Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

The Asian — stalking me to just about every other lunch and spending more time hanging around Achsa and me during her visits than Sveta my Svetichka ever did, and I’m sure you can put this into better Hebrew for me, but I was davening, God YHVH, Father of my fathers, don’t let her shoot me down with Achsa around or before our tix to Merce Cunningham’s farewell at the Armory. But then she’s like God herself, this Asian, in all places at all times, though managing always to be far enough away from me and inconspicuous to cabbies that I thought she might be two Asians, or four, or more, and even jumping into Bill’s on 54th and blarneying a bartender who’d once temped for me into letting me exit through the broken filing cabinets of the Prohibition sewer tunnel that let me out on 55th to come around Madison to get her face, head on, she’d turned, was gone. But then she’s outside my office. Outside my fucking building. At the fucking cardiologist’s, like she knows what she’s doing to me. Always in that Red Sox hat, and that’s what drives me crazy — also, can you imagine my bloodpressure coming through Koreatown?

I went through all the Asians I’ve ever repped, all the Asian women I’ve ever repped (so counting up my nonwhite friends nontheless), no likelies, so she’s either a sub I rejected, or related to us, our us, which would be worse. Because I can say this with total confidence. I’m sure I never fucked her. It’s difficult in life, to go against the conventional wisdom, to oppose all the entrenched norms and institutions and dogma, like Copernicus and Galileo, Spinoza, Marx, Pancho Villa, Rosa Parks, like Duchamp going readymade and Dylan going electric, and this is mine, my stand, my own two feet on the garbage day street with that scrawny flat just unfuckable ass always in front of me and then behind, face brimmed, averted. Unlike every other male American Jew, I have never had a thing for Asians. I’ve loved women of every race, and if I haven’t loved them equally it wasn’t from any bias, just my diet or circulation, poor sleep habits. But an Asian fetish? No. Have I ever thought of them as unobtrusive and subservient replacements for my mother? No. Have I ever thought of anyone as a replacement for my mother? Maybe my sister, maybe me for my sister’s kid, maybe Elaine Kaufman, until we got into a fight over Norman Mailer, maybe Norman Mailer.

Have to go now. Calls to return to what was once called “the coast.” Back in the days when 12 channels broadcast for only 12 hours a day, the pitcher’s mound was 15 inches and the designated hitter didn’t exist, the bestseller lists were 30 % Jewish. When the pinnacle of technology was mutually assured atomic destruction, and women, who were basically typewriters — wait …

Really really can’t wait for that away msg, aar

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To begin is how to begin, for the writer and reader both. The first sentence sets the rules, the laws, the measures, sentencing the second to its fate.

To begin with how to begin, I couldn’t. I couldn’t decide on whether to try some generalist baseline crap, something about how computers have changed our lives (the history of the mainframe or personal comp?), or how online has (explain the difference between the net and web?), or how search has (explain tetration/Tetration?), or to go instead for a more intimate approach, like with an anecdote, with people in it, a person, Principal, but I was unable to decide between presenting him as a child or as an adult, at a successful moment like the company’s founding or IPO, or at a moment not more failed but sad like the cancer or Balk, though anything like that would mean that the book wouldn’t proceed chronologically, which always requires an earlier germ, the earliest — Principal’s birth and the lives of his parents and grandparents (the partition of Poland by Imperial Russia, the Roman exile, the Greek conquest of Palestine, the Babylonian exile, the sixth day of Creation, the void?).

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The dream of search is the

History derives from historia , meaning “I search” [is this true?], which Antiquity [which Antiquity?]

I was [firstperson singular?] born in Palo Alto, CA, 40 years ago last summer. The neighborhood, Crescent Park, lay cradled in the crescent of San Francisquito Creek.

I am [present tense?] the 14th richest man in America and the 18th richest man in the world and my sole possession is a begging bowl.

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All distractions, diversions — fidgeting, smoking, drinking, jerking to memories eidetic, echoic, Arabic/Semitic but fading like drunkenness, fading like smoke, until as empty as my Glenlivet and Jameson bottles and my last carton of Camel Lights.

I went reading through my old.docs for old inspiration and techniques (which voice to use for this, whether active or passive?), and I moved around (which tense, if not the present?), moving myself, the furniture, alternating nights between rooms, dragging the Tetbook’s charger wire between my legs limp until finally settling — the past, the past was unavoidable, not as deep as the void, but proximal, basically, as like.

I forced myself to stay seated, at screen — no wifi bars to stick my nose through, with any other barrier just selfimposed — and then, after a day or two sleepless, I got into it, I grew into the writing and so found myself growing up too, alongside Principal, taking his life and making it mine or half his and half mine and so going through all that childhood pap and school crap again, maturing, or aging, but also, simultaneously, getting younger. Whatever, don’t pay any attention, just get the words down on the page. Point is, that feeling was returning. That etherealizing feeling I’d assumed I’d lost forever of just losing yourself, myself, in another. Letting everything else just go slack. Hitting wordcounts, hitting Return.

The sky outside was a cloud, a metaphor or simile, a repository of all worldly files but mine. All the windows were on the same channel. Oscillating rain. Let lightning describe itself, and let thunder be its dialogue.

I had this superstition — never sit directly under the chandelier. No walls would ever be white again, next to or behind the whiteness of blank.docs. No silence would ever be as silent as the sibilance between.recs. It’s bizarre that this flat doesn’t have a fireplace, but I might’ve noted that already — pressing Ctrl+F would find that out, I keep pressing my sinuses instead.

If you think this is procrastinating, think again — because I also had the sensation of spyquip, and went about searching its concealments. In the tall thin coiled basketry that reminded me of Rach and the stumpy canopic jarlets that recalled me to Lana. In the sepia clock, the cameras and mics eloigned behind its escapement. In the small little Mongoloid trees, which if they weren’t themselves recording devices were either dead or dying.

Going for a refill of ice, or a light from the burners, trying to block it all out — the kitchen. All that tile and stainless steel was just a rash of prepackaged foodstuffs in and out of prepackaging. The floating task station and chopblock, the handles of the freezer/fridge, the knobs of the range, were flavored with ketchup, mustard, mayo from teethslit packets. The double trough sinks cradled an afterbirth of takeout goulash, backsplashed even to the pot/pan rack. A sponge had been rended, which bothers, because I don’t recall ever doing the dishes. A bite of the sponge was stuck to the wall.

Going to the bathroom was to navigate the McDonald’s takeout sacks I’d intended to take out, börek and wurst wraps, polystyrene bivalves of dumplings, cardboard pails clotted with chiliflecked stirfry. €2 coins have a silver coating, a creamy gold center, €1 coins have a gold coating, a creamy silver center. Both feature maps of borderless Europe. Just desserts. Toiletpaper was wadded with all the laundry I wasn’t doing. Tiny green hemorrhoids of toothpaste were affixed to the mirror and sink. Toothbrush gagging the drain. Thank Christ I’d boosted towels from the Khaleej, the Burj. No extra set of sheets has been provided. I haven’t accounted for the bedroom just yet, that Charlemagne deathbed perfect for rugmunching and with a canopy so high no cumshot would ever reach it.