JANUARY, 1998

"What Happened Was..." that I found myself with my eyes crushed behind my curled-up knees because the truth was too horrible to witness. This whole movie is about a first date. The entire, godforsaken two hours of film is devoted to presenting a perfectly, painfully rendered date replete with all the awkward pauses, all the non sequiturs, all the conversational repetition and the inappropriately revealed childhood facts that characterize the start-up fumblings of two persons searching for meaningful common ground.

It's a movie about how all throughout a date we desperately grope for shared experiences, ideas or esthetics on which to pin our attraction. And about how similar we all are once that attraction has been defined. About the letting down of the hair, the taking off of the jacket, the relaxing into reclined positions on the sofa.

It is a movie about how common awkwardness makes us seem insane. About our inability to survive the extended pause. About how we are rarely able to differentiate between lack of interest, guarded disgust or mundane insecurity. About the way in which even the deepest, truest passions of strangers, of the virtual stranger of The Date, seem trivial and futile. And it's about how we persist in spite of and because of our naivite and our frailty.

The Other Side of Camelot, by Seymour Hersh. Why hasn't anyone from the former Soviet Union written a tell-all book about the Cuban Missile Crisis?

The plastic rain kerchief is my new best friend. When my hands get cold, they become sluggish and achey and prevent me from gesticulating with the required level of panache. Which is why I'd rather have a plastic rain scarf ($1.99 at Walgreen's) wrapped around my head and neck a la Audrey Hepburn with my hands nestled warmly inside the felt-lined pockets of my black rubber raincoat than be exposing my hands to the damp and cold as I vainly try to keep a grip on a wind-battered umbrella. I could care less if my face gets wet -- one quick mop with the corner of a sweater and I'm good to go -- but my cold hands take slightly less forever to warm up. Gloves would seemingly solve my problems (in this regard) but now that I've discovered the joys of feeling raindrops actually fall on my (plastic covered) head, the umbrella strikes me as being just one more technological invention distancing me from immediate environment.

The perception of time's duration influences our behavior. I personally feel like I'm living at The Beginning of Time rather than at The End. Unfortunately, more people seem to think that they're nearer to The End, to the end of time, of history, of responsibility. Viral infection, global warming, nuclear holocaust, starvation by numbers -- certainly these are convincing threats and their specter seems to be causing people to burn more brightly in retaliation. But it is a singular brightness. People, as separate individuals, are desperate to make lasting marks against this supposedly looming annihilation. And yet, as a means of gaining fame this tactic only works if one is at The End of time. Fame, during the beginning of time, is necessarily judged after the fact and those names which prove most durable will not be the names of the temporarily anomalous individuals (who have almost always proven bland after the fact) but the names, or nicknames rather, of groups of people whose collective influence proved to be most influential. (cf., Annie Dillard's, "The Wreck of Time," January 1998 Harper's.)