Yes, I'm reading the Catcher in the Rye again. Deal with it.

. . . or kindly fuck off.

Every time I came to the end of a block and stepped off the goddamn curb, I had this feeling that I'd never get to the other side of the street. I thought I'd just go down, down, down, and nobody'd ever see me again.

This line, and you may recognize it, is Holden Caulfield having a Holden Caulfield moment. Holden has the disease, undiagnosed and unnamed, that I saw so much of in my high-school years and late teens on the coast, south of Boston. Almost all my friends had it growing up. Two of them even died needless, stupid deaths because of it, deaths unworthy even of far lesser people.

I got an email from an old friend which has been having a time-machine-like effect on me, a time-machine that only knows how to take you into your past and leave you there.

Niles was the first friend I made after my family left my childhood home to move closer to the city. He was the first and most significant friend of the second phase of my life. We had our first explorations of drinking together. Several times he took it upon himself to try and correct my almost impossible naivete in the area of sex (there were some very funny conversations). It was Niles who convinced me to pick up a musical instrument for the first time. And I was with him when I almost blew my thumb and first two fingers off my left hand with some sort of firework that he had rigged to, as he said, 'make the fuse last longer'.

Jules was different. Difficult, frustrating, creative, well-meaning, his horses eventually got away from him. His mind was always moving and he had a real gift for crisp observations. I lived with him in his rent-controlled house in Dorchester for a little while after I left school. We were in bands together, so many of them I can't even count, at least five or six, me a bass player, him a drummer which, if you know your music, is a traditionally sacred relationship if ever there was one.

These were good young men. No more confused than anybody else I knew. Male friendships are rarely mentioned in this culture, unless it's a ridiculous caricature on a sitcom.

~~~~~~~


10:22 PM

So now I'm thinking (for reasons both terrible and trivial) about Sylvia Plath and what she referred to as her bell jar. Sylvia grew up where I grew up, and she went to school where I went to school, in the Pioneer Valley in the middle of Massachusetts. Of course, she went to Smith; and, while I obviously did not, I did take two classes there. Combinatorics and Real Analysis. The combinatorics class was a joke, but it was that analysis class where I had a strange non-reoccurring experience toward the end of the semester.

The class discussion had for some reason digressed into the topic of voting systems, and we were working through a proof of either Gibbard-Satterthwaite or Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, I don't recall which, when, in my experience, the whole room temporarily receded and, for a spellbinding quarter-minute, the proof seemed actually to be about human psychology, and not about voting systems at all.

This was striking me as a Sylvia Plath-like moment. I don't know. Maybe there's something in the ivy at Smith that induces distressing transpersonal experiences. Either that or I'd been drinking before analysis class again.