Our delusions weren’t matching ones, though I guess you could describe them as complimentary in a way.Ī co-dependency of false narratives? A canopy of shared illusion and delusion. It still comes in handy when I visit friends in Brooklyn.” Not matching, complementaryĪnd so, as it turns out, we weren’t having similar, oddly parallel experiences, on the opposite sides of a mirror. We couldn’t wait to take over New York, it was exciting. We memorized maps of New York City, we trained for the invasion, for victory. Preposterous.” She looked at me with the most withering possible expression. It was all propaganda of course but it felt so entirely real at the time. “There was always this imagined imminent threat that any day the bombings could start, and probably would. “We were so scared, constantly, of being Attacked By The Russians,” I explained. Fear and Loathing in Not-Here (and a map of New York City) I adored her.īecause we had both grown up inside of the cold war, confused traumatized kids of the ‘80s, I had this idea at first, one possibly rooted in wishful thinking, that we must in some way have had some similar or interrelated childhood experiences, just from opposite sides of the looking glass. She was, at all times, consistently dry, witty, and sarcastic, refreshingly abrasive, and very, very funny. She spoke Hebrew with a calm, measured way of speaking, not slowly exactly but somehow studied and methodical, a light Russian accent present though not distractingly so, and then she’d speak in English at a breakneck speed in a sort of clipped British television voice that I loved, and her personality remained consistent despite these tonal shifts that I at first found disorienting and then soon became used to. Though more as a survival instinct by this point than anything else, I think.īut we were at first surprised and eventually delighted to discover that we didn’t hate each other at all, and we became fast friends. Somewhat unsurprisingly, having had to fight our way into this situation to begin with, we both showed up to this shared living arrangement prickly and uneasy, fully prepared to hate each other, on principle. (I couldn’t tell you where my spite-diploma is though, because once I had earned it, I had to go be spiteful about other things.) Everyone had an opinion, a negative one, and they all went out of their way to tell us that we wouldn’t and couldn’t succeed there, though we did, possibly out of spite. Truly no one knew what to do with us, certainly no one believed we would finish our degrees. We were mismatched with the world and mismatched (though also well-matched) with each other. I think we were put together because we were both foreign odd stragglers who didn’t fit in and didn’t make sense, who in everyone else’s mind weren’t really supposed to be there, two difficult people who seemed temporary, who had rudely managed to finagle their way into university without doing army service first.įor this, we were seen by some as sneaky and unlikeable, and by others as cool and reckless, and we did not seem to care what anyone thought about this, which only intensified these perceptions of us on their part, and our own perceptions of not belonging anywhere. My roommate was Russian, tough, bitter, glamorous, a few years older than me. When I was in my first year of university, in Tel Aviv, I was living in a shared dorm room. If I can chart the despair, I can also chart the not-despair, which means maybe I can also chart a channel, find a way through. If that’s what the poet intended.Īnd to chart is also to map, a chart is also a map. I found another note that simply says Charting Despair, underlined three times. I know that maps is a verb as well as a noun. What do I know about maps? Maps as a verb Surely this was an important thought or I wouldn’t have written it down. I then find these fragments later and have to guess what the poet intended. I live without memory and also I have too many memories, and while those sound like conflicting pieces of data, both of these, taken separately or together, mean I am forever mapping my thoughts in fragments of words that feel so clear and clarifying in the moment… I did this before the concussion too, leaving myself clues and forgetting what they meant. The problem with fragments and clues is that I know I made the map, and I don’t remember making it. Image: A turquoise door with an arch shape cut-out, through which you can see sky, the other half of the door is open to an outdoor courtyard…Ī map of a place I don’t know (a map is a place I don’t know?) YetĪ map shows what is still unknown (yet), and yet, whoever made the map knows more than I do.

Yoko ono grapefruit map piece