My Apology to the Internet

While I'm in the middle of a long health crisis, I just want to say to something to this 'audience' of friends.

In the early years here on facebook, before we truly understood the impact of social media on our psyches, I was a particularly loud purveyor of rancor and I don't think I've ever truly apologized for it.

On the one hand, you can't really regret your life except for your most extreme sins. We all lived through the same events and forces, and we are all, in our way, the markers of the times we lived in. Social media is the closest record of what it was like to live through any historical period, but because the record was so tantalizingly easy to write down, it changed our personalities. If you already had a lot of anger, if you'd lived a troubled life, the temptation to splay your anger around the internet was irresistible. The fact that the temptation was irresistible is amply born out by the fact that so many millions yielded to it.

The point of the internet, what makes the internet great rather than terrible, is that it gives a place to express yourself at your best, your most uplifting, your most enthusiastic, not your worst. But when you feel like your best is ignored, it is so unbelievably easy for the worse angels of our nature to emerge. And for those of us who've showed our darker selves in public, the penance is that we have to show our struggles to control it publicly, with the knowledge that we will fail all too often and that every time, we have to own up to that side of who we are, with both realism that that side will sometimes emerge, and also with the promise to ourselves that we'll strive to do better even as we know that some people will write us off along the way.

I am a lonely guy. 41 years old, a life of little romance, no marriage or children, almost all my good friends live far away, with too much brain malady for more than a cursory job, armed with a battalion of physical ailments, learning disabilities that prevented education in the subjects that interested me, and interests so unique to me that there is barely any contemporary I may discuss them with. I live with all too many memories of actions of which I feel deeply guilty, many of which may well be the coinage of a feverishly delusional mind. The temptation to view the world misanthropically is overwhelming. But it is not the people who hate life who are most vulnerable to hate, it is the people who love life vulnerable to it, because when life doesn't love them back, it's a colossal blow.

If I end up consistently posting here for another thirty or fifty years, it's bad enough that my epitaph will be 'he had a good facebook page and he went to Cats.' Whether I think other people have been unfair, nobody wants to be remembered as a troll. I want to give more solace than disturbance. I want more to comfort the afflicted than afflict the comfortable. I want my presence on the internet to be remembered more with fondness than exasperation.

Some of you weren't there for the worst of it. Some of you may think you were there for the worst of it and got a mere pebble in the pool compared to what all this was ten years ago. Whatever my qualms about others, those don't matter. That's between them and their creator. We're only responsible for ourselves.

So if I do serious posts around here, I'll do my best to stay positive. I'm going to keep failing a lot, but once your 'out there,' you can't change your reputation by keeping quiet.

Wish me luck.

Poem of the Day

 

To gypsy jazz I go to play

And then to fucking dance

And if there is a price to pay

In body take the chance.

Our lives must always go apace.

Else living starts to die

For living's an eternal race

Or living is a lie.

Oh god... there's nausea... Everything is blinking... a stomach migrane...

To home I go and brave the drive

hot blanket on my back....

for... a...

Oh god that probiotic has trace amounts of wheat.

Fuck rhyming. Fuck meter.

Life is prose.

Shyness

 

Two years ago I promised I was done with Baltimore. I declared very publicly that I found the ethos loathesome of everybody I knew and they would never see me again. Why? Fucking Israel criticism.

My beloved grandmother was dying and I felt my loyalty divided as I usually do by two groups who often sound like they want to burn everybody who disagrees with them as a witch, and generally not in a great mental state. I speculated I was on my way out of Baltimore to rebuild my life in the County, and as usual, I burned what was left of the bridge rather than rebuild what I feared was missing.

I'm not the hyena you think I am. I'm not the madman I think I am. I'm not me around you, 'me' is around music and books, writing things on a page and trying very hard to do creative and intellectual projects that inevitably get abandoned, 100x more at home with ideas than people and just grateful for the privilege of being able to surround myself with ideas I don't understand. I'm very curious, but I'm not all that intelligent, I just play at being it online.

In eleven years in Baltimore, literally nobody knows me in real life better than they know me from a facebook page where I can speak with a voice slightly more authentic than in person. Other people use social media to share selfies that shout to the world their fun lives and your dull one, their physical allure to your ugly mug, or how loved they are by their significant others in comparison to how hated you are, I seem to shout 'look how smart I am and how dumb you are.' Beneath every share is an intrusion, an unspoken comparison to the person who unwittingly sees it. Yes, it's partially about sharing happiness, but sharing happiness inevitably inspires envy among those who lack what you have.

Was this really my intention? Of course not, but social media is more powerful than us. It flattens every aspect of our character to 1s and 0s. Everything is either a problem or it isn't, and no context online's yet been developed evaluate a problem's severity. Every small problem is now an existential problem.

I'd say that all this has compromised my social life but for eight years I haven't tried hard to have one, and in the early Baltimore years it got me noticed by a number of 'in-groups' who wouldn't have given me the time of day if they didn't find me funny and weren't intimidated by my keyboard-tongue.

No, I'm quite shy, bookish, disorganized, clearly a little narcissistic, an emotional yo-yo, an outsider to every group I've been inside, easily intimidated and rarely find social interaction fulfilling. The domineering steamroller/clown people think they know is a tic, learned early in life when a severely LD kid realized he was having a colossally difficult time of it. For eleven years the situation did not change. Tucker thus developed a contest with himself: dare his nerve to speak his mind at all times. Show perpetually that nobody could intimidate or break him; a lifelong chip on his shoulder that cost him as many friends as it made.

Will finish this another time... maybe never, maybe later tonight.

Poem of the Day: Cross Keys

.

A village of rich a mile from the poor.

Home to the WASP divorcee and the married WASP adjacent.

You pass it every day for fifteen years and going never occurs to you. You go in and your very presence makes you think you're losing money.

Yves Delorme, Williams Sonoma, Monument Sotheby's, Octavia, Talbots, Chezelle: The very names smell of money as much as Daisy Buchanan.

On the bistros' outside decks sit septuagenarians who double as walk-in closets for haute couture.

Jesus, there's even a place called "The Store, Ltd."

Right next door is Poly High, where northwest Baltimore's promising poor can grasp their future if they hold a grip of iron.

What would happen when they go into Cross Keys?

The truth is, Cross Keys is a brutalist dump. The one minimall in Baltimore that convinced its 1975 customers they were shopping in the world of tomorrow.

Three miles downtown is Charles Center, a thirty-story village against Cross Keys three, where tomorrow's always been inhabited by ghosts and City Hall workers at lunchtime. Charles Center, Baltimore's future where none have dared go at night for fifty years.

Somewhere in Baltimore, there is a city. 

Poem of the Day

 

Relearning (learning) to dance the lindy with bad innards on medical advice to make my esophagus great again.

I dance only one in four songs or else my heart feels like it'll play leapfrog.

If i collapse on the floor I'll be known as the guy who might die when dancing with you. I can make it a thing.

Everybody here is so thin and energetic, except the old guys like me who stay on the sidelines in a mixture of inhibition and exhaustion.

Oh for the good old days of jazz jams on the violin, three whiskeys and a giant smoked hen. The whiskey near me is Laphroaig. I can tell just from the smell. If only...

This whole thin thing is a lifestyle that suits the Tucker you love about as well as 6'5.

Enough of this. Back to the dance floor so I may become death.

Beginning of New TCP: Herod dedicating Caesaria

"We've got a half-mile of real estate. What do you say? Should I make Caesaria my capital? Why shouldn't such a beautiful city be the capital? It's got a beautiful seaview, you can never get that in Jerusalem. My friend Augustus used to say to me "you should try to make the capital somewhere other than Jerusalem. Those Jerusalemite elites never loved me and they never loved you. You should try to make the captial Sebastia, it's right on the top of the mountains, it's a perfect fort!" But I can't move the capital away from Jerusalem. Do you have any idea what kind of machareikeh those Jerusalemites would start if I ever tried to do that? But still, we can dream of a new capital and one day, maybe when they're not looking...

And let's give you a load of our beautiful new High Priest Simon ben-Boethus. He's one of a kind, folks!  This guy is going to administer the new loyalty oath like he just came up with it himself! I've never heard anyone administer a loyalty oath like this guy. He said to me "Herod!" and that's what my friends call me, I never go in with this 'Your Majesty" drek, you all can call me Herod too, you know what's what, not like those rich Jerusalem elites and their crooked Rabbis, and I know, you're supposed to say honorable things about the Rabbis but between you and me, folks, those Rabbis are bad people, very bad people, they really are, and just want the power to tell you what you should do, but we're not gonna let them tell us, are we?

Poem of the Day

 Hopkins outpatient center.

It's not a hospital, it's an airport. Patients are processed as efficiently as factory meat.

Outside the factory are terraced English gardens fit for a capital city, for we're to understand we are in the world capital of medicine. The St. Peter's Cathedral. The Taj Mahal. The Louvre or Hermitage. Baltimore's Forbidden City of overachievement.

Everything here that's not an airport is there to tell us that medicine is art as towering as Michelangelo and Mozart where towering artists paint their masterpieces on diseases that barely have names.

Some of us are just here for an ENT and for these Goyas and Breugels, we're still just processed meat.

All 

More with Istvan Ticoczki, the world's worst novelist

 AC Charlap Tell me about your novelistic project?

Istvan Tococzki: It is 'the Jewish comedy.'

ACC: It's not very funny.

IT: That is where the comedy lies.

ACC: I'm afraid I don't understand.

IT: I wish to convey the entirety of Jewish history as Dante did for the afterlife and Balzac for Paris.

AC: How long have you been working on it?

IT: Seventy years.

AC: How much have you finished.

IT: I have roughly three percent of it complete in rough form.

AC: It sounds exhausting.

IT: I shall complete the rough draft in roughly the year 4823.

AC: You think you will live long enough to complete it?

IT: It does not matter whether I live long enough. The material should be unfinishable.

AC: Why then would people read it?

IT: None read it anyway.

AC: But it isn't published yet.

IT: It's not publishable.

AC: So why write it?

IT: Because one day people will read it.

AC: You just said it isn't publishable.

IT: It will be read, not published.

AC: What does that mean?

IT: I do not know.

AC: Then why do you say it?

IT: Why say anything?

AC: Inquiring minds want to know why you are writing this work.

IT: That would be the first time minds ever inquired into my work.

AC: Well they are now.

IT: No they're not.

AC: That's why we're here.

IT: You're here because your magazine exhausted all other options.

AC: Does that make any difference?

IT: Ultimately no.

AC: So why do you write it?

IT: Because a voice told me to.

AC: A voice? What sort of voice?

IT: How should I know what sort of voice?

AC: Would other people know better than you?

IT: Who knows?

AC: Well then maybe you should tell us so that better informed readers can tell you.

IT: Alright, I was told by God.

AC: .God?

IT: God.

AC: ..God!

IT: God.

AC: ...God?

IT: God.

AC: Why would God tell you to write something?

IT: Why does God do anything?

AC: You really believe God spoke to you?

IT: What else should I believe?

AC: What did he tell you?

IT: That he would dictate a novel to me that reveals the universe's truth.

AC: Has he?

IT: No.

AC: Has he dictated anything to you?

IT: I sometimes think he does. Much of my writing reads to me as though I did not write it.

AC: Does it really?

IT: Many readers agree with me.

AC: Is it possible that they mean...

IT: ...yes they mean it's incoherent, I know.

They Have the Right: Attempt at a Daily Poem #7

At a WNBA game in Washington.

The athletes are throwing punches at each other.

They have the right to be idiots just like we do.

BLOOD! SANGRE! DOGS OF WAR! BURN THEM ALL!

Novelgazing - Attempt at a Daily Poem #6

 Don't write a novel.

Just don't do it. Please don't. It's

a bad idea.

Too Old for a Friday Night: Attempt at a Daily Poem #5

 

You drive thirty minutes to find the usual haunt closed for a private event.

Tonight must be salvaged like a classic car.

You text most of the few friends you're still in touch with, none respond in time to do anything.

To the old bars you go for wine from a box in search of an adolescence that happened in your early thirties. You see an acquaintance so distant you don't say hi.

Social media shows old bandmates have a show in your old neighborhood, you drive over and contrive to run into them by coincidence.

They take you to a bar: why do all these little children have tattoos?

There's a punk band playing. The kids should be beating the shit out of each other, instead they're all checking their phones. Maybe the phones have a moshing app.

Then you realize, this music from the Carter Era is the music of their parents. For them, The Ramones are classical music, and they listen like they're going to church.

Time's thievery of youth is not very subtle, Milton was wrong about that.

Age dwindles the friend list, time dwindles the sacrifices we make to keep them, tensions dwindle their willingness to keep us, paranoia dwindles the willingness to try with them again, morale dwindles the willingness to make new ones.

We all come to prize our dignity like bees their queen, as though pride is something a computer can quantify.

Magnesium Citrate: Attempt at a Daily Poem #4

 Two days of doses

Results not predictable

Until they happen.

At therapist's office. 

Computer Left at the Beach: Attempt at a Daily Poem #3

I know I put the computer in the car yet it's not there.

Will have to drive back to the beach three hours then three hours back.

Remember putting it on top of the trunk when I put the bag in the car?

Oh god it dropped from the car.

Will somebody run it over? Did I run it over? Will someone steal it?

Will they delete my email? Will they delete my blog? Will they, perish the thought, facebook?

Your life is over. It's always been over. Eight years old broke you and putting yourself together's impossible ever since.

This is so typical of you, cosmic plaything of a malevolent god who subjects you alone to personal trials none else endures.

Damn Him, damn me, damn all creation.

It's under the seat.

You deliberately put it there.

....

Beach Sushi: Attempt at daily poem #2

A man with a giant esophagus has few luxuries. One of them is sushi.

A restaurant upscale enough where each of the people has one indication how rich they are: a leather wristwatch, a wallet tip calculator, a bottle of Riesling. All the women have exactly one piece of expensive jewelry.

The waitress is obviously the owner. In shape late 50something with a tan and facelift and perfectly sophisticated glasses. God knows the divorce story... The three sushi chefs say nothing. One Asian, one half Asian, one white.

In the center of the room is a family where sits a paterfamilias with a shaved head, guns for muscles and a bottle of wine on the table right above his lap. The college age daughter with the white blouse says nothing as though scared of him. The other daughter has a genderqueer partner. We know which is his favorite.

Directly in front of me the cufflinked WASP with the leather wristwatch and the petite wife so understated she has no defining features, even in her clothing. God's frozen people.

Behind me, two Indian teenage girls. One petite, one big and tall, they say nothing.

Two twentysomething couples. One behind, one in front. One tattooed, one preppie.

Next to me at the bar, a late thirtysomething lady whose voice has no vowels takes a selfie while sitting alone. We pointedly don't speak to each other. To speak would break the denial. She takes twice as long as me to order then speaks to her sushis about how delicious they are.

In the corner is a group of five college alternacrowd with weird hair who talk louder than everyone else. They talk about Mark Wahlberg and Toy Story. They are the only people in the restaurant who seem happy.

The sushi comes late. Eight pieces plus some sashimi without rice. Finished in four minutes. The cucumber is clearly pickled but I need to know if there's onion or garlic. The waitress looks at me in panic and puts her whole arm on my shoulder: "Do you have a pen in case I have to save you?"

...yes and yes to be frank. I stutter as I ask for the check.

I don't dare mention the price. Time for pineapple at Wawa.

There's a ten person line to play lottery games.

The World's Worst Novelist: A selection of an Interview with Istvan Ticoczki

 AC Charlap: Today we are sitting with Istvan Ticoczki, the self-proclaimed world's worst novelist.

Istvan Ticoczki: It is not a proclamation, it is a fact corroborated by every review and lack of book sale.

ACC: And yet you are acclaimed throughout the world as the most consequential and loathed intellect of your time and place.

IT: That too is not acclimation but fact. I was proclaimed by Roger Ebert to be an internet troll who was somehow deposited in the New York Review of Books in the early 1960s and waited for the world to catch up to him.

ACC: You have what might be the singular distinction of being beaten up by Norman Mailer on nine separate occasions.

IT: I refused to ever fight back, as I knew after the second time that provoking Mailer in print would result in my remembrance by posterity.

ACC: You also had separate plates of beef stroganoff deposited on your head by Joan Didion, Eve Babbitz, Mary McCarthy, Cynthia Ozick, and Lillian Hellman.

IT: Don't forget Susan Sontag.

ACC: Why was it always beef stroganoff?

IT: I always keep a plate of it near me for just such occasions.

ACC: And yet you were always invited to parties of the New York literati?

IT: It was always secretly hoped that I provoke people in person, yet people persisted in finding me nice and polite, the literary scenesters were always disappointed.

ACC: And yet you took quite a few beatings?

IT: It was a regular event that I would be punched and slapped, with drinks thrown in my face. At one party I stood in the middle of the room while the other members tied ropes to me like a maypole and proceeded to promenade around my neck so as to choke me.

ACC: How close did you come to suffocating?

IT: Very, but I made sure the event was covered in the next issue of the New Yorker and received a nomination for the National Book Award long list as an act of contrition.

--------------

ACC: Tell me about your novelistic project?

IT: It is 'the Jewish comedy.'

ACC: It's not very funny.

IT: That is where the comedy lies.

ACC: I'm afraid I don't understand.

IT: I wish to convey the entirety of Jewish history as Dante did for the afterlife and Balzac for Paris.

AC: How long have you been working on it?

IT: Seventy years.

AC: How much have you finished.

IT: I have roughly three percent of it complete in rough form.

AC: It sounds exhausting.

IT: I shall complete the rough draft in roughly the year 4823.

---------------------------------------------------------

The interview cuts off here for legal reasons. There is more that may be shared in future issues.