M. Donovan Stack

Absolution

2006-06-26T22:04:42Z

Alone, annoyed, and smelling of smoke, I went to a McDonald's for lunch. I had slept late, and my friends had disappeared inexplicably without me in the morning; already feeling overwhelmed by the city, I sought out familiar things: first, Borders, the McDonald's of bookstores, then McDonald's, which, like G-d, is that it is. I was filled with a lingering sense of shame, as though I was masturbating.

Then, as I sat at my table drinking Coke, I felt the kiss of cosmic forgiveness. A char-eyed, pink-haired punk, wearing a spiked belt, a cap with spikes and rivets jutting through, a black Clockwork Orange bandana, and a shirt with the name of a band on it (it was something bricky, like "Cement"), sat down growling next to me with a Happy Meal. He then ate his hamburger with the unpretentious hunger of the young subvert, and I felt a kinship to him. My new brother, my new city.

Bimonthly post

2006-06-20T23:10:22Z

While packing my things for San Francisco, I put my few sexuality-oriented belongings -- books, lube, Fleshlight¹, etc. -- into my baggage to minimize the frankly terrifying possibility of my parents finding it. I put them in little bags and sandwiched them between layers and layers jackets and ironic t-shirts, then departed in the early morning with Brian² to the airport. It was a crisp autumn day in late spring, and I was transitioning from a beautiful old place in my life to a shiny new one.

Obviously, the airport people opened it and threw everything around in front of my father.

However, I did manage to board the plane despite arriving 20 minutes before the flight left by utilizing a mixture of bribery and swearing. I might be some sort of sexual beast, but here's to being a tenacious and lucky sexual beast -- in my mind, the best kind of sexual beast to be. I'm writing, as usual, from a plane. The sleeping man on my left is the long-limbed, sprawling kind, and I can feel the scratchy but strangely comforting presence of his hairy arm against mine. The pleasant fat man on my right is reading what appears to be an enthralling white paper about ligands. He's nodding along as he goes, and it cheers me to see somebody who appears to enjoy what he does for a living.

¹ I don't really have a Fleshlight³. It just makes me giggle girlishly to write about it.
² Brian Stack is my father. Yes, I'm one of those hippie kids who calls their parents by their first names.
³ This is basically a synthetic vagina-in-a-can.

On Inspiration, and the Ethics of Style.

Lacking anything better to discuss, allow me to return to canonical LiveJournal form, which is talking about LiveJournal. More specifically, I was thinking about the formation of my writing style. I feel no shame in saying that, while everything I write about comes from the fly-infested, overflowing trash can that is my mind, the way in which I write about it is thoroughly cribbed from other people. When I started getting into writing, I naturally followed the voices that I admired most. I absorbed their styles, employing the same constructions they did until they became part of the subconscious process.

So, I'd like to hear your writing inspirations, online and not. Who is it that you latched onto, limpet-like? Or are you really such a revolutionary that you have been influenced by nobody?

For my part, I remember being influenced hugely by Lex in junior high, then getting into Toastyfrog and SolidSharkey, then Erik from Old Man Murray. (The gamez crowd.) More recently, I've been stealing from Tim Rogers and Mario. Non-Internet people include Annie Dillard, John D'Agata, and, obviously, Dave Eggers.

Transitioning into my next topic a little bit here, each of the Internet celebrities above has their own little cult following. For example, everyone on Sharkey's forum writes exactly like Sharkey, except they're less good at being Sharkey than Sharkey is. I think the thing about having a "distinctive voice" is, actually, two things: you can either be born an extremely idiosynchratic individual, or you can be a sponge and soak it up from other people. In the latter case, you should be flexible enough to learn from several sources, or else you really do become a, well, a robot. There's a thick line between being a robot and being someone who can learn from a whole bunch of other people to make your life more interesting. In our postmodern world, everything is about remixing everything else.

A Moral Question.

I've got an extremely minor moral quibble that I'd like to raise for discussion. Is it fair for a liberal, freethinking person to cast judgment upon some communities but not others? For example, I'm always swatting down my AzIaN fRiEnDz' comments about gay homosexuals, and I make a point of arguing fruitlessly with my parents when they say something silly about black people. (It is a poorly-kept secret that Asian immigrants are moderately racist, although, in my experience, they're willing to make exceptions for their friends.) On the other hand, I think furries are deviants and I have a really hard time taking seriously anyone who uses *emotes*, or ::emotes::, or ^_^ faces, or, alternatively, [emotes], in their writing. On the other hand, we can't help who we are.

LiveJournal, am I a hypocrite? Please discuss.

Epilogue.

Back to real-life matters, then. Freshly graduated, I've spent the last whatever bumming around at home. I'm moving to San Francisco to work for a company you've heard of whose name I will not disclose for fear of being dooced. I'm living with a close friend from college, but we cannot move in until July; until then, I'll be bouncing between her parents' place and my brother's.

Dream catchers, I hope your life is eventful this week.

Murder Party

2006-05-05T08:19:49Z

On the plane back from San Francisco. It was a pleasant enough trip, disregarding the steam-powered robots and the "murder parties" -- a violent, erotic successor to the New York flash mob popular among Californian high schoolers. I barely made it to the airport on time, had barely enough money to pay the Soviet taxi driver, spent five minutes dawdling in the wrong line, and was placed at the last minute in the very last row of the airplane in between two large, bearded, bespectacled, somnolent men. They smell like gasoline and hair. I feel trim and young, in between them, like a boy.

I made my first San Franciscan friend, a gregarious cabbie called Gloria, a self-described "born and raised San Francisco native, culinary sea trader, explorer, and entrepreneur." In fact, she said this twice. (I hypothesize that the very talkative have a repertoire of stock sentences upon which to draw at the beginning of relationships.) She had lived in New York, Boston, and Hawaii as well. When I mentioned that I was born in Paris, she started speaking to me in (what I assume was) perfect French and I had to interrupt her to explain that my parents had been on vacation and I didn't speak a word of it.

"Gloria, you are so worldly," I said, awed.

She (alarmingly) raised her hands from the wheel to shrug.

"It's because I'm a very interesting person," she said.

She gave me her card and made me promise to call her. I gave her all the cough drops I had in my pocket -- she, who was coughing, was clearly in more need of them than I was. I just think they're delicious.

Cab drivers have been some of the most interesting people I know. I spent three hours on an extended business trip in Providence with a grizzled Italian-American, and he spent the entire time telling me stories about his life. Getting high in the army. "Mistaking" his wife's naked-but-for-high-heels best friend for his wife while heavily drunk. He was a man's man who built his house with his own hands, then adopted eight cats.

He made me who I am today.

The rest of the trip was mostly spent in the company of my brother David and his wife. David is fifteen years older than me and rents a loft one of the best neighborhoods of San Francisco. A preternaturally informed businessman, he got out of the tech sector right before the bubble burst. Our sister, an illustrator, always draws him holding a big bag of money with a dollar symbol on the side.

We spent a couple of nice days together. We did some unremarkable sightseeing. We ate steak and pasta and sushi. Tina kept comparing the capers to hamster turds, which, clearly, made my tortellini al pesto just that much more delicious!

Incidentally, Dooce's observation about public transportation in SF is completely true:

We tried to spend Friday visiting our favorite places in the city butinstead we battled public transportation half the day — an hour and ahalf waiting inside a MUNI station and thenanother 45 minutes for a bus that never came. There seemed to be aserious lack of pride in the system, and for a city known for itsprogressive politics it felt really hypocritical that we were basicallyforced to take a cab to get anywhere

But, fortunately, David drives a BMW 5-Series, and we were able to avoid the problems of the common man entirely.

Let me clarify that I'm quite fond of him. And none of us define him by his money in real life. It's just the sort of thing that stands out when you're trying to write about someone, since money determines lifestyle.

Let me also share with you a headline from the cover of this month's issue of a popular men's magazine, sponsored by the mustached man next to me:

RETIRE RICH! AND DIE HAVING SEX!

Sometimes, I read books. Most recently:

Oh the Glory of it All, Sean Wilsey: Less like AHWOSG than I was expecting given the title and Eggers's enthusiastic endorsement, this was a continually surprising but unevenly-paced memoir that would have been great literature at half its length. Not that I didn't enjoy it, but San Franciscans aware of the celebrities the dude talks about would probably get more out of it than I did. As self-conscious and honest as Eggers, without the verbal pyrotechnics.

Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans, Eggers and the McSweeney's gang. I'm making just enough money now to spend money on books based on websites that I can read for free. Altruistic, I know, but it's just the way I am. (I just noticed another tomato-headed baby being carried to the bathroom in the plane aisle. I SWEAR their heads used to be smaller.) This made me LOL and once made me snort, which provoked the mockery of my sister-in-law.

I might be a McSweeney's groupie.

DAMN IT, I FORGOT TO STOP BY THEIR PIRATE STORE

Food Court Druids, Cherohonkees, and Other Creatures Native to the Republic, the same dudes who wrote The Hipster Handbook. Tries to categorize types of annoying Americans. (The Food Court Druid: mall goths. Cherohonkees: white people overly, condescendingly interested in American Indian culture.) Insightful, unfunny, and neither self-mocking nor self-aware enough to get away without coming across as a little nasty.

In the world of ironic literature there's a line you can only cross if you leave part of yourself on the other side.

There's a kind of delicate grace to it, even if you're going out of your way to appear clumsy.

AND THAT'S WHAT MAKES THE POSTMODERN ESSAY SO LOVEABLE

In other news, I think David is going to help me move to the Bay Area. This is top secret information that should not be shared with anyone.

In other other news, I watched all four seaons of Mr. Show in one day a couple weeks ago. I either forgot or was too ashamed to mention this, because I was alone at the time and in my underwear. I mention this for a reason that I have now forgotten.

The sun of journalistic clarity has officially disappeared behind the moon of my hunger. I want me some god-damned okonomiyaki and I don't care who knows it.

TALES FROM THE NAKED RAP BATTLE

I'd like to close our seminar with a couplet which came to me in an erotic dream I had last week. It was some kind of naked rap battle, and I was a black teenager talking about my deconversion from Christianity.

Yo check it serious I put it here for all to see
A haunting rap of my relig-i-ous apostasy

I forget the rest, but I think I slant-rhymed "Genesis" with "exegesis."

If you were me you would have, too.

An early flight to California

2006-05-03T12:52:42Z

The sunrise this morning looked fake, Photoshopped. The sunrays were visible to the naked eye, which is strange; I have always thought of sunrays as an artistic conceit used by illustrators to convey the idea of sunlight, in much the same way that speed lines behind a cartoon car convey the idea of movement. But there they were, connecting cloud to cloud with silky, straight lines.

Underneath the sky was the hideous skyline of Boston. The tops of brick buildings and grody billboards were passing by like the balding heads of a row of old men. They were moving because I was in a bus going to the airport. I'm on a flight now to San Francisco to visit my brother. Before boarding, a large red-faced woman and I were selected for an extra security screening. We went to the counter, and a tall airport security lady with one eye shut for no obvious reason looked at me, smiled, and shrugged.

I SEE A BABY, ACCUSE IT OF BEING A DEMON

On the plane, a hunched-over woman sitting in seat C looked up at me and asked if the empty seat next to her was mine. It was, so she unfolded herself and revealed a baby. I have noticed that baby heads appear to be getting bigger. This baby's head was like the most juicy tomato, so round and squishy it was. I can only conjecture that a new generation of over-brained Uberbabies will rise up and make us all their psychic slaves. It turned out, later, that we got the good plane baby -- a demon child spent most of the flight shrieking just a few rows forward.

I have received a good education, but I stare out the window like a lout when the plane takes off. To think that a steel can full of people and jackets can go fast enough to not have to touch the ground anymore is nothing short of magic to me. I feel the same way about wireless Internet, magnets, flocks of migrating birds.