12.29.99

When we moved we trashed the old 486 desktop; only laptops enter this house now. His is in its case on the floor next to my file cabinet and I've attached mine to the cables trailing from the wall. This room, with the wide-open desk, is light and airy. Lacking the hum of box, monitor, and speakers -- that spatial and auditory imposition -- it is a tranquil place to sit and work. Morning's fish tank, warm and bright; escape through the top hatch is impossible: high ceilings in this loft apartment. In this room, the ceiling, painted white as the walls is the incline of the roof and is easily 14 or 15 feet at its apex. When we moved in we left the walls bare, mostly. Pictures we had hung before were used up and the new ones have never been mounted for hanging. I like the sterility and the quiet of white, how it supports the collage of living things accumulated within it. Two windows hold up the narrow room, each of them taller than I am, letting in the day and night. The desk faces them, the bookshelf flanks the left, and the right wall is entirely blank. At my back are the door (very bad feng shui) and a closet that contains the things we keep but do not necessarily want to see. Contained in the bookshelves are mostly D's Korean and Chinese language books and his innumerable strategy games. Tucked at the margins are a few dictionaries and some of my papers and old textbooks. There is also a plate resting on display that is painted with the portrait of Mao. D bought it in China, as a momento of what one would see in someone's home in that country. A display plate is a typical household knickknack, one of those kitschy items blending West and East toward exceptional poor taste: a must have. Except, now that I look at it, the more I see this image as a symbol of terror; displaying his mug among the shelves is equivalent to allowing Hitler or Stalin to stare from there, which wouldn't be done. The difference being that he is not one of "us" but one of a culture determined exotic and therefore to some degree fantastical. The atrocities that happened under his reign are too far removed from us and we are content to giggle at his neotenous face on t-shirts, lighters, and plates as if he and the oppression executed in his name were an invention of Disney.

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