Shorthand for Nothing

Dear guy handing out pens in the quad earlier today,

I’m sorry I thought you were ridiculous and a terrible idea for marketing. It’s not your fault your employers wanted to become synonymous with those cheap pens with company names on them that nobody pays attention to. I’m sorry that if I don’t lose your pen, your company name will probably end up getting scratched off to near illegibility. I’m sorry that those pens aren’t very good advertising, since most of the time the person who ends up with it has no idea where it came from, and even if they do they don’t care. I’m sorry I don’t like your pen as much as the one I stole from the Berkman center last year.

I’m also sorry that after I wrote “it’s not your fault” above I considered adding the clause “unless you came up with the idea, in which case I’m sorry that you are not very good at marketing, but I congratulate you on finding a way to get paid to hand out pens to college students.” I’m sorry that I’m not going to write out your company name here.

I’m sorry that it wasn’t a terribly good pen. It wouldn’t write for me earlier, when I needed a pen to write on a napkin. It’s one of those cheap Bic pens that has a cap and isn’t even clicky. I’m sorry that I’m probably going to lose that cap the next time I use the pen, and I’m sorry that I’ll probably either let a friend steal it or forget it at a restaurant somewhere. I would say that I am terrible at keeping pens, but that’s not true at all. I’m just terrible at keeping things I don’t care about.

Yours,

RM

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Idea for this shamelessly stolen from Dave Bry’s regular feature on The Awl.

Dear Canvassers Who Have Stopped Me At Various Times Around Northeastern,

I am sorry for wasting your time. I was never going to give you money, even if I had any to spare. But I feel bad and I really wish I could help in non-money-related ways.

The first time you stopped me, you were the guy who had just moved in to the place I’d just moved out of. It was cool or at least funny running into you. You needed to meet quota, and I appreciate that you were straightforward about that. I hope you managed despite wasting several minutes talking to me and only getting me to sign one of your little postcards in exchange. I am sorry I am broke and miserly.

The second time you stopped me, you were a cute girl who thought that the news article I read a few weeks ago that I was vaguely sure about was pretty neat. I signed yet another postcard, and I think I even checked the little box that said I would volunteer. You gave me a flier for working at Environment Mass, and we chatted about our majors and our lives and so on, and I am pretty sure you were hitting on me. If you were, I am sorry that we will never get coffee. You were gone when I went to get dinner later. I never got a call. I am sorry I am not helpful.

The third time you stopped me, you were very persistent, and I seriously considered saying “look, I have already signed like three postcards for you guys, I have no money, I am glad you exist but you don’t want to waste your time talking to me,” but I didn’t because you seemed so enthusiastic. You said a few things which were slightly dishonest, and I smirked and ignored them. You didn’t stop until I finally said I would not give you any money. I am sorry I found you amusing and entertained myself by making you come up with ways to counter my excuses.

The time you didn’t stop me, I was on my way to class. I’m sorry that I told you this instead of just continuing to walk. You hear that all the time, and it makes you wonder why they sent you to a college campus like they did, because everyone is either poor or on their way to class.

I am sorry that I embody the type of person you hate running into on college campuses, someone who is sympathetic and willing to listen and talk but has no interest in giving you money because that’s money I could spend on food or concerts or booze and at this stage in my life that’s a significant sum of money and I just can’t afford generosity. I am sorry that despite my attempts to be friendly and helpful you probably just sigh and shake your head and wonder why college students all suck.

Mostly sincerely,

Rob Mason

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There was a trailer for some movie involving hell demons featuring Nick Cage at Sherlock Holmes. I have no interest in seeing it! But I would be interested in seeing this:

DIABLO: THE MOVIE

Teaser trailer.

A dark set–a dark sky, a faint horizon, wilderness. Moody music. A fire is lit, casting red lighting over:

Two figures, a MAN and a WOMAN, seated around a small campfire; around them the signs of battle, or at least skirmish, are barely visible.

MAN: I don’t understand it. It’s like they were–

WOMAN: Possessed?

Shot of mountainous country with a desolate and slightly ominous feel. The music swells in intensity. WOMAN speaks over this.

WOMAN: This is an evil neither of us can hope to comprehend. We need to find someone who knows. We need to find Cain.

Cut to many scenes of the MAN and WOMAN battling demons, zombies, et cetera. Music is appropriately fighty. The montage concludes with an image of a massive, terrifying demon. The MAN and WOMAN pause, glance at each other, and simultaneously raise their weapons to charge. Cut to black, silence. The lights slowly raise on DECKARD CAIN.

CAIN: Stay a while, and listen…

The title DIABLO flashes on the screen. Fin.

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I remember waiting for the year 2000. I can vaguely recall the computer I must have been using at the time, running Windows 98. Even then we thought it was slow. Today it would be utterly decrepit.  My netbook is significantly faster and I still cringe sometimes at how long it takes to perform some tasks. Longer still, fifteen years ago, I probably wouldn’t have blinked an eye at the delay.

It seems so cliche to say that the decade was characterized by change. And that’s not quite right. It was inconsistency. It was mercurial. It was frequently beautiful and frequently terrible, often at the same time. There are parts I don’t remember. I was a completely different person then. There are little fragments of memory, like fragments of a strange dream. Some days I wonder if they really happened.

I’ve lived in four places in the last five years. I’ve been in this city for a year now. More than a year, even, and I’m restless. I am far from home, but I have a home now. That’s new. I want to travel and explore. I want to find secret places and make them my own, and stumble home exhausted with a smile on my face because I have seen and experienced things that no one else knows.

I’m not sure what to think of this decade. I’m not sure what happened. It’s been that sort of quiet which is really restless underneath, where everything is moving into place, waiting for the other shoe to fall. It’s tense. It’s dissonant. It’s full of ghosts and regrets and memories. Everything that happened is screaming at me to write about it, but none of them are important anymore.

Here is one thing that happened in this decade. Maybe it will help make sense of things.

It was March of 2008, I believe, and Harvey Danger was performing their tenth anniversary public spectacle, a two-evening event in which they played essentially their entire discography. On the first night they played rarities and B-sides, along with their debut album, “Where Have All The Merrymakers Gone?”

Just before they played one of my favorite b-sides, a track called Incommunicado, Aaron Huffman and Jeff Lin switched instruments. Rachel Bowman came on the stage and I realized she was the same Rachel Bowman who sings some beautiful lo-fi songs. Sean Nelson said something about how much he liked it when Aaron Huffman and Jeff Lin switched instruments. To my knowledge this is the only song for which they do this.

Incommunicado is a song which used to be on the “Little By Little…” album, but it evidently didn’t fit with the rest of the album and was ultimately removed. It is beautiful and sweet. It opens with the line “I wish the words would fail me just for once.” Yet despite its charm it was ill-fated, and it is a secret now, a strange and unique and wonderful moment waiting to be found.

Happy New Year.

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An excerpt:

I wish I could say “time stopped moving.” That would be easier. I wish there were some clear logical way to explain it, some rules that it followed. There aren’t any. The nearest I can get is this:

Time stopped moving, but everyone kept going anyway, for the most part.

Except it didn’t really stop. It just moved in fits and starts. The sun would be hanging in the sky for three days and then suddenly it’s night time, two weeks later. Or sometimes it would just be a few hours later. Sometimes it’s like everything stopped happening and sometimes it’s like the clocks and the sun aren’t moving but the trains still run and we could still do whatever.

The worst part is that the intervening time didn’t happen. It’s just suddenly I’d be somewhere else, a new context, in the middle of something sometimes, and I’d just have to figure out what’s going on. Eventually you learn to play it by ear.

It’s hard, though. “Relearning to walk” doesn’t begin to cover it when it’s the rules you thought the universe followed that have stopped working. And they don’t even have the decency to break them in ways that make sense.

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I noticed recently that I co-opt words and phrases all the time for my own personal use. It’s pretty much always ironic, but the specific reason varies. Sometimes I self-consciously use words like “whatevs” and “obvs” in an ironic attempt to look like I’m not the kind of person who co-opts words like “whatevs” in order to appear less self-conscious about my word choice. I add phrases like “in my experience” or “in my opinion” with a wry inflection to the end of a story to indicate jokingly that I am pretty sure that this is more or less universal.

I’m sure I could find a few people who disagree with me, but our language defines us. The words that we use, or don’t use, shape the way we think and look at the world. If I don’t know the words to describe something, I’m stuck with some imprecise words to describe it. I think I can even fully grasp the concept of it if I don’t know the words. There’s a reason so much of education is just learning the words for something, learning the jargon of the field.

Maybe it’s the power of words that attracts me to writing so much, or maybe it’s my predilection towards wordplay that makes me appreciate their power so much.But words define us, both in who we are, how others perceive us, and how we perceive others. (Have you ever refused to use certain words to describe someone, or just refused to use a whole class of words and phrases for someone?)

But lately I’ve been thinking of the power of ironic words. I use them casually, but it ultimately has the effect of  destroying a word’s meaning, or at least changing it to the point where it is nearly unrecognizable. When it becomes natural to use or hear it in a completely new context that word is effectively subverted. You can use these words to forever change the way someone thinks of something–you can change the words someone else uses, or at the very least change the way they think of those words.

And I’m thinking of words like “coffee,” which have so many connotations. I’m thinking of how I always thought of coffee as something my dad drinks when I was a kid, how it always meant my family sitting around the dinner table after dessert just talking. How boring it was. I’m thinking of how coffee soon became the word for going to Shari’s late at night and never actually drinking coffee. I think I usually ordered a milkshake. And I never noticed how “coffee” just meant me and my friends sitting around talking after dinner. And I’m thinking of how “do you want to get coffee sometime?” is just a way of asking someone out on a date without using those words. And I’m thinking of how I started making increasingly bizarre “I like my women like I like my coffee” jokes (the latest one goes “diluted with foreign substances”), and now when someone talks about coffee or when I drink coffee I think of that, too. It’s a word which defines so many of our rituals.

There’s a line in Harvey Danger’s song Cold Snap which goes like this: “We will be lazy with our language and comfortable with our clothes off / We will say just what we have in mind.” Then there’s a line in Harvey Danger’s song Big Wide Empty which goes like this: “We could leap off of the infrastructure / Choose our words less carefully.” Sean Nelson is a lyricist who understands the nature of words too well; the difference between proclivity and predilection, or how to make words mean different things or multiple things. There is something playful and, yes, ironic behind it all.

And yet.

He returns twice to this wistful idea of not having to care about our words, which presumably involves dropping all of these ironic affectations and certainly means not thinking about the perfect word for the situation. It’s not just about not wanting to try, but about no longer having to worry about how you’re defining yourself. It’s about freedom, because no matter how skilled you are with it, language is a prison.

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Just a heads up to all you Rob Mason fans, I have started a tumblog, which is called Objectively Right, and it is here. It will probably be mostly about songs and videos and other things that don’t merit the full Rob Mason treatment (which is to say things that I cannot ramble about at Considerable Length, or things I can write about in like five minutes).

GO. READ.

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From Joey Comeau’s Overqualified, which I previously reviewed:

It’s Joey, not Joe or Joseph. My grandfather was Joe Comeau, and Joseph is my mother’s name for me, but I have always been Joey. I worry sometimes that it’s a childish name. Would a “Joe” tell jokes in bed, perform puppet shows after sex, and give every body part a different high-pitched voice? It seems unlikely. The names we choose for ourselves aren’t meaningless. They’re self-fulfilling prophecies.

When I was a kid, my mother called me Robby. It was just the name I went by, and I was fine with it for a while. Then at some point I decided I didn’t like that, and I told her that my name was Robert, and that I would like to be called Robert, if it’s all the same to her.

I remember feeling that Robby was a silly name, and that I wanted to be taken seriously, so I would wear a serious name. My grandfather was Bob, and that was fine for him, but I would be Robert. There’s still a chair at my dad’s house that has “Robby” written on the back. It bothered me when I was a kid.

Sometimes I wonder if that was a mistake.

In late high school my name stopped really mattering. Maybe before then, but by then everyone was calling me Mason and it didn’t bother me. I had no preference. I even preferred it to Robert sometimes. Robert is a name I never liked seeing typed. So when I made a Myspace profile, back when that was a thing that you did, I put my name as Rob. I didn’t figure it would matter.

But then a few people called me Rob, and suddenly I had a new name. I used it in a few other places. It suited me: it didn’t speak to me of anything in particular. So, with the exception of my family, I was now either Rob or Mason. There were distinct groups which stuck with one or the other, and they mostly stuck with their own. It was here that I started letting other people introduce me, so there would be no confusion.

Then I moved to Boston and there were no more distinct groups, and I had to do the introducing myself. People never quite knew what to call me. Sometimes an introduction required explanation.

I keep going back to the time when I was a kid, though. I couldn’t have been more than 3 or 4 years old. I decided then I wanted to be taken seriously, and I gave myself a name that would be taken seriously. Would I have been different if I was Robby?

I can’t bring it back. You can’t just change your name. It’s an organic process. But I wonder.

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I had a dream tonight.

I was living in a house (I think it may have been the old house in Medford) with some people, and the girl who lived there had brought home some of these little pocket black holes. I don’t know what their actual intended purpose was, but she was proposing we use them to help clean up some of the garbage around the house. They were kept in these little white packets that were sort of like those silica gel packets, or maybe like moist towelette packets. Something like that. Anyway, I went up to my room to collect some of my trash. I assumed she was going to use them outside, because they are hazardous. Then suddenly she was in my room and threw up one of these portable black holes. It made a sort of ominous noise but not too loud. She hadn’t used one before, so it very nearly destroyed the house, but she managed to keep hold of it.

She started throwing some garbage in, and I shrugged and started doing so myself. But the pocket black holes only lasted so long, so it went away before I was done. Then someone else was talking about everyone chipping in three bucks or something for more, and I said “look, I can just use one of mine.” Apparently I had like six of them in my pocket. I’m not sure why. I had apparently never used one before, however, and when I set it down it started drifting to the ceiling. I managed to contain it, and when she glared at me I said, “Hey, you almost did it, too.”

We finished cleaning up, sending our garbage to be devoured by these little micro black holes. Finally, an environmentally friendly way to get rid of garbage!

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It is probably not accurate to say I learned a new trick, because I’m sure I’ve always done it. But recently I was talking about magazines with someone and I wanted to express how perfectly they capture the moment in which they were published, in a way that things like newspapers don’t do very well, and I paused and said, “I guess they really capture the zeitgeist, if you want to be the type of person who uses that word.”

This does nothing to prevent the impression that I am a self-conscious linguaphile with heavy affectations in everything that I do, but it does make it seem like at least I’m not the sort of person who uses the word zeitgeist! It’s a great trick. Like scare quotes, it distances you from the word, but it goes further than that. It says “you and I both know what this word means and I, at least, dislike its connotations, but nevertheless, there it is.” It is another self-conscious affectation that people can politely laugh at, or maybe even sincerely laugh at. For all I know other people hear certain words and phrases and sit there thinking “he just used ‘zeitgeist’ unironically–to think I liked that guy!”

In which case I may just be hilarious.

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