• The existential blogosphere

    IF BOOKS, particularly novels and memoirs, are our defence against a certain loneliness, as our (questionably reliable) guides to how life is lived, then I'm realising (finally, and late) that blogs (some, few) can fulfil something similar, albeit in a more disposable and less cathartic way. I mean, don't we read about others to recognise that the weird buzzing in our own heads is merely human? Even normal? And don't we like to know that other people are also trapped at their desks, with said buzzing?

    So I've been enjoying the tossed off observations of Dana Goodyear's Postcard from Los Angeles, a new blog over at the New Yorker's steadily expanding website. (George Packer and Hendrik Hertzberg are blogging too, though their posts are mainly about the grand failures of governments rather than the small failures of an otherwise ordinary day.)

    Here she writes about an odd incident with a driver in "an immense red S.U.V., in perfect condition, seemingly just washed and detailed, with a pair of golden testicles swinging from its undercarriage." The man insists she hit his car. An unexpected tension (and even suspense) builds: 

    “I’ll pull over,” I called through the rain, and, since he was slightly ahead of me (he had positioned himself to photograph me through my windshield, like a renegade red-light ticketing camera), he took the lead. He turned right onto Ivar and kept going, past many empty stretches of curb where I felt we could reasonably have had it out. But, having taken my picture and, doubtless, copied down my license-plate number, he had me in a strange position, forced to follow him into the labyrinth, a Theseus attached by an invisible string to the pendulous golden “bull balls.”

    The red car turned again and travelled what again seemed to me like a needlessly long distance, an intimidating distance, before pulling over at a red curb. I put on my hazards and nervously got out of the car, apologizing and supplicating even as I approached. The driver emerged, a large, muscular man with a thick mustache and a gentle face. He looked at his bumper and its appendage and swiftly concluded that he was wrong: there was no damage to his car.

    Slight, yes. And reassuringly so. Goodyear escapes from the scene unharmed, despite the inauspicious promise of those golden testicles. And we get a story--a small, human one. A postcard.


    COMMENTS: 0 | ADD NEW COMMENT