A brutal desire for the purely present moment

chronicling the quick & the massive

This January, I did what I do every January: I looked through various bags and boxes of photos and mementos I’ve kept over the years. A few of these items include:

• Some touching postcards from friends spanning the 2010’s.

• An unopened cable bill from 2013 covered in sharpie drawings of goofy monsters. I did not draw them and I don’t know who did.

• A haiku from Lindsey entitled “GIOVAN” written on a napkin in ballpoint pen (c. 2014). It goes:

          I WONDER SOMETIMES 
WHY I’M LUCKY ENOUGH TO 
          TOUCH YOUR BUTT DAILY

• A really intense pocket-sized portrait of me (c. 2017) that I believe was drawn either by a former student or my friend, the writer Pia Sazani, as a birthday present.

• A 2012 triplicate receipt from Entebbe International Airport of Uganda declaring my lost luggage.

• An old letter from a friend that says: “Though nothing need come of this, for what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”

• A short note about a book in my grandfather’s hand to my mother, dated 11/15/97.

• A peer’s review (peer like student, not scholar) of my linguistic study of teasing—the study being my analysis of a transcript of me and my roommates talking shit to each other in 2011.

• A half-mooned shape Chinese comb.

I think you get the idea—random personal things. Every year I sit down on the floor with these objects and reassess them. Why keep them? Obviously, keep the sweet things—the love. But the apology? The triplicate? A cable bill?

Nostalgia & Nowheres

Most of these things are small and tucked away, but, when I touch them and read them, they feel huge and ever-present—they make everything come back to me very quickly—and it seems no matter how hard I try, these objects stay spread out in different boxes and bags, under the bed and between pages and in the corners of closets and balancing on the edges of bookcases. All told (excluding physical photographs) I might still have over a hundred “nowheres,” as I started calling them this year. I call them nowheres now because I put a label on a magazine file that says NOWHERES where I want them to live.

Some live there. Some resist. I want to control them, but they are uncontrollable. They are my gut—kind of.

It’s become a ritual for me to not only use the nowheres to reminisce but to try to remember why the person I was a year ago decided to save these things. To be sure, not all of the nowheres make it; every year there is some culling. This year, 2023, I threw away the apology. And the triplicate. (Growth, by this formula, is a significant removal of things—which is funny: as a kid, growth seems composed entirely of trying to gain or accumulate things).

The process is nostalgic, and nostalgia is exhausting; the friction of coming back to the present after gliding through so many memories makes me want to throw all of the mementos away—some kind of brutal desire for a purely present moment where nothing has stuck to me and nothing will ever stick to me.

I’ve never done this. Instead, I stand up, get some water/beer, go outside to breathe and let this fantastic urge appear for what it is: a gross, lonely kind of freedom.

I want to come back to the nowheres, and I want them to be nowhere. Both can be true, I guess.

Happy Birth

We’re having a baby in July—due on my birthday, actually. Where we live, space is precious—the lines between memento, knickknack and garbage seem faint as we prepare to meet our child. In this context, the decisions to keep certain things and not others feels different. What version of me will they come to know? Which of these objects will tell my story? Which of these will become part of theirs?

I could blame this tension purely on physical space, but it’s more than that. Space is more than just shelter. Space is inter- & intrapersonal awareness. A shared hippocampal dance. It’s the plan for who we will and won’t be in the next few seconds, the next few hours, the next few weeks, ad infinitum. It’s where our hands and our eyes go as we step back and forth between rest and responsibility. What do we want to be around when we do not want to think? When we must know without knowing?

In this way, the placement of these nowheres in our house is not quite accidental and not quite on purpose. The placement is, arguably, just not thought about. Even if, initially, there was thought behind the location of the object. The thought fades; what’s not thought becomes the emergence of what’s felt. One new object enters the space and everything starts to change. One new person enters the space and everything starts to grow.

Nick Van Exel

I have a small wooden plaque displaying a Nick Van Exel basketball card from 1993 held in mint condition by transparent beveled glass. He’s midair; the ball has left his hands; the court is out of frame and the crowd is a blurry ebb under the darkness of the Forum in the background.

A brutal desire for the purely present moment.

It’s autographed on the back by three Lakers of whom I couldn’t even tell you their names (none of them being Van Exel’s, for reasons I can’t quite remember). This nowhere, being not only light and durable but memorabilia, is always orbiting me. At times he’s been front and center in kitchens and bedrooms. A few months ago he was in the closet. At one point, my brother-in-law had him. Now, he hangs out unremarkably on a shelf you’d only notice if you were looking for a book. He does not have a “spot.” He doesn’t even have the NOWHERE box. Now (like, now) he’s on my desk as I write.

Something tells me he will persist.

A Cable Bill

For some reason, the cable bill survived this year. I don’t know why. Maybe I’ll know come January 2024. Maybe not.

Was it paid? Who knows.

That’s the thing about the nowheres—they’re really not meant to be thought about; if anything, they remind me that I cannot think my way through everything. They remind me that attachments persist beyond explanation.