The Way We Were

Intro to Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher"

During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was -- but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me -- upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain -- upon the blank walls -- upon the vacant eye-like windows -- upon a few rank sedges -- and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees -- with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium -- the bitter lapse into every-day life -- the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart -- an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it -- I paused to think -- what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in the unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down -- but with a shudder even more thrilling than before -- upon the remodelled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.

Feeling Lucky

Emmett wants to buy cigarettes, so we stop at 7-11, right across the street. This 7-11 is the stuff of dreams, maybe because I’ve been going there since I was around twelve, when my dad first started letting me roam free around town; this place, to me, exists in a different time, where it’s the 1960’s, and everything’s perfect: Slurpee’s, innocence, the corner store, baseball cards and ice cream; when the steady buzz of street lights, crickets, and A/C units droned through muggy nights. In my mind, it exists as an old faded Polaroid photograph, rife with nostalgia.

Until I walk inside. It smells like old doughnuts, and the artificial fluorescent lights are blinding. I go over to the Slurpee’s, and the Slurpee machine has spilled the sticky, sugary drink all over machine and floor. Used straws and cups litter the little metal countertop; in a huge plastic box, hot dogs and sausages are slathered with grease—who knows how many days they’ve been heated there, rotating under a hot metal lamp slowly but surely. I’m not thirsty anymore, so I go to the front. Hassan looks like he’s about drop dead. His skin is dry, his eyes glazed.

“Hi there.” He sounds like Apu.

“Long shift?” I smile.

“Oh yes—here since midnight.”

“Almost there buddy. Can I have two lottery tickets?—the two dollar ones, the ones that you have the best feeling about.” He rips off two, hands them to me, and I give him my check card.

“Cash only, sorry.”

I stuff my hand into my pocket and take out a crumpled five dollar bill. “Here.”

Hassan takes it and rings it up. “Thanks, bye now sir.”

A burst of cold air greets me outside. Emmett’s pacing back and forth in the parking lot, taking long rips from his cigarette. His left hand is jammed into the pocket of his black, puffy overcoat.

“Let’s go dude.”

He doesn’t respond.

“Hey, come on, I got us some lotto tickets.”

“Oh shit, true. Sorry.” He stands still for a second. “Yo do you think Kelly will fuck me?”

I laugh. “I don’t know.” We start walking over to his car. “Invite her over tonight or something.”

“Yeah, because at the bar the other night I was treating her like shit, and she was just loving it. Like, she’s cool. You can make fun of her and shit.”

“She wants you dude,” I say. I’m an optimist.

“True.” He throws his cigarette down, and belches out a burst of smoke and hot breath. We arrive at his 1998 Camry. He gets in the driver side, and leans over, manually unlocking the passenger door. I open the door, and duck inside, pulling my hood over my ears. Emmett starts the engine, and I grab a sticky penny and a nickel in the cup holder. He lights another cigarette, rolls down the window, and exhales out.

I look over at him. “So I’ve been reading this book—The Secret—and it’s all about how positive thoughts lead to good things, like if you think about things you want, then they come true.”

“You believe that shit?”

“Well not at first, but it makes a pretty good argument. And they tell stories of people who use it, and how their desires came true. One lady wanted needed money to pay off her mortgage, and all of a sudden checks started showing up in her mailbox. Another guy was supposedly paralyzed, you know, for life—and he used it, and slowly he was able to walk again.”

“Okay what’s your point.”

“Well we should make it a part of our lives.” I turn up the heat, and zip up my coat. “It can’t hurt, right?”

“What’s it?” He blows a straight line of smoke out the window and ashes the cigarette in the cup holder.

“Visualization, using your imagination and seeing yourself succeeding. Here, this will be our first try.” I hand him a lottery ticket. “We have to visualize ourselves winning a lot of money.”

He holds the ticket in his hand, examining it. It says “Scary Rich” and has a picture of a ghost on it. “Do you want money for this?”

“How about if you win more than a grand, you give me half of it.”

He looks at me like I’m crazy and laughs. “Alright.”

I hand him the nickel. “Okay, so close your eyes.” I close mine. “See yourself bathing in money—you have so much money you don’t know what to do with it.”

He laughs.

“I’m serious, just shut up and do what I say.” I take a deep breath. “Okay. You’re set for life. You never have to work again if you don’t want to—well you’re going to want to, or else life would be boring, so you can do whatever you want to do. You could open up a baseball card shop, start a restaurant, hell, work at a gas station for all I care. But you’re set and you never have to worry about money. You can take care of your family, too, so your dad can retire early. And they can buy that house on the Cape that they want so badly. See yourself at that house.”

I stop talking and imagine myself on Martha’s Vineyard, when I was nine, and for ten days my dad was able to get us a little cottage by the beach. I’m on my boogie board, on the top of a wave, squinting, eyes stinging from the spray of sea salt, and I can see the entire beach—families playing wiffle ball, kids building sand castles, the massive, multi-colored clay cliffs looming in the distance, and the miniature figure of my dad, holding a beer and standing, observing me from the shore. The lighthouse on the cliffs flashes, a singular pulsating blip: red.

“Yo so can I open my eyes?” Emmett laughs. It snaps me out of my trance.

“Uh, yeah, sure. Let’s see if it works. You go first.”

He flicks his cigarette out the window, squeezes the nickel in between his index finger and thumb, and scratches away at the ticket. He blows off the silver shavings, studies it, and looks up at me, smiling. “Nothing.”

I take a deep breath, and scratch the prizes first. There’s the chance to win $100,000. Then I scratch the two winning numbers: 11 and 5. Eleven is my lucky number, so this must be destiny, I think. I scratch away at the others, one by one, leaving the $100,000 for last. I lose those, but that doesn’t matter—if I lose the smaller prizes, there’s an even better chance that I’ll win the $100,000. Finally I get to it. I close my eyes, scratch, and open them. 17. I stare at it for a second.

“You win?”

I drop the ticket to the car floor. “No.”

Emmett puts the car into reverse and pulls out of the 7-11 lot. I don’t talk the rest of the way home, until he drops me off at my house. “I’ll call you after work,” he says.

Passing our time in the grassland away

I had an interesting conversation with a co-worker yesterday who's an avid outdoorsman. He recently spent three weeks in the woods with his coon dog, Murphy, just the two of them, with no other human contact. He craves these getaways because they offer an escape from over-stimulated, attention diverting technocratic barrage.

"When I'm working I don't talk to my family. When I'm in the woods, I talk to them more than I ever would, because there is the time for it, and there is a priority placed upon it."

It made me think how I rarely talk to my family, even though they're only ten minutes away from my apartment. The one time a week I do see them, I'm in and out, and even then the experience is disrupted by phone calls. I said I'd never get a Blackberry, but my job has forced me to, and now it completely dominates me.

My co-worker told me about an article he had read about how destructive technology is to our ability to complete projects and goals--the pop-ups, videos, phone calls, texts, and e-mails that have become an inescapable presence in our everyday lives. They completely disrupt a natural biological process: an innately focused, zeroed-in drive to complete long-term goals, such as building shelter, hunting for food, planting crops, and maintaining strong familial ties. And so we sit at our desks W.I.R.E.D. into our gadgets, harmlessly passing our time in the grassland away.

It doesn't make us better at "multitasking"; rather we have become the kings of procrastination, because there's always something else--an article to read, an e-mail to check, a quick message to send--that exists solely to divert us from what we're trying to accomplish. It's all there at our fingertips--in the palm of our hand if we own an iphone--and yet it simultaneously imprisons us.

Cluster One