richard bigman

Readers, for many reasons, the absence.

One, the last year involved considerable low-level angst of my own doing, precipitated by life changes I was pretty smug about at this time last year but turned out came faster than I was ready to process. The ambiguity is deliberate because somebody told me not to write the specifics, says the asshole who signals the specifics in the very sentence claiming to suppress them. At the lowest levels I found myself asking my empty office, aloud and alone, "Is this it?" It's hard to write when one is not happy with oneself.

Two, Angst beseitigt, I write now for my best reader, in private. Sometimes the parts that would not trigger diabetes make it onto the blog, e.g., thoughts on Justin's Beaver, but you're really just getting the dregs.

Three, this blog is at 972 posts. 972 posts. EIGHT YEARS. I told myself long ago that I wanted to do something with it before I hit 1,000 posts. A child born when I started this blog could have grown big enough to span the distance between San Francisco and Portland, Maine. Yet this blog remains the same old shit it was eight years ago, evidence of my continuing failure to mature past the "Why do girls make me cry???" stage of boihood development, now with legal vocabulary. Well, I cannot blame the girls, because in pari delicto melior est conditio possidentis.

What in the fuck am I saying?!!!! One thing this blog has taught me is how to be totally obscurantist in my writing, because I want to share, but I am afraid to be too public. So I just write in puzzles! SOLLY! The first time I joined an online dating website (screenname "DogEater") I embedded my personal email address into the profile, in an acrostic, to see if anyone would bother to decipher it and write me directly. Nope! I dismissed the entire universe of online daters as literalists I would not want to date anyway.

Two years ago I took a memoir writing class. Not much came out of it, except I wrote notes on one of my classmates and said to myself, "I'm going to post this on my blog in two years, when I have let enough time pass that there is little chance the subject would discover his portrait."

Well, it's two years later, so you get to read about Richard Bigman. The name is slightly changed but is very true to the original, in spirit.

Richard Bigman

This class is giving me insight into one of the most self-centered people I have ever met. The very pejorative meaning of the word is hard to escape but that's not exactly what I mean - Richard is not cruel and petty, but merely unable to conceive of the world as separate from his inner life. He is like those infants you read about in child developmental psychology textbooks who delight in peekaboo because they believe the thing disappears when they cannot see it. Though he is mostly blind to other people's needs, and this leads him to say and do appalling things, he is nonetheless appealling because he is friendly, positive, scruffy, stupid, and well-meaning. In this way, Richard reminds me of America.

A few examples of what I mean:

• Professor tells a story about her afternoon. She is riding the bus in San Francisco, reading a book of poetry. A man approaches her, looks at her face, looks at the book of poetry, and says, "Now that's an old girl with a dream." A kind of mean but funny thing to say. I point out that it requires insight to see a poetry reader (especially an older woman reading on a city bus) as a dreamer. Richard follows up: "Oh yes, was this person black? He sounds like he was black. Black people are just so insightful! They are just more intuitive than other people. They just really feel things. Have any of you all found this to be true?" He looks around the room, nodding, expecting support, not noticing the horrified rictuses on our frozen faces.

• Professor asks us all to bring an object with deep personal meaning to discuss at the start of class. Her object is a fragile coral necklace - so fragile, in fact, that it breaks as she is handling it, scattering red beads across the table. She gingerly re-ties the strand and passes it around for us to inspect. We each cradle the necklace like a baby bird, handing it carefully to the next person. When it is Richard's turn to pass it on, he drops it on the table and slides it four feet to the person sitting to his left. Nobody notices this, because somebody else is talking, except Professor, who gives the necklace a quick glance, and me.

• Richard tells a story about the year he spent living on an Outer Banks island after his divorce. He picked up some new hobbies, including collecting sea shells. Around the holidays, he thought it would be a cute idea to write messages onto the shells - one letter per shell - and send them to his friends. M-E-R-R-Y C-H-R-I-S-T-M-A-S, and so on. "When they got the packages, they didn't understand," he said. "It was just jumbled up letters." It wasn't some fun word game he was playing with them. He just failed to understand that letters on sea shells would become jumbled in a shipping box and would be hard for other people to decipher.

• He is obsessed with sex. He is a flaccid-bodied 65 year-old man, but he is obsessed with sex. His stories feature girls' tits and asses; not in any crass way, but in that deeply interior and self-centered way, as in when his protagonists think, "Why do girls wear thongs in churches? They must know how easy we men are!" He also says, in his stories, that he knows when it is gross when older men hang around younger women, hoping. He praises stories as "sexy" if they involve sixteen year-old girls getting a little bit of tongue kissing from 37 year-old men.

R.W. brought a game called Stix and Stones to game night last Friday. It's sort of like Pictionary, except with a limited set of drawing utensils. You're given a clue, and then given a certain number of plastic twigs and rocks to illustrate it. Gets pretty difficult when your teammate draws a three-stick triangle and you guess "hat" but he means "pizza slice." The game really shines a light on the dark inner workings of another person's mind. It's all about the execution of an inner vision. For example, I tried to draw "UFO" - it looked so good in my head! - but on the coffee table looked exactly like a vulva. O.L. made something that looked like the kind of pronged branch you use to spear marshmallows for roasting; the clue was "gondola." S.E.'s two-story house with a chimney? "Ice." One woman illustrated something patently nonsensical, directed us to look at a certain portion of it, and could not understand why we did not see it as "tunnel."

I think this is what is going on with Richard. He sees something in his head. Most people see things in their heads. What's notable is that Richard's vision is farther from the truth, and he believes his vision much more strongly than most people do theirs. Add to this the fact that he is a white man named "Dick Bigman" who feels entitled to speak his mind, and you get this very weird, chummily ignorant man who cannot control at all what he thinks and says. I am more appalled then intrigued, but nonetheless I am still intrigued.