Shorthand for Nothing

When I was a kid my father worked at the community college, and we’d spend a lot of time around his work after school. Often we’d go to the bookstore and someone would buy us some snacks. For some reason I associate it particularly with gummi worms; for the longest time this was my only association with the place. I didn’t really notice or care that it sold books, so long as there was candy in it for me.

I remember an occasion where someone asked if I wanted to go to the Snackbar. This is apparently what the cafeteria used to be called. Naturally I said yes, because I assumed they meant the bookstore, where we got our snacks, and I could be relied upon to want candy. And we went to this place which was foreign to me and serving food that wasn’t candy at all, and I was very upset. This wasn’t the Snackbar, this was some other place, some place serving food I wanted none of. It was shattering. I felt cheated. I felt like the world wasn’t working the way it’s supposed to.

I’m older now. I know the context of things, and I understand confusion, as much as any of us can. I still care a great deal about words and what they mean, though, and I still find it shattering when life doesn’t live up to my expectations. I have them so rarely, that when it doesn’t happen I don’t know what to do. I was expecting something. I had every reason to believe it would happen. When it doesn’t, I feel just like I did back then. Like there’s something that just fundamentally broke, and I’m left holding the pieces.

And I’d been thinking of that story lately, because sometimes an old story you’d forgotten for years is the best way to frame the world.

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Dear girls who hated me when I first started college,

This was about 2005-2006, I guess. You may remember! I was always hanging out on the couches, along with some of my friends. I think there were two or three of you. I only remember one of your names, and that one of you was blonde. Apparently one time you complained about me to the guy who works in the cafeteria, who knew me. “Do you know Robert Mason?” you asked. And when he said he did, you just said how much you hated me.

I have no idea what I had done to earn your ire. I suppose it was probably just a case of being completely different people who happened to share proximity all the time. Apparently your hate for me was pretty intense. I’m sorry if I caused you to lose sleep or something. I mean, I’m sure you aren’t terrible people. Maybe you are very nice, and I just rubbed you the wrong way? So, I’m sorry. I hope that you don’t think back of how much you hated me from time to time, unless it’s just to laugh about the follies of youth. We should all laugh about the follies of youth.

Yours,

Rob Mason

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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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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 think I’m going to do more of these ‘post a thing that I wrote and then ramble about it’ things.) I once sent a friend of mine some of a batch of poems that I wrote in early 2008. As I read through them and sent them to her, I commented on some of them. On one I noted that its meaning was inscrutable even to me. It started with the lines “Left turn only / once defined your destination,” and I’m still not sure what that means. The full text is here:

“Left turn only” once defined
your destination.
And, after hours on a Tuesday,
the blur of traffic signals–
the prohibitive reds, flashing
but never changing–
became too much,
and you would stand for hours
at a single intersection.

By day you could follow the crowds,
but at night,
with only the occasional passing car,
the isolation was crushing.
None of the distant lights
cared for you,
if they even knew you existed.
The most reaction you could get
came from the crosswalk signals.
Even then,
it was only so long
before “don’t walk” would flash again.

Did I just like the line? Did it mean something? I have no idea. I wrote this poem about making an impact, about isolation, and about destinations, but I don’t know why I decided that left turn only would have any meaning. Was it merely suggesting that, at night, you don’t have to turn left in the left turn lanes in Seattle (which the poem, as much of my poetry, was definitely about)? Was it instead suggesting that the person described in the poem was once defined by restriction and was now paralyzed by freedom?

I don’t know these things, and this is weird, even to me. I could probably tell you what inspired most of my writing, even though I am probably too prolific for my own good at times. I know these stories. And yet, here’s this. Some of the others are the same way: I have no idea what I was thinking when I wrote it. Not in a ‘wow, this is terrible’ sense, but in a ‘I don’t recognize these emotions’ sense. I’m not sure how I feel about that.

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This section starts with a quote from Hunter S. Thompson. It’s about taking flight, in more ways than one. (more…)

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You guys, I am going to make a podcast and it’s going to be awesome. I’m going to probably record this weekend and then find a place to upload it, which will probably be pretty easy, given my expected bandwidth use (very little!). It will be called Rob Mason Tells You What To Think, I will post them here when they happen, and it will be the greatest thing ever. I will basically talk about whatever in a rambling and digressive fashion, because oral storytelling is fun, and sometimes you just need to hear my voice when you’re walking to work or whatever, talking about something useless. It’ll be great, probably!

Or maybe it won’t be, but even if it’s not, it will be awesome, because terrible things are just as awesome as awesome things, in the end.

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I have CNN.com in my Google Reader, though as time wears on I find myself wondering why I would do such a thing. It has articles with consistently terrible ledes and some really terrible commentary, which for some reason people are getting paid to write.

Their latest assault on the dignity of the English language is written by Roland Martin, who is apparently a nationally syndicated columnist. It is an article complaining about Valentine’s Day, which is super original! It’s pretty much the same sort of anti-Valentine’s rant you hear from anyone who has ever been burned by some of its more absurd adherents, or felt that roses are overpriced, or complained that society felt they needed a special day to demonstrate their love for their significant other. I’m not a devoted adherent but I don’t personally feel the day needs abolishing or anything. But the article bothered me, so here is my little defense of the holiday.

The article starts off with the false assertion that it was “created by rabid retailers who needed a major shopping day between Christmas and Easter in order to give people a reason to spend money.” Which is, you know, completely false!

Valentine’s Day is a Saint’s Day, for one. It became associated with romantic love in the High Middle Ages, before Christmas and Easter were shopping days. So, nice fact-checking there, Roland Martin! By which I mean ‘oh you appear to be completely wrong.‘

Then he does the traditional “I love my wife but why do I have to buy her expensive roses today?” thing. Answer? You don’t, actually! Society doesn’t really expect much of you. But it’s a day traditionally associated with romantic love, and do you really do nice things for her every day of the year? If money is tight or you want to avoid crowds, it’s still a nice time to watch a nice quiet movie with the missus and maybe have some candlelit dinner at home. Is there something wrong with having a day set aside out of the year for this? Anyone who’s likely to do it spontaneoussly is going to do it whether or not there’s a holiday on.

What really gets me is that this guy is getting paid, probably substantial sums of money, to complain about Valentine’s Day, without fact checking, inaccurately, and unoriginally–everyone who’s ever complained about it has said the same thing, and they have said it better, and without the self-righteous “I’m getting paid to do this!” sort of attitude. And it wasn’t polluting my feed reader.

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