as i stand knocking

it's the kind of thing that makes you want to write. that makes you wish you wrote.

i was talking to my friend with literary aspirations this morning on el internet. i told him i never had anything to write about anymore.
it was slow at the up's so i was reading. and i was reading short stories by thaddeus brewster. i hadn't read them in a long time.
brewster stories always make me think about the process of writing. yesterday was thanksgiving and my father and i were discussing good stories and bad storytelling.

i'm scandalously reckless with my keys. when my sister exclaimed at the number of keys on the ring i tossed to her, it never occurred to me that i might need any of them. it didn't dawn on me that the reason there were so many keys was that for most places i go, i need a key to get in.

it's happened before, working on a weekend, but there's always someone there. i knocked. and cringed at the mocking soon to begin. i knocked again. i could here faint clicks and shifts that gave me hope my boss was still around. then i heard it. "hey." it took me a minute to realize that the man studying at the nearby table was addressing me in such a private moment as i had imagined myself to be in. "you working?" "i'm trying to."

bernie went on for 45 minutes to tell me about the signs of the times and the bible code. to inform me that i was young and smart and unfortunate.
he shook my hand at least three times and finally allowed me to go back downstairs and find a security guard to let me in to the office.

meeting bernie makes you think.
at first i thought about the end of the world and that it was sad to have to see all the "evil" of the banks and "you know people talk about the beast...some of that's this, right? the computer." but that notion promptly yielded its position to other thoughts. it didn't take long to remember that the world isn't completely done for (i am the author of a happy blog, for goodness sake) and i wished i could have interjected a positive note into our one-sided conversation. as i recalled the conversation, stepping around photocopied newspaper articles on the ground and wondering who exactly it is that comes in on a late friday afternoon on a campus holiday to do work at the library and what exactly they were working on, i reflected on my reaction at the outset of the conversation.
i thought he was completely insane.

he wanted to show me his books. all about the bible and the bible code and the apocalypse.
next would come the bank and the 22 cents and the overdraft charges. maybe he could get them reversed.
but that's why he's so mad.
and the bank.
and that's why he had to come get these books.
he had another book by this author, it was written in 2002, but this was written in 1996.
and he just found this one. it was written in 1973.
he was sixteen.
in the panama canal zone.
he was sixteen.
in high school.
but the lady at the bank was just rude. (foul language ensued and picked up toward the end of the conversation.)
and that's why he had to come get these books.
he was in the pawn shop.
the lady there is nice. she likes him.
and i don't know if you remember, but they found these artifacts that were hitler's.
and he remembered the newspaper article.
and the jcc threw him out.
and the skybox threw him out.
did i get cookies at the gateway? they threw him out.
and that's why he had to come get these books.

i'm not doing him justice.
the story was so incoherent, i thought he was just loopy. but all his dates checked out, he knew what year it was, he had a legitimate looking print out from chase bank. but there were no connections, no transitions. yet he told it to me as if he were making a clear, organized progressive argument almost as if each point had a causal relation to the next.

as i kept listening, knowing against reason that there must be some sort of organizing principle, i was finally able to follow his train of thought. i finally grasped how all the seemingly disparate anecdotes he was relating to me related to hebrew and code-breakers.
and i felt like i had just lived in a faulkner novel for an hour.
and i wanted to tell a story like bernie.
but i can't.
not quite.