“Two nights in a little cabin with wood-burning stove in the Olympic Peninsula, La Push. I love the land there, the moss and firs, and the fact that it’s the very outside edge of the country. The radio picks up Canadian broadcasts and some foreign language station (Russian?) as you roll across the Hood Canal Bridge thinking somewhere down in all that water are Trident nuclear submarines. And how it could be different, but if it were it wouldn’t be America.”
[excerpt of novel i wrote as series of spontaneous posts at twitter over several months in 2009.]
New project yesterday: a small drywall patch in a house over in Tangletown. I think the homeowners were Jewish. There was a plastic bowl on the front porch–must’ve been a water bowl for a cat–that had a Star of David. Also something about the guy, Frank. He wanted to hang upstairs while I was up on the ladder tearing out the drywall. A lot of guys do this actually. Usually they’re tinkerers, amateur carpenters. Or they’re just interested in how their house is built. But Frank was different: he just seemed to want to talk to somebody. He had an office downstairs. Never asked him what he did. I was busy running up and down getting more tools. There were pictures up and down the stairway, those kind where you pay some pro to pose you and your family doing all different things. We did one like that when I was 13. Right after my Bar Mitzvah. I remember the photographer asked us to bring our basketballs, bats. Frank said they had three kids, 4, 2, and 10 months. But all of them were out. Preschool, daycare. In the stroller with mom. A rain-snow mix was coming down outside. Each time I came in I’d wipe my boots on the doormat. The patch was up in the baby’s bedroom. There was a crib in there. I covered it in a plastic sheet so it didn’t get dusty. Later I finished and came downstairs. The mom had come home. She was short and heavy. She looked away, wouldn’t meet my eyes. Frank was different now too. Cooler. They had something cooking on the stove. I got out of there.
In January of 2009 I started looking around Twitter. I read various people’s tweets. It seemed like a mass online masturbation session. People beating off their companies, their books, their blogs. My first instinct was subversion, using twitter to make fun of people using twitter. I thought I could write a kind of meta-novel. Continue Reading »