All Things Considered featured a report on a Kentucky man who was recently recognized as a hermit by the Catholic Church. The segment made it sound as if being a hermit were an occupation, like being an accountant or an engineer. “Tell me,” Linda Wertheimer said to a woman connected with the Kentucky archdiocese, “do you have any guidelines for hermits? Do your hermits live in proximity to other hermits?” The woman said that many of her hermits held part-time jobs as weavers, which, again, sounds so ancient. “Do you think this is on the rise?” Linda Wertheimer asked. “Being a hermit?”
“Oh, definitely,” the woman said. “Especially now.”
November 1, 2001
Dearborn, Michigan
I had the night off so went to the multiplex across the road from the hotel to see Joy Ride. The only people in the theater were me and an obese woman dressed like a witch. I’d seen her earlier in the lobby, noticed the tall black hat, and thought, That person is going to sit in front of me. And so she did, directly in front of me, though there were hundreds of empty seats for her to choose from. “Fucking…witch,” I whispered.
November 2, 2001
Dearborn
I talked to Amy yesterday. She’d just gotten off the phone with Tiffany, who’s having a fight with her boyfriend. He can’t stand it when she pees in front of him so a few days ago, after sitting on the john and groaning, she dropped a bar of soap into the toilet. He thought she was defecating and what was supposed to be a joke soon escalated into a fight. Tiffany argues that because he never takes her out to dinner, this is the sort of girlfriend he deserves. It’s part of her new identity as a poor person, and it illustrates how she’s making things up as she goes along. Tiffany’s poverty is noble, but I guess this nobility doesn’t extend to her boyfriend. Somewhere along the line she’s decided that money has a direct correlation to manners, meaning that a minimum-wage girlfriend shits in view of her company while a salaried woman can afford to close the door. As a poor person, she’s decided to identify with Osama bin Laden, whom she sees as a Middle Eastern Robin Hood.
She and Paul had a huge fight when he wore a turban and a fake beard to visit a neighbor. She told him he was being disrespectful and he called her a whore.
November 20, 2001
New York
At Provence on Prince Street, our waiter led us to the kitchen, where we saw the restaurant’s prizewinning entry in the recent New York Restaurant Show. The theme was Tragedy, so the chef constructed a replica of the remnants of the World Trade Center surrounded by a trio of firemen. Made from animal fat and sugar, the sculpture literally embodied the term bad taste. “It was nicer last week,” the waiter reflected. “A few days ago it started to melt, and some of the walls have fallen in.”
November 22, 2001
New York
The other day the president pardoned a turkey named Liberty. The two of them were pictured on the front page of the Times, the president joyous, the turkey indifferent. Something tells me she would have been eaten had her name been Chris or Becky. Instead of being served for Thanksgiving, she’ll be sent to a petting zoo.
Late last night Hugh and I walked up Central Park West to watch them blowing up the balloons for the Thanksgiving Day Parade. In the 1930s Macy’s would cut them free and pay a reward for their return. It sounded like a nice idea, but by the second year they were being brought back with bullet holes in them, shot down by people desperate for reward money. In the past, you could step up close and watch the inflation, but now they block off the streets, either for security or the fear of lawsuits. We got as close as we could, but it wasn’t very satisfying.
November 23, 2001
New York
Dad called last night to say, “You looked terrible.” He’d seen my Letterman appearance and was angry that I hadn’t worn a bow tie. “I told you a hundred times. Hell, I even gave you the ties and still you didn’t listen to me.” My shoes were a disappointment as well. “Jesus, what were you doing up there? You had no personality at all.” It’s Dad’s opinion that a bow tie enhances everything you say, elevates it into a language of elegance. With my brown shoes and knit English tie, I looked common, unspecial, boring. “God, I just…want to shake you.”
November 25, 2001
Paris
On WNYC I listened to a report informing us that New York’s paranoid schizophrenics were having a difficult time coming to terms with the events of September 11. It was another example of something we probably could have figured out for ourselves. The reporter interviewed the tenants of a halfway house, people convinced that the hijacked planes had been aiming for them personally. The solution, as with everything else, is counseling, counseling, counseling.
December 13, 2001
Paris
On Friday we’re supposed to receive our first euros, which will come in little 100-franc packets distributed by the post office and the Bank of France. I say “supposed to” because both the post office and the Bank of France are threatening to strike starting Friday morning. Apparently this euro business is making them work too hard, and before the program’s even started, they’ve decided they need a raise. Elections are coming up so this year the strikes are even heavier than before. All of them want to get their licks in before the new administration.
December 17, 2001
Budapest, Hungary
The Eyewitness Travel Guide describes Budapest as a glittering jewel—“the Paris of the East.” On closer inspection, the book is full of errors. It reports, for example, that in winter the city gets only two and a half hours of sunlight a day and cranks the figure up to eight for the months of June, July, and August. I’d expected it to get dark at around ten a.m., but it turned out we had light until four in the afternoon. What they probably meant to say was that each evening, the city endures two and a half weeks of darkness. The nights feel impossibly long here, partly because it’s cold, but mainly because things are so poorly lit. Everything not pictured in our guidebook fades away once the sun sets.
It’s as if the country has run out of both paint and lightbulbs. When people leave their apartment buildings—most of which are missing great patches of their facades—we peek into the grim, peeling foyers. They burn brown coal in Budapest, and everything is coated with soot. You just want to put the entire city in a bathtub and take to it with a wire brush.