Blogging is still pretty new, and it’s the most self-reflective of all forms of writing. (See, e.g., me blogging about blogging right now.)

I wonder if we would still feel obliged to daily re-define the conventions of blogging if it were simply called E-writing, i.e. the same thing we always did, just here. The answer is likely yes, as E-mail users still haven’t decided if that is simply a quicker letter or an entirely new form of communication. Similarly, bloggers can’t determine if we’re simply writers with .com soap boxes or if we’re sexy renegade journalists, new media cowboys, or perhaps just lonely people with public diaries. Is a blog a long-term refuge for the fleeting particulars of daily life or a short-lived sanctuary for timeless candor and certainty and truth?

Self-reflection is practically the only aspect that blogs share, and it’s there from the very beginning: that first post is the writer’s opinion on what a blog is for and a declaration of what he or she is going to do with the medium. “Hello, world. I’m Dave and I’m going to write a song a day for the next year. Be sure to follow this blog for updates.” Often this opening is followed by two months of nothing and then the same kind of apology that we used to write in our dusty journals — “Sorry, I know I should’ve written more but things got so busy. I promise to be better about writing in here.”

But Yabot — until now — wasn’t self-reflective or apologetic. The first post on this blog isn’t a hello, it’s a goodbye. Certainly I decided what I thought a blog should be — simple design, no comments, longer posts, a mixture of personal stories and links to things that interest me — but I don’t explicitly write about those decisions here. When I don’t post for a while, there’s no mention of my absence when I finally do come back; everything here is offered as it would be if I printed it out and handed it to you; I don’t blog, I write.

Why do I write on a blog, though? When I think about Kaufman’s speech and Jonathan Franzen’s article about technology and love, I have to consider whether I write here because I want to be needed and liked. Franzen writes about the harm of writing (or doing anything) with the goal of being liked:

But if you consider this in human terms, and you imagine a person defined by a desperation to be liked, what do you see? You see a person without integrity, without a center. In more pathological cases, you see a narcissist — a person who can’t tolerate the tarnishing of his or her self-image that not being liked represents, and who therefore either withdraws from human contact or goes to extreme, integrity-sacrificing lengths to be likable.

The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you’re having an actual life.

But I don’t think I fit the picture of the desperately-wanting-to-be-liked blogger. I’m often depressing, preachy, and combative. I don’t pander. I write candidly, and I hope my work moves people — but if they don’t like me, that’s okay.

I do, however, want my writing to be widely read, and I don’t think that’s a pernicious desire. I guess I feel that my meticulous review of statistics is somewhat forgivable: I’m proud of what I write, and I think that it’s worth reading. I want to know that people are reading it. However, if I get to the point where I’m writing to see the numbers go up, or I’m worried about posting something that might make the numbers go down, then I’m being dishonest.

Until then, Yabot remains a straightforward website with a simple focus: telling you about what interests me in the most compelling way possible. If you like it, stick around. If you don’t, I hope you enjoyed your time here anyway.

Charlie Kaufman spoke to the British Academy of Film and Television Arts last September about his attempts to write films that don’t pander but aren’t pretentious, that are all about him but that say something to us. Kaufman struggles during the speech, partly because he’s nervous as hell but mostly because the speech is an attempt to re-shape his ideas about art into a form that he has no experience with. If you haven’t seen Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, you’ll want to after watching his talk. You can stream the video of Kaufman’s talk, but I didn’t embed it here because Adobe Flash is awful. If you hate Flash too, there’s also a PDF of the speech.

What complicates it, in addition to the fact that that’s a hard thing to figure out, is that I also struggle with wanting you to like me. In my fantasy I leave here and people are saying, ‘Great speech!’ you know, and, ‘Not only is he a great writer but boy, I really learned something tonight, he really brought it!’ So as much as I know that this neediness of mine exists, I also have a difficult time extricating myself from it, or even fully recognizing it when it’s happening.

I sincerely hope that I have something of interest or value to say tonight. I can’t tell anyone how to write a screenplay because the truth is that anything of value you might do comes from you. The way I work is not the way that you work, and the whole point of any creative act is that. What I have to offer is me, what you have to offer is you, and if you offer yourself with authenticity and generosity I will be moved. You are born into a body, into a family, into a situation, into a brain chemistry, into a gender, into a culture, into a time – as am I. At times I can feel the massive gravitation pulling of all these various things, pulling me in different directions, creating me.

(Video | Transcript)

He hands his journal to her and takes hers off the table. Both journals are red, flimsy, and contain two-hundred pages. The kids took the journals with them on a weeklong hiking trip and each day wrote a two-sentence summary of plants or birds or food or friends.

“Leonard, your handwriting is awful and your grammar is even worse. Listen to this, Dan.”

“Give me my journal back.”

“It’s just for fun. Let me read this one?”

“Fine. But you’re a goat.”

“Monday: We’re eat soup it smelled like fish. Volleyballs fun.”

“Yeah, so what? It’s good,” Leonard says.

“It’s really, really bad. Do you know how to capitalize? Do you know how to spell? Do you know how to write an r. You’re so stupid. Write an r here.”

“If that’s what you want,” he says, and scrawls an r on the page. Indeed, it is misshapen.

“Leonard, I think we need to play schoolhouse again. You can’t write.”

He goes into Lea’s bedroom and comes back with a folder with a jellyfish on the cover. Flipping through the book, he comes to the page he was looking for and shows it to Lea. On one side is a watercolor picture of a rainbow-colored jellyfish and on the other side is an illegible heap of cursive letters.

“Leonard, that’s not even a fair comparison.”

“Why not?”

“Two things. First, my pen wasn’t working well. Second, I was in fourth grade then.”

“But I am in fourth grade now.”

“Second, it’s a really long report. And third, I had to hurry because it was bedtime.”

Julie comes into the kitchen and tells Lea to stop teasing Leonard. She takes a cake out of the oven and slices us all a piece. Sitting next to us, she watches us take our first few bites of cake, mentions that it has four hundred grams of butter, and then leaves the room.

“Imagine, Dan, that someone is threatening to kill your mom,” Leonard says.

I feel guilty that the grotesque image of my imperiled mother is fused in my mind with the immediate pleasure of eating wonderful chocolate cake. Ignoring the juxtaposition, I say, “Okay. I see her.”

“Now, if you let her die, you get one million dollars.”

He waits.

He sees I want to know the alternative. I’m wondering if I’m too practical or dispassionate, wondering why I didn’t yell “No! Never! I’ll stop him!” or something like that, but it’s because I know there’s always a trick, like when Leonard says, “Imagine you’re a bus driver and five kids are on the bus and then two get off and seven get on and twenty-five get on and two get off and thirteen get off and one jumps out and six get on and seven more get on. Who is the bus driver?”

“Or you can tell him not to kill her but then you don’t get any money. Do you let her die?”

“No.”

“You wouldn’t?”

“No, I wouldn’t.”

Lea slams her fists on the table and yells, “Mirror world!” This means that it’s Leonard’s turn to answer the question.

“Of course not. I love mama.”

Great: None of us want to have a hand in our mother’s murder even with a million bucks at stake.

I see Leonard is considering variables, and I expect him to try and find my breaking point by offering larger and larger amounts of money. Instead, he says, “There is one way I’d do it.”

We don’t ask; we know he’ll tell us.

“I’d do it if I knew that she was going to die the next day anyway.”

He’s sure that he’s got something with that, and he looks to Lea and then to me and sends us into mirror world.

“No,” Lea says.

“Me neither,” I say.

“What if she were going to die in six hours no matter what?” Leonard asks.

“Still no.” I respond.

“One hour.”

“No.”

“One minute.”

“No.”

“One second.”

“I wouldn’t.”

Leonard is incredulous, and Lea turns to him. “Leonard, I wouldn’t do it either. And besides, there’s no way to know when someone is going to die. Remember when grandma was really sick, and we went to see her one last time? That was a while ago. You couldn’t buy mama back with all that money. And I want to say also that I don’t want to know when I’m going to die. I’d never want to know that. I’d spend my whole life thinking about that day and I’d always be afraid of it coming and I don’t know if I could enjoy anything if I knew that I was going to die, or, I mean, if I knew when I was going to die, and so it’s better a mystery when it’ll all be over and we’re better off with mama right now and I really can’t imagine it any other way.”

Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that “plagiarism” farce! As if there was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism! The kernel, the soul—let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances—is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily use by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing.

From Letters of Note.

Throughout April the rain and sun in Dresden argue like divorced parents — you take every third weekend and I get Tuesday because that’s my day off and we’ll figure out the cat later — and it’s not uncommon to see people in shorts, T-shirts, and sandals sauntering alongside others wearing pants, coats, and boots; a few times a day they all take cover under awnings and umbrellas and look up at the sky, where blotches of black clouds are a heavy canvas being ripped apart by the sun, and the flashing lightning and howling thunder emphasize the drama and aptness of such a metaphor.

Those of us who are too neurotic to face the world on a whim carry around large bags of clothing appropriate for every possible contingency, and we can be seen wandering the streets zipping and unzipping our rain jackets, or else at home, opening and closing the windows as the breeze fluctuates between being absolutely necessary and totally overwhelming.

Cottony puffs of poplar seeds fall like snow, so outdoor conversations imply the risk of choking on giant fluffy projectiles, which I believe have evolved to target mouths and eyes. For weeks these white clumps drift across my floor like an allergy-inducing parody of tumbleweed.

I tell a botanist friend about my witty theory that poplar seeds evolved to seek out human mouths but he informs me that human mouths are unsuitable locations for poplar trees to grow, and ultimately poplar seeds have evolved to best encourage reproduction. He adds that this spring is particularly bad due to the abundance of female poplar trees in the area.

A confounded colleague sitting nearby says, “Those? Female poplars? Do you know how utterly imposing female poplar seeds are? These,” he adds, picking up some seeds off the floor, “are the hopes and dreams of the male poplars.”

Warm May nights along the Elbe evoke Midwestern summers, when neighbors come over after the sun goes down and sit on the enclosed porch with a sweetened beverage, with Matlock re-runs wheezing in the living room, with the mosquito candle flickering, with the conversation focusing on how darned sticky it felt today and leisurely approaching the conclusion that tomorrow is going to be even stickier.

Tonight there’s a party celebrating Kriegsende — the end of the Second World War, also called Victory in Europe Day or Liberation Day, depending on where you’re looking from — and hundreds of students are shuffling side to side and twisting their waists with absurd regularity.

As I bike away from the party and over the bridge, I see a man holding a sparkler on a steamboat, and I think of Stefan with his glass jar in Middlebury’s graveyard, chasing fireflies in a lightning storm because he says that light is attracted to light, and that’s the best time to catch them, and he couldn’t sleep thinking of them blinking helplessly, beautifully in the rain.

(Thanks to Philip for the rad photos of dandelions.)

Carla’s mission (God bless her or perhaps God help her) is to get me to become a Catholic because otherwise there is no chance of me going to heaven because only Catholics go to heaven and time is running out because the apocalypse is due any day now, as we can so clearly see from what is going in Syria, and not forgetting Iran, but also those really weird tornados in America. And in those very few moments of life as we know it left to us on Earth she feels “only half a person” being married to a non-Catholic, which also jeopardizes her own place in heaven.

Read the rest at Taki’s Magazine.

“What’s your name?”

“Farmer One. What’s your name?”

“Pig One.”

These simple sentences are the zenith of the third graders’ English at the school where I teach in Dresden. Today we are acting out the three little pigs: I say a line, the students repeat it, and then I tell them what it means so they can act it out. There’s a beautiful delay between when the kids say, “I have some bricks!” and when they pretend to hold bricks by sagging their arms and buckling their knees.

As I teach, I think about Aidan, whom I angered by calling his essay about Emily Dickinson pompous. He’s my only friend, so I was happy when he sent me a bouquet of Dickinson’s poems that reference flowers, like ancient lilacs and a window filled with a permanent rainbow. Aidan thinks Dickinson is afraid of dying and losing the beauty of the world; I think that the transient radiance of a hyacinth rainbow is a perfect metaphor for the way that we, dying, live: defiantly displaying our beauty and never quite believing that we could be anything but eternal.

I think about how Nora, my niece, doesn’t yet have the words to describe the fleeting, chaotic beauty of experience, and how Neil, when a butterfly landed next to him, said that “it just seemed to delight in opening and closing its wings and just actually being beautiful for that period of time.” I look at the tissue paper roses that I have in a waterless vase on my window: they won’t live and they won’t die.

Lily’s text says “Maurice Sendak.” I know that he’s gone and I imagine a boat sailing in and out of weeks and through a day. I think back to the last time I heard him, when he said, “I cry a lot because people die and I can’t stop them. It’s like a dream life, but, you know, there’s something I am finding out as I’m aging: that I am in love with the world.”

And I sit on the banks of the Elbe and the water is always rushing away but the river never leaves me, and I am calm.

(May 8th, 2012 @ the3six5.posterous.com)

(via kottke.org)

“I always wanted to play the trumpet,” Karla says, “but I never even held one.” Sensing our next question, she adds, “My parents didn’t take the idea seriously.”

Karla looks down at her coffee and then puts the tip of her pinky into the tiny handle. The cup shakes and a bit of hot coffee spills on her hand. At the sink she puts the hand under some water and shakes her head: disappointment added to disappointment. I wonder if she’s chiding herself for reliving her regret or rebuking her parents or maybe trying to figure out if there’s still time to learn.

At the same time, Leonard is requesting chocolate with single-syllable German imperatives: “Gib.” “Hol.” “Jetzt!”

When his mom, Julie, puts the chocolate on the table, he rubs his hand over the package and says, “Mama, you ate six pieces. Damnit! No one can trust you around chocolate! You always eat our chocolate!” Lea is so upset at the utter truth of this statement that she dramatically leaves the table with her own chocolate bar and slams her bedroom door shut. “I’m enjoying my chocolate bar in my room today,” she yells. A pause, and then: “Where it’s safe!”

Karla is here to chant the Gongyo with Clement and Julie, but Clement is busy painting the living room, the small altar is under a tarp, and Julie can’t remember where she put the incense or the bell.

Every few minutes Karla looks at the clock, which has been stuck at 8:45 for days with just enough battery for the second hand to ferociously and repeatedly try to get from 28 to 29 seconds but never accomplish this feat. Each time she looks at the clock, she says, “Maybe I should ask Clement if we’re still chanting today” and Julie sighs, “No, no.” I can’t tell if she doesn’t realize how annoyed Karla is or if she is even more upset at the mess of painting, the mess of having kids, the mess of being alive.

When Clement does finally come, Leonard lifts his head up from the table and, though I thought he was simply trying to privately enjoy his chocolate with all of us around, it’s clear that he’s been thinking hard about something, and Clement makes a joke that he’s really been thinking hard because there’s an imprint of the table on his forehead. Leonard’s focus is singular, so he doesn’t notice Clement’s comment at all.

He holds up one of the two remaining Easter eggs, which are still on the table weeks after Easter because they never made it into a salad. Leonard has the blue egg in his hand; the one in the basket is red. Both eggs are covered with Christian images, though the parents are Buddhists and the kids are skeptics whose friends’ didactic Protestantism leads them to hate Christianity more and more, though their resent of Christianity’s ubiquitous rules — i.e. Leonard to his friend: “I can say God damnit in my house and I can say God damnit in your house. God damnit. You understand?” — is paired with some curiosity: Lea once came to me and asked, “What does God look like?” “I don’t think he looks like something, Lea. That’s not what he’s like.” “But, do you think he’s here, watching me?”

Leonard spins the egg in his hand and points to a picture. “This is Jesus,” he says, “and Jesus is God.” He says this with a certainty that makes my years of metaphysical kriegspiel with this doctrine seem pointless. Leonard continues, “This egg came from the Easter Bunny, who leaves many eggs like this one all over Germany and perhaps in other countries each year on Easter which I know is always on a Sunday and which I think is also the birthday of Jesus — ‘God’ — and I want to know—” but Clement interjects, “Easter is the day he died.” “The day he died?” “Yes. He was killed.” “And that’s why Catholics, you know, Evangelicals, celebrate Easter? That’s why we celebrate Easter?” “That’s the origin.”

I learned the German word for resurrection — Auferstehung — a few weeks ago, and I’m confident I could explain that Jesus’ death is important but it’s his resurrection that’s paramount, confident I could affirm that, even if you don’t believe in any of this stuff, the symmetry of salvation is overpoweringly thoroughgoing and reasonable and sublime. But I stay silent and I let Leonard’s Christians revel in the death of their God and dance in the dawn of their idols.

He runs outside, where it is raining, to the balcony, and howls triumphantly, as if he himself had landed the killing blow, “God is dead! God is dead! God is dead!”

He runs to his room and goes back out to the balcony with his trumpet and plays the only song he knows: When the Saints Go Marching In. After finishing the song, he continues to shout the news that God has died, but no one is on the street. I go out and stand next to him in the rain as he plays the song a second time through. I ask him, “Do you really think he’s dead?” He barely takes his lips away from the mouth of the trumpet and says, “I know he is.” “What should we do now?” “Wait.” He starts to play again — his fingers clumsy and the music jarring — and the sun refuses to shine, the trumpet sounds its call, and a new world is revealed.

If we’ve learned one thing in this year’s Stanley Cup Playoffs, it’s that there is no home-ice advantage. anymore. Yes, Although one second-round series has seen the home team win each of the first three games, entering Friday, but road teams have still won 60 percent of the games in the playoffs this spring. That is down slightly from 65 percent in the first round.

If we’re going to talk about home-ice disadvantage, we need to talk about the Los Angeles Kings, who are 5–0 on the road and 7–1 overall in the postseason. In order to win the Stanley Cup, you need a team that gels and goes on a roll at the right time. I don’t think there is a team in the National Hockey League right now that fits that description better than the Kings. They snuck into that the eighth spot at the end of the year, when it looked like they could possibly nearly missing the playoffs. Then they started Game 1Nobody expected them to win against Vancouver, with nobody giving them a chance to win, which made them a dangerous team. When you have no expectations and everybody is expecting you to lose, you can just play hard and prove everyone wrong. That’s a good situation to be in.

I don’t think there is a team in the League that is working in all facets of the game harder than the Kings in all facets of the game. in all three zones. Their feet are moving faster than anybody else’s, their positioning is bang on excellent, their puck movement has been is fantastic. Defensively, They’ve been sound on defense and their goaltender Jonathan Quick is the best goaltender in the National Hockey League NHL right now. <bar none. Nobody even close.

I’ve watched Jonathan Quick’s and his mechanics are so sound, his concentration on the puck is so intense extraordinary, and I don’t see the kid breaking he doesn’t show any signs of letting up. With the way he is playing, he is very quickly moving himself up to the superstar level in the National Hockey League. His exceptional play had led him to be recognized as an elite goaltender in the NHL. It’s always nice to see an American kid player do well in the National Hockey League and, having grown up in New England, I feel a personal connection with Jonathan Quick I’m biased to the New England area because I grew up there. You like seeing guys who come from the United States system do really well and I think Quick is the upper echelon of American hockey right now.

A lot of it the team’s success has to do with Darryl Sutter and what the changes he implemented after coming into Los Angeles as the new head coach. His rigid coaching style mentality has been, “Listen, we’re going to do it my way and we’re going to do it hard or you’re not going to play.” demands that his players follow his system and play hard; otherwise they don’t get a spot in the lineup.

Whether he has scared the guys into doing it or the respect is naturally there for Darryl Sutter, this team is clicking at the exact right time. Whether the team fears Sutter or naturally trusts him is of course a mystery, but they’re 7–1 in the playoffs, they haven’t lost a game on the road yet, and they’re doing it against two teams that everyone thought would blow them out. their success has come against teams that were once favorites to win the Stanley Cup. Not only are they doing it, but And they’re making it look easy.

Bringing in Sutter was a turning point for this team, but they also brought in acquired Jeff Carter, at the NHL Trade Deadline, a guy who has been a proven goal scorer for a long time, at the NHL Trade Deadline. General Manager Dean Lombardi needed a goal scorer and found one in Jeff Carter. The Kings were No. 30 in scoring for most of the season and ranked No. 29 by the end of the season.

When you need something and your GM goes out and fills that void, that sends a message to your team. Especially with a guy like Carter, who has a big salary. That shows dedication from management.

The guy some people thought the Kings might trade at the deadline, Dustin Brown, who many people thought would be traded away from LA at the Trade Deadline, has also raised improved his game. I’ve played with Dustin and I’ve watched him for the last three or four years, but and this is the best I’ve seen him play. And When your captain does that plays well, it motivates everyone else on the team., everyone else has to follow.

One last thing: that people don’t understand is that the Kings have a great fan base. Staples Center is not a very cozy arena to play in because it’s so vast and so is a big arena, but the Kings pack it every single game. People in that area Los Angeles don’t get enough credit for the support they give the Kings. Before this year, the Kings hadn’t had too much playoff success, yet their fans continued to come back day in and day out support them. I don’t think there were any empty seats when I played there in 2005–06 and there haven’t been any in the last couple of years.

That great fan base is important now that the Kings are playing the way they are.

My biggest problem with Roenick’s writing is redundancy. Below I have listed a few examples of redundant phrases that I edited.

• “in all facets of the game… in all three zones.” The first part of the sentence includes the second and renders it unnecessary.
• “When you have no expectations and everyone is expecting you to lose” is redundant — or untrue, if the implication is that the Kings expected nothing of themselves.
• “You like seeing guys who come from the United States system do really well and I think Quick is the upper echelon of American hockey right now.” The paragraph to which this is appended already mentions both of these statements explicitly; their repetition serves no functional or rhetorical purpose.
• “it’s so vast and so big” is a clear redundancy.

If I edit another J.R. post, I’ll give examples of his proclivity for cliche and non-sequitur.

Which is what walking in America has become: An act dwelling in the margins, an almost hidden narrative running beneath the main vehicular text. Indeed, the semantics of the term pedestrian would be a mere curiosity, but for one fact: America is a country that has forgotten how to walk. Witness, for example, the existence of “Everybody Walk!,” the “Campaign to Get America Walking” (one of a number of such initiatives). While its aims are entirely legitimate, its motives no doubt earnest, the idea that that we, this species that first hoisted itself into the world of bipedalism nearly 4 million years ago—for reasons that are still debated—should now need “walking tips,” have to make “walking plans” or use a “mobile app” to “discover” walking trails near us or build our “walking histories,” strikes me as a world-historical tragedy. (Slate)

Bonus Reading: The Atlantic Cities writes about keeping people safe from traffic.

The long-sleeved undershirt makes her pink sundress more modest, but its chief function is to thwart the still chilly Dresden spring. Her mom bought her the undershirt two weeks ago, but she hadn’t washed it until last night, so Lea is wearing it for the first time today. When she walked out the door this morning, she said “Don’t I look pretty today?” in a way that seemed to suggest that the sentence was both a question and its answer. And I just ruined it.

Just a few minutes before the spill, Clement had taken Lea’s mug and the new milk frother (which looks like a repurposed sex toy) to the sink, where, turned away from Lea and I eating crumbling cake at the table, he scolded her for not frothing her milk correctly, and preemptively reprimanded her for probably spilling on herself had she even attempted to froth her milk correctly, because frothing milk in the baby mugs that Lea likes to drink out of is tough, especially when the milk is cold.

During this reproach, I gained status with the young girl by smiling as she rolled her eyes. She was furious that he had taken the frother from her when she was certain that she was a delicate, careful, well-dressed princess, so when Clement asks Lea “Is the milk okay?” the reply he gets is: “Give me the damn thing back.”

He does, and she starts to froth the milk, which has clumps of powdered chocolate that she stirs several times before resigning to drink the milk as it is: half-dissolved, half-clumped, entirely disappointing. I pick up the frother and hold it close to my face so I can see it. It has a green handle, a sliding button that turns it on and off, a long metal shaft, and at the end of the shaft is something that looks like an uncoiled spring. The fast spinning of that spirally spring is what froths the milk, somehow. It costs €1.25 at Kaufland. You can’t get to the battery without destroying the motor, so when it stops working you throw it away and get a new one.

As I set the frother back down on the table, my thumb slips and I turn it on. Chocolate milk that had been diligently running loops around the metal spiral heeds the command of a centrifugal force and streaks out so quickly that no one sees the flecks flying, but, after observing the chocolate streaks on Lea’s sleeve, we observers assume that it was movement through the ether and not spontaneous speckling that has occurred.

So I sit while Lea rages at me for being an absolute idiot and ruining her shirt. I say sorry a few times, but otherwise I just nod when she tells me it’s all my fault. It is. Clement tries to calm the situation with non-sequiturs and funny faces and quotes from movies that the kids don’t know and that I have never seen. Leonard is counting his Star Wars cards for the fourth time: he keeps losing count, and hasn’t yet realized that he can just subtract the cards he knows he’s missing from the total number of cards that exist. He knows he has at least eight-five, because he got that far twice, and he estimates that he has at least twenty more, or wait, maybe forty? “Dan, what’s nine times six?”

And we just sit there and finish the cake — it’s called Donauwelle and I still don’t know if I ever had it before I came to Germany — with Leonard scribbling muddled equations on an envelope, Clement reassuring Lea that he’ll make me take the trash out as punishment, Lea repeating variations of “This is total crap!” with curse words of a particularly German variety, like ass violin and shit sausage, while I look at the bottom of my coffee cup and wonder what future mistakes the swirling grounds portend and how I’ll feel when I make them.

“I’m sorry. I saw your name tag. I wanted to ask you a question.”

“Yes, yes. My name tag. I am part of the jury. I am going to determine the winner. There is a cash prize of €60,000. I will decide who gets it. With a team. I’ve been on the jury six years now.”

“Ah, yes. Can I ask a question though?”

“Go ahead. But when I’m at the front of the line I need to go in to the theater. The jury has to be there before normal viewers. I really won’t be able to answer any questions once we are at the front.”

“Yes, yes. I wanted to know if you recommended seeing the international or the national competition? Since they both start around the same time…”

“How did you know that I have seen the films? I thought you all were under the impression that the jury was viewing the films for the first time.”

“I didn’t know.”

“You didn’t?”

“I didn’t.”

“I can recommend both. In the international competition at 5:30 there is Score, and that is a pretty good film with surrealist elements; it comes from Canada. I’m Fine Thanks isn’t worth a second viewing, or a first. Frozen Stories, I forget it, and then there’s The Making of Longbird, ah, wait, Frozen Stories was a good Polish film. Yes. Slow and good. Yes. The Making of Longbird is a creator’s dilemma; I could well understand it, but I don’t think everyone could. I don’t know that you’d know the character it’s based on. The animation is first-rate. Really, really first-rate. Alexis Ivanovitch You’re My Hero will win an award — you can count on that, because… — it’s about — I really hope it wins — about, about, it’s from France. A love story from France. And then Brother, I didn’t like it. I got it, I didn’t like it. It’s freaky. Not scary, freaky. I didn’t like it.”

A nod.

“And then the national competition at 5:45 — we’re getting close to the front so if I don’t finish, you just won’t know what I think until the prizes are announced, and I’m sorry, it’s just that I have to be there on time, and we’re almost at the front, and then I’m going — so let me look at the program here, I don’t remember these, I don’t remember these. Okay this one, Rubber Soul, there is unexplained screaming, and I wasn’t sure I liked that decision. Out On A Limb is animated in a style that can only be called traditionalist postmodernism. It’s both at the same time, which I suppose could also simply be postmodernism: isn’t that sort of the all-encompassing mode? And Long Distance Call, I called my husband after watching it and said, ‘I’m not with any other men.’ And I wasn’t, it was the truth. You may not enjoy the ridiculousness of Mr. Nightmare and the Blessings of Progress. Okay, we’re almost at the front, so: The Bathing Suit, pretty actress, The Centrifuge Brain Project, funny, Flamingo Pride, stupid.”

The poet stands up and unclips a piece of lined paper from a damaged binder. I met him six minutes ago; eleven minutes ago I resolved not to look toward him, even as he repeatedly set his iPhone to speakerphone and called a charming-voiced girl named Kate, whose answering machine declares, “Here’s Kate, I’m terribly sorry I missed you, can you leave a message though?”

I could sense that she employed some approximation of Method Acting while performing the message, and I imagine that, upon finishing her recording, she paused with a winsome simper, considered her own voice, and thought: Perfect. The poet’s phone manner, juxtaposed with coquettish Kate’s performance, sounds sociopathic; he simply mumbles “Callmeplease” as one terrible, indistinct, pleading syllable. He left her eleven messages, each with the same desperate content and peculiar form.

But I didn’t look at him. Instead I pretended to read. I wasn’t looking at the words but, wanting to realistically portray a reader, I was (probably too frequently) turning pages, as if some scrupulous skeptic were watching me and might suddenly come up and say, “You aren’t even reading you phony!”

I’m forced away from my faux-reading, however, when he starts playing Dear Prudence at (I estimate) eleven or so out of twelve (or whatever) iPhone volume ticks — that is, really loudly.

When I involuntarily look at him he is already waiting for my gaze, and he greets my eyes with feigned poignance and says, “Hey man.” I just nod, but quickly I realize it is expected that I ask him about his identity, because, after all, he knows the barista’s first name and he’s got two empty cups in front of him and no one has told him to shut the hell up, so he’s got more prestige than me at this two-tabled, milkless coffee shop. I’m certain he doesn’t work here, but I want to give him the opportunity to brazenly explain whatever reason he has for feeling superior, so I ask: “Do you work here?”

“No. No.”

Then, of course, it was his responsibility to explain what reason he had for being so smug and inconsiderate in a bookstore, but since he didn’t, and since I couldn’t ask directly what reason he had for being so smug and inconsiderate in a bookstore, and since it was pleasant to be back in the States where it is acceptable to inquire about a stranger’s profession, I asked him what he did for a living.

“For a living? Yeah man, I guess it takes more than a job for living, you know? We don’t need to get into all of that.”

Several more minutes of unnecessarily cryptic small talk ensued, after which I learned that there were two primary reasons for his presence there: first, he was in love with one of the employees, and, second, he wanted to be seen writing poetry.

“I’ll read you a poem. You want to hear a poem?”

I’m not sure if he meant that to be a question, but charitably I decided that, were it not for my utter dedication to politeness (read: dishonesty), I would have had a choice whether I heard a poem or not.

“Yes, I’d like to hear you read a poem.”

Now he stands up with his paper and gives the requisite warning that I may not enjoy or get this piece, but: “Look, it’s a work-in-progress — so are you, so am I. But really try and get it.” He sets the paper down and scratches out a word and writes another above it, and I see that the sheet is a palimpsest, layers and layers of indecipherable text, and I’m suddenly curious how the poet avoids reading words from one of the many buried revisions, and at last I wonder if I should offer to buy him a ream of paper.

“Dave,” he calls to the barista, “come listen.” Dave has heard this one before, but it’s a new revision with new words — although the mention of Dave has been effaced, so maybe Dave won’t enjoy it as much after all.

Either the poet is unable to recognize that Dave is desperately trying to avoid listening to this poem or I’m too quick to want everyone to be like me and I’m falsely assuming that Dave doesn’t want to hear this poem, but I’m pretty sure that Dave hates the poet and is as afraid of his vaguely homicidal stare as I am, and my sense about Dave is confirmed when someone comes to the counter to order coffee and Dave sprints over there and says “Thanks for getting me away from that crazy poet!” with such an overblown attempt at irony that I’m certain Dave can’t stand this guy, who has in the intervening time left a small piece of paper in front of me that lets me know his stage name is “Mr. Speak E-Z” and that he performs every Monday night at that little stage in the middle of the bookstore.

He begins to read his poem, and I miss the first few lines; I’m distracted because, though his body is turned toward an invisible audience of thousands at an odd angle from me, his eyes nonetheless meet mine, and it turns out he has the poem memorized, so he doesn’t stop looking at me even though he’s grasping the paper almost in front of his mouth, the result of which is that the particular cadence with which he reads — that tormenting style of slam poetry that highlights hackneyed rhymes by ascending the musical scale to reach the peak of the first word of a rhyme pair and then descending the scale to that awful nadir where the uninventive rhyme disappoints us even more than we thought it would (e.g. “And that road, well it was paved/and on that night, man, we were saved) — the breathy cadence of his delivery causes the paper to making a crinkling sound at the end of each line, and each time his monotonous, predictable delivery crinkles the paper on that eighth beat, I’m reminded of the dreadfully steady sound that a car makes when the blinker is on, a reminder that you’re going somewhere else, or at least you want to.

The poem, by the way, is the poet’s attempt to excavate a psychological problem of his — which he wrongly calls an Oedipus Complex (and rhymes with Tyrannosaurus Rex) — which makes him want to kill his mother. Lines like “She says no son no you’re too sweet/but I already see the bullet through her cheek” and “They say I’ve got problems I say I do too/and what about you and you and fuck you.” He’s still staring at me when he emphasizes the second-person, fourth-wall-breaking you. And you would be scared, like I am, when the poem concludes: “And you won’t feel a thing when I kill you too/this isn’t a poem it’s a dream coming true.”

I tell him I got it, I see where he’s coming from. I look down at the table and back up. I put my book away. I tell him I need to leave. He shakes my hand, says “See you Monday,” and then, pointing toward the woman at the cash register, “I’m going to try and take it slow, like you said.” I had told him that maybe his tactic of telling a girl that he had an intention of dating her whether she liked it or not might be a bit aggressive.

On the way to the library, I can’t stop thinking about washing my hands. I wipe my nose with the cuff of my jacket. I shake my hands in the air and then rub them off on my pants. At the library I wash my hands, and I feel clean.

I heard that Mr. Speak E Z is in New York now. I heard that he’s got gauges in his ears and that he’s living at a place between this one and that other. I heard that his hair is black and long, and that he’s only working on one poem nowadays, and that he calls it a manifesto. I heard that he calls himself a prophet. I heard that he’s a work-in-progress, and that he might have turned forty already, and that he only eats lettuce. I heard that some of that other shit might be made up, but there’s other true shit that you wouldn’t believe if you heard it. I heard what you said, and I’m coming: I heard that he wrote that at the end of that last letter he wrote her, and I heard that he really is coming, though no one knows for sure.