I'm riding, wheels turning, puddles spinning off the rubber, thinking that the people all stand together with their faces so death-heavy because it's backward. Because it's in the DNA to collapse at the sight of a coffin the size of a suitcase. You don't want to pack your baby on a trip like that. When you walk down the street, and you happen upon a baby carriage with a baby inside it, and you peer in the blue awning, the scalloped edges, the squirmy flesh inside, there is one simple given: If all goes right, this baby will live in the world longer than you.

It's all about numbers. It is all about sequence. It's the mathematical logic of being alive. If everything kept to its normal progression, we would live with the sadness—cry and then walk—but what really breaks us cleanest ...

• lapilofu
• February 4, 2010
• An Invisible Sign of My Own
• Page 195
• Reply

I keep my eyes closed because I want to kiss him and when you kiss someone your eyes are closed. I won't do it but I want to and he is chewing next to me, the last of the popcorn, cold by now; if he has felt anything from me, he is careful not to show it, and I am wrapped up in myself here, I have cloaked myself, I have sent surges of me over to him, but he knows nothing. He is caught in his own wonderings. He is still watching, he is inside the movie and he is not mine.

• lapilofu
• February 1, 2010
• An Invisible Sign of My Own
• Page 140
• Reply

You know my dad is sick too, I said to her then.

Her face opened with interest, and she hopped from foot to foot.

Does he have eye cancer? Lisa asked, ready to drop down again and roll around some more.

No, I said, not cancer at all.

What does he have? She edged toward the door. Outside, her classmates had stopped running and were laughing about something.

I don't know, I told her. It doesn't have a name.

She nodded before she bolted away. Oh yeah, she said. I think I've heard of that.

• lapilofu
• January 30, 2010
• An Invisible Sign of My Own
• Page 56
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Much of the cold, dead, mechanical quality of adult films is attributable, really, to the performers' faces. These are faces that usually appear bored or blank or workmanlike but are in fact simply hidden, the self locked away someplace far behind the eyes. Surely this hiddenness is the way a human being who's giving away the very most private parts of himself preserves some sense of dignity and autonomy—he denies us true expression. (You can also see this very particular bored, hard, dead look in strippers, prostitutes, and porn performers of all locales and genders.)

But it's also true that occasionally, in a hard-core scene, the hidden self appears. It's sort of the opposite of acting. You can see the porn performer's whole face change as self-consciousness (in most females) or crazed blankness (in most males) yields to some genuinely felt erotic joy in what ...

• lapilofu
• November 4, 2009
• Consider the Lobster
• Page 17
• Reply

This is one reason why so many gay people are now desperately hoping that a gay gene can be found. They think they would be more justified if they could show that they had no choice, that neither they nor gay culture played any role in shaping their desires. Some conservatives, meanwhile, trivialize the gay experience as "lifestyle," as though that warrants interfering with it. Both sides seem to agree on an insane assumption: that only immutable and genetic sexualities could be legitimate, that if being gay could be shown to be learned, chosen, or partly chosen, then it could be reasonably forbidden.

• lapilofu
• October 11, 2009
• The Trouble with Normal
• Page 9
• Reply