We Change Your Channel

2007 Frats Luv Nudes

From Blue to Ananda:

You say you wouldn't change anything about your life, but is this true? Is it really that you don't need to change anything? Where is the intellectual challenge? Like me, a fellow high-school dropout and self-made personality, you're always going to be blooming late. The fact that you lose yourself in reading means you're finding yourself to be deeper and deeper with each book, with each repeated examination of a subject. Isn't it strange that you would be reading and identifying with women's lives in oppressive societies? I read Persepolis the other night and thought about you, reading. And I've said it before: the awful thing about reading is that you get smarter doing it, and this leads to all sorts of problems. I know it's ridiculous to compare yourself to your peers, but look around at all the readers in your life. How many are there? And I totally discount anybody in a book club unless they're reading three or four things simultaneously outside the designated choice. And reading newspapers and the internet and magazines is not reading at all. Why bother with books? What can you possibly get from them? How can you lose so much time reading them?

When I have my existential fears and retreat from the reality of death, I crawl into bed with a book. Five books. Several nights ago my stomach was killing me, so I took four books off the shelf and laid down, even knowing that the horizontal position was the worst thing possible for me. Laura Huxley's memoirs about the last years of her husband Aldous, cinematographer Nestor Almendros on cameras and apertures, a book on the discovery and use of the mathematical term 'zero', and Persepolis. Tore through the last, spent three hours on Huxley, and then read for four hours the entire Almendros. Got up middle of the next day without sleeping and suffered. But then within minutes of getting into the Valley I got to the videostore and rented "Cockfighter," shot by Almendros (he also filmed Sophie's Choice and Days of Heaven, and nine of Truffaut and five of Rohmer), and watched the movie last night, hoping to understand more the imperative of using natural light in telling a story. How how how? And what else had Almendros made since writing his book? Looked him up on Yahoo and found he died of AIDS in 1983, and suddenly another domino fell: His piece on dissenting voices in Cuba, which of course included the poet Arenas, and now his anger with Castro and other dictators (Somoza and Franco) which affected his life . . . his anger struck my own hatred of oppression. I like revolutionaries, but I hate Castro because Castro tortures homosexuals, and here he is, in the news, and whenever he comes up I can bring up Arenas and Almendros and condemn him for his pathology with homosexuality while defending the revolution; you can imagine the effect this has on gung-ho Yankees who think Cuba is about to invade south Florida and prevent us from singing the national anthem every morning in kindergarten. So a train of thought rumbles from going to bed with four books.

Aren't you exactly the same? How can you measure your interests against the reality of what you read? Shouldn't I go to Cuba? Shouldn't you go to Iran or Afghanistan, and talk to women? You, who is so open? What kind of effect would you have on a class of teenage girls in Kabul? My friend Nasrine is there, clandestinely, changing the world with death stalking her walk home every night, and what would she make of you addressing her class: "I judge everyone I meet sexually." How could you explain this? How many lives could you influence in one hour?

Do you still judge people sexually? Do you still want to travel to India? Do you still want to read Darwin and Wallace?

You're intelligent, ambitious (gallery owner, horticulturist, banker, animal rescuer), and by retreating into books you make all these aspects of yourself weightier than ever. You cannot keep denying yourself to maintain a position in society (mortgage banker) or a position in a family (mother and wife) while sacrificing the girl who kept her plates in a closet, waiting to have her own home.

You are not self-destructive, and you never have been. When other people get hurt through your actions, too bad. Apologize and give them a band-aid. You had no problem doing that with me, but I'm sure that part of this was because you thought I was independent enough to move on without you. If you are self-destructive, how do you explain your childhood fear of nuclear bombs and your desire to open a dog shelter? I got an e-mail from Yvonne Verkaik a few weeks ago, inviting me back to Uganda to see the progress at Siwa Ranch, where she now has 19 rhinos, up from two rhinos two years ago. What a hero she is. Wouldn't you like to go check out her shelter? And if you did, if you could go without raising suspicions in your family, wouldn't you do it if the tickets were paid for? Who could possibly object? Who would say, Great Ananda, go for it and bring back some pictures? And who would say, uh, terrorism, uh, black people, uh, AIDS, uh, cholera, uh, the baby's feeding schedule, uh . . .?

And if you don’t go to Uganda, you still read and you still judge. These are habits which keep you attractive, long past the fade of the sheen of your pretty face and lovely bottom. The people in your life who still find you attractive do not do so because they want to watch your face while you eat a meal or to see you in red underwear; people remember you and long for you because you are curious, because your desire for emotion and feeling quite possibly leads to danger or at least to trouble. That's the Ananda everyone wants, but that's also the Ananda they must deny, if they judge themselves uninteresting enough to keep her interested, or if they judge themselves too timid to keep her passionate about her own interests.

How are you challenged now? If there is a cool painting hanging in New York that might change your life, what's wrong with dropping everything to go see it? And if you're tempted in the process of going to see a painting, why would you hold back from any experience you think might be enriching, or nourishing, or ennobling? Perhaps working out in the gym every day and reading books every night isn't enough. Maybe you need to be alone in India for a few weeks to get the right perspective on yourself. Either that, or stop reading, and dumb yourself down the way everyone else does, slowly settling for the undeniable comforts of mediocrity.

I am quite sure my eros star has faded from your sky, and I accept this as much as I lament it, so I am encouraging you to do what you need to however you need to because you are perhaps the principal personality of my life, certainly the most erotic element of it, and I wish you pleasure and knowledge the same way I would hope you wish it for me. If I have a secret agenda in pushing you to be you it's simply so I can hang rapturously on the details, to live vicariously through you and re-visit the mysteries and hopes I found in every touch of your skin and whisper on your lips. I know better than ever what it means to long for relevance and knowledge . . . for fantasy, even, if that's the proper term to use for reality we are reluctant to admit or explore.

Thinking of you in between my madcap illusions, and sometimes in the middle of them . . .