Well you guys are wanting me to post about something other than how much boys on tumblr love me— which is a funny phenomenon by the way, when you think about it. I have always written to you about the things that happen to me, the ridiculous, hilarious, sad things that make no sense, and of all of them, what is funnier than people who don’t know me declaring their love for me on the internet? I want to laugh about that with you, too, you know.
Anyway what I want to say is, sometimes I wonder why people don’t eat apple seeds, why it’s so bad to eat the the whole thing, why we go all go to so much effort to avoid it, throwing practically half of all our apples away, good apples, too! never even getting close to the core, just to be safe— and i am here to tell you as someone who has had a few beers and just ate an apple seed as she was writing this, IT’S BECAUSE APPLE SEEDS TASTE LIKE POISON.
So a few things from my week I wanted to write you about:
When people say bad things about JD Salinger I get irrationally angry.
Salinger is like the really cute boy in your 8th grade class who you were in love with despite the fact that everyone else was in love with him, too, and it made you so mad because you thought YOUR feelings were special, you thought you appreciated the way he fixed his butt cut with his middle and index finger int he middle of a soccer game more than anybody else, you thought you watched his uniform pants for an erection much longer than anyone else, and you did, you kissed him at the movies and wiped your face off with your hand when you both stared straight ahead at Leo DiCaprio at the movie screen, and he changed you forever and he is yours, yours, yours, even though he is everybody else’s, too.
I want to tell you (that I ate all of the something’s in the icebox) that I read the Catcher in the Rye when I was a freshman in high school in my gifted english class because it was on our Banned Books list and I skipped Mass every Sunday, sat in my parent’s white minivan, a Plymouth, my barefeet up on the window, laughing. If anyone was ever in the room while I was reading it I read it aloud to them; I think that was when I picked up that terrible habit that still haunts me today, that thing people do that bothers me too when other people do it, when you laugh and say, Get this!” and the person on the couch next to you, when it’s about the third or fourth time, rolls their eyes and sighs heavily and says, What? because they love you and they have to, and you read sentences with such glee, such feeling like no one ever wrote sentences like this before, like you’ve unlocked the key to the world and now you know what you must do. You must write, You must write things that people annoy their parents with when they read it aloud to them in the car back from Mass on Sundays. And yes, your father regrets that he made that rule that the family needed to drive home without radio because your sister only listens to that rap crap and JESUS can he have two minutes of peace and quiet?
I want to tell you that I, too, wrote an essay about that book for my AP English class, for our summer reading essay, saying why it was my favorite, and the teacher chose me to read it out loud to everyone. I want to tell you that I, too read and reread it throughout college, while studying abroad, before graduating, forced it upon my friends, pushed it on my dad while home for the summers, took it with me to New York, read it out loud again on the 14A bus to the 11 year old boy I was taking home from basketball practice at the Y, and he curled up to me and laughed with delight, not believing that books could really be like this. I want to tell you that I made a man I loved or at least thought I loved (the verdict is awaiting critical distance), read it, made him reconcile the adolescent in him and in all of us, made him fall in love with Holden Caulfield if not with me.
When I think about his books, all of his books, I beam with affection and gratitude. I love them. I can’t say enough good things about them. And I’m not sure what to do with that. I want him to be mine. I want everyone to know how good he is but also I want nobody to really see how good he is but me.
That day, Thursday, right?, on the way into work I sat on the Q train with a coffee I balanced on my messenger bag while I opened up Jesus’ Son which is no Seymour, An Introduction by any, any, any means, but it is nevertheless engrossing, so much so that a man had to say, Excuse me! Excuse me! across the train before I looked up and saw that coffee had spilled all over my overpriced J Crew coat and I said FUCK out loud in front of all of the rush hour commuters, quiet with their indifference, but instead this old black man just handed napkins to strangers who passed them on down the line to me and I looked up at him, blushing deeply, so embarrassed, and cringed and said, Sorry, thank you and he said, “It’s okay, happens to the best of us!” And I wanted to fall down on the floor of the subway car and cry at his feet.
Then I transferred to the 6 and as the doors were closing, saw a woman just miss it, but stand there, her fingers wedged in the crack of the doors, her face all scrunched up, wrenching the doors open, or trying to, as we all looked on in horror. I refused to help her, I have some sort of moral disgust at people that desperate to be on a train. I hate them. I see them running, running!, down stairways and flinging their bodies through closing doors and I think, why? Why? I hate you. Nothing is so important. Then I try to imagine they are all late to say their final goodbyes to their dying mothers and I feel better.
That night, after work, I had a dinner meeting then went back to the office to finish a story which was a month late. I must have read something or heard the right song, or thought about it enough, that i found all the words and all of the cadences, and I was giddy with them. I would take breaks to breathe knowing I had finally found the beats. That is how it is. You want to die and then you find the wavelength and you can, largely, do not wrong. That is a bad way of writing to portray because anyone who has to write significant amounts on a regular basis does not have the luxury of sitting in front of a computer for a month doing nothing, reading wikipedia, weeping.
But I found the words and I finished by midnight and I rejoiced. I packed up my things and turned off all of the lights, already a little scared by how alone I was in this huge, empty, awful building.
I put the key in the door and it didn’t come out. And it didn’t come out for two hours. It’s easy to say, it didn’t come out for two hours, without really understanding what that meant. Turning a key takes 1 second, maybe two if it’s fidgety. Thing how many times I turned that key in two hours, consider how much my fingers hurt, how I pulled them up into my sleeve and tried to open them through all of my clothes, the way you do with a jar or a particularly cold can of coke. Somewhere after calling a few people, after considering calling a locksmith and realizing i didn’t want to be alone on the 8th floor of a completely empty building with a strange man, after realizing I was also afraid to sleep in this cold, empty building, in a room with a key in the door, after realizing I couldn’t leave but couldn’t stay and it was 2am and I was completely and utterly alone, I cried. I sobbed. I yelled but no one could hear me.
Sometimes I wonder why people attack very smart, seemingly very vulnerable and very generous people on the internet, people who are just like them. I wonder why they would say mean things about someone telling a story on their blog and not, say, Hoda Kotb or Rick Sanchez (these are really the only News people I can think of —HA see, I read blogs). And I think it’s because you see them and you think, Why not me? I do it, too, of course. But I know when to stop. I know when to say, I am horrified, but that is only because I recognize myself in it.
What bothers us is that someone seemingly gave Hoda Kotb permission to speak— I don’t know why, but I always envision the media knighting people, suddenly saying, “Yes, what you have to say now matters.” And when people listen to someone who has not been given permission but has gotten people to listen anyway, it worries us. It threatens us and our understanding of whose opinion matters and when. Now we must be discerning. But instead of turning that discernment to mainstream media (usually we just beging to stop paying attention to maintsream media; a problem in and of itself (for them, anyway)), a discernment we never enacted when it was perhaps most called for, mind you, we turn it to our peers. We wonder what they did to deserve the right to speak. Who are they to be listened to? We criticize them, doubt them, say they are crazy out loud at our computers, wait for them to fuck up, but why? Because why not us? Why not us, too? Because we are smart enough to not try? Because we are afraid people will hate us the way we hate people?
