Floyd in the dark without getting scared. This one throws a dart at my nemesis, but it’s a lame gesture. This one makes my augmentation less brutal. The doctor gives me one that says, this might cause sudden death. 250 mg vs 500 mg. Dry mouth, nausea, dizziness. This one is legal, so it’s not as fun. Take this one with orange juice. Swallow this one with a spoonful of peanut butter. Take this one alone. Don’t take this one alone. This one brings the horizon line into your lexicon, and you store it for better occasions. Chewing this puts me on a raft on Lake Erie. I’m in the sun, then I’m in the mud baths of Black Rock City getting felt up by a chick with a bone in her nose, then I’m at the top of the hill of my street getting the mail, ...