Adultery. Whatever Will Be Will Be. Lucky Penny. You Can Stick Your Little Pins in the Voodoo Doll. Idiot American. Means Nothing.

--K tells me she “met someone”.
This was while she was on a trip.
Who can blame her?

Her husband hasn’t slept with her or seemed to want to in two years.

Of course she is going to meet someone. Over and over.
Until she learns what she is trying to teach herself.

Until she stops being where she doesn’t want to be.

--When a girl who has a boy starts cheating usually it is a transition strategy for ending the relationship.

When a boy who has a girl starts cheating he just wants to have his cake and eat another one too.

--This theory that things will work themselves out.

“If it’s meant to be, it will be.”

That supposes a meaner—someone or thing who means—and I guess most people would say their prime meaner is some god or another.

So when you speak that way about relationships, don’t you suggest a more Classical vision of not a god but gods, where Eros and Aphrodite take special interest in affairs of the heart, where designs are laid and followed and what is meant to be might very well be?

Oddly, most people who say that are Christian.
But I have a hard time finding a Biblical backing for the idea that God weaves plans of seduction and marriage.

It’s just what people say.
We say it, Christian and Greek and etc, so that we don’t have to think about what we must try to do, what we must risk, to make be what may not be.

So that when it is not, we can say: It wasn’t meant to be.


--Deboarding the plane, Atlanta again, I see a penny on the seat of the man who sat in front of me. My impulse is to pick it up but my pride is such that I don’t want anybody to see me do that.

Even though it is a penny.

And so it haunts me all down the walkway, all the way to the train and through the tunnels, this penny, sitting on the seat, my broken ritual of pennies found.

--And I’m not superstitious.

Although I heard of a woman in LA who kept an effigy hanging of me in her room and that bothered me to no end.

I didn’t even know there wasn’t peace between us but when that rumor reached me I tried to make the peace.
Perhaps I did.

Eventually, she gave me a concussion in Las Vegas, but that’s another story.

--I hate traveling. Don’t like the planes and the people on the planes fighting for their space and the airline attendants trying so hard to be snappy and clever and the pilot who always says things like “It’s a short two hours and twenty minutes” and tells you as you land about the weather.

I’ve flown too much.
Too many trips back from Colorado.
Too many times to Beirut and back.

None of this is good for a person like me. If I had the energy, I’d try to say what that was, a person like me. But fill in the blanks.

--In any case, I may not like to travel, but at heart, I’m still American.
Wherever I am, I want often to be elsewhere.
I still imagine New Canaan over the next horizon; that somewhere not here things are better.

Are good.
Are pure.

That there is some place to be where I will not even be me fully.

I don’ t like to travel, but I’m still restless as hell.

And other contradictions.


--That’s not really American.

In fact, all the things the people of the world want to heap on American are not really American. What is hated in the American character is not American character but the character of all humans.

We’re just the product of prosperity and power and luck.
Any country that experienced those things to the extant that we have would end up like us.

What we are, we’re just the natural end of common human aspirations, we’re just human desire taken to an almost absurd end.

Any nation would grow fat and bored and spoiled.
In fact, many of them have.

Any nation would throw round its weight.
In fact, most have tried.

It’s not Western.
It’s in the hearts of all these thinking creatures.
In the brains of all these opposed thumb giants.

--Read on the airplane Diary by Chuck Palahniuk.
Good line, one of the best: If you don’t understand it, you can make it mean anything.