Volume Seven: Lost and profound.
tl;dr: Flirtatious Mermaids, Loquacious Motorcyclists, and Four Other Things
Hey there—
I keep staring at a candle flame hoping it’ll talk to me. You can join, if you’d like.
As we sit and watch, we’ll remind each other that its movements aren’t meaningful. I’ll remind you that the flame flickers every time the air conditioning sputters on. You’ll remind me that it wavers when I place my beer next to it on the barstool I use as a coffee table.
Hell, the only reason the candle can mime at all is because we tricked the wick and the lighter into a momentary tryst, a sham kissing booth in my living room that will only end in tragedy. The lighter is going to die any day now—slower than the flame, faster than a lot of other things. A short romance, light on poets but dripping in wax.
Candles don’t talk even when we want them to.
Some publisher somewhere excerpted a man named Edward Everett Hale’s writing into a zine called How To Do It that I bought at Quimby’s, a zine store and minor taxidermy emporium on Metropolitan.
One section in it, labeled, “How To Talk,” has been ringing in my brain for weeks—
“Talk To The Person Who Is Talking To You
Never Underrate Your Interlocutor
You will be amazed, every time you try this experiment, to find how often the [person] whom you first happen to speak to is the very person who can tell you just what you want to know.”
Today, we’re discussing two instances of speaking to the very person who can tell you just what you want to know. Underrate me, your interlocutor, if you dare.
Only pessimists get good surprises.
The other day I went to my Björk-watch bar (explained in Vol. Five) in search for someone to say something to you about. It was a slow night. No Björk in sight.
The electric candles—as chatty as they were cold—made eyes at me. The singular patron sitting at the bar, a modest two seats down, did not. His attention was fixed on the bartender. The former disparaged the L train, flicked his hair around after saying the phrase, “Well my music…” and said that both Cleveland and the Arizona desert are both “just fine” destinations for “motorcycling around.” He really liked talking about motorcyling around. The latter nodded along—a humane display of absence.
In a divine loophole that I can’t help but think that the aforementioned E. E. Hale would appreciate, I was afforded the opportunity to decide whether to talk to the people who were not yet talking to me.
I weighed my deep desire to give you the content you crave, dear reader, with my confidence that if I opened the door, the motorcyclist would leave tire marks on my doormat and my head full of exhaust. Yes, I could have written about what he told me, but he was the type of person who spoke on a soapbox, and there’s only so much looking up that someone can do in a day. Instead, I continued looking down at my notebook, sipping from a glass of bottom-shelf pragmatism (what a connoisseur of the bev. might refer to as pessimism).
The motorcyclist left, and the bartender walked over to me for a conversational palate cleanser.
He asked what I was writing. After explaining this neuesletter, I mentioned feeling slightly guilty about my conscientious objection from the motorcyclist’s musings. He said it was about intent. Some people, speak for the benefit of themselves, listener be damned. He phrased it more elegantly than, “be damned,” but this is my editorialization, and you’re just living in it.
Enter the conversation that I’d been wanting the whole time. Music. Spirituality. How To Fake Your Way Through Conversations With Musicians (Start by using the buzz phrase, “The cost of pressing vinyl these days…” and let the other party carry you from there.)
He played a great song by a Lebanese artist named Fairuz over the bar’s speakers for me. It’s linked in the Four Things section at the bottom of this email, so you have to keep reading if you want it…
He confirmed Björk’s occasional bar patronage, and then he gifted me his mother’s favorite saying: “Only pessimists get good surprises.”
I left as he locked up, and two weeks later we continued the conversation where it had left off. That week, he was listening to Argentinian tango, and it made a woman cry with delight when she walked in the door.
Let the mermaids flirt with me. (That’s the title of a song, but it works here—I promise.)
I’ve long been tempted to start all first conversations with, “So, tell me about myself.” Of course, it would be said in that specific conspiratorial tone that strangers use with other strangers. You know the tone. The one that means, “I know too little about you to ask something specific, and I care too little about you to come up with an interesting beginning.”
I don’t have a high tolerance for small talk that someone’s pretending is big. Fake intimacy. The weather. What our parents decided to call us.
If I could forego any spoken necessity, it would be, “Hi, I’m Nicole.” That introduction means nothing. I wish that names came later, once we’ve negotiated our cadence and our level of care, our dance between what has been and what might be. Once the metronome has started, I can know your name and you can take a moment to remember mine.
At the very least, my “So, tell me about myself,” hypothesis is that starting with the assumptions and adjusting from there would unlock an interesting beginning.
The following caused me to rethink my bias against conversational preamble. Beginnings aside, I’d be shocked if you could guess which celebrity pops up by the end.
“You know… I know the DJ—we’re roommates,” the bar was dead, so it wasn’t the most impressive opening line. “Yeah… we live together in a Bushwick bro loft.”
"I’m going to have to stop you there. You can’t say ‘Bushwick bro loft’ to me and expect me to not repeat that to everyone I talk to this weekend. And it won’t be in a nice way,” I believe in setting reasonable expectations.
We continued talking.
He mentioned crypto. “Do you know what that is?”
He mentioned deepfakes. “Do you know what those are?“
“I’m going to have to stop you there. You can’t say ‘Bushwick bro loft’ to me, and then ask me whether I know what those two things are,” I again measured his expectations without a ruler.
I was waiting for Becka to finish making her rounds—it was late, and she knew everyone in the sparsely populated room.
He was Canadian and a filmmaker. I’m sure that he doesn’t remember what I do or am. Then, he mentioned something about a recent film project that made my ears perk up.
Mermaids.
“Do you know what Weeki Wachee is?” I turned his line of questioning back on him.
“Yes. I’ve actually been there.”
Weeki Wachee is a little-known excursion in Florida where mermaids (n., alt. def.: human women wearing prosthetic fish tails) swim in a tank that was built around the ebb and flow of a natural spring. Audiences have been enthralled by these realized agents of magical realism since the 1940s, as they use oxygen wands to breathe underwater and perform stories like “The Little Mermaid” with off-brand titles. Some company owns the name-brand rights. It is one of my favorite places.
“I actually bought a prosthetic tail from the guy who makes their prosthetic tails.”
His soapbox splintered. He finally was telling me what I wanted to know.
Apparently, he worked on a mermaid film project that led him to Weeki Wachee. He commissioned a tail from their tail guy. They shot the film somewhere else in Florida.
“And I guess Mariah Carey somehow saw the project… and her team reached out.”
Then, he allegedly worked with Mariah Carey twice(?!). As I was absorbing that fact the way that Weeki Wachee mermaids absorb adoration from six-year-olds, we walked outside and then—
“We should get brisket sometime,” he said.
“Brisket?”
“What do you mean? Do you not know what that is?”
The dance ended. The small talk resumed. The bar closed.
He said he’d send me a copy of his script, abruptly kissed me on the forehead (with a shocking amount of tenderness) and got into a car that was, no doubt, bound for a Bushwick bro loft somewhere in the horizon.
I suppose that I have a difficult time resisting making value judgments based on what someone might say next. The lesson here? You can’t really predict who will talk to you about prosthetic mermaid tails, so trust your interlocutor as long as they are talking to you rather than at you.
He never did send me a copy of his script, though.
Now, before I kiss you on the forehead and send you on your way, here are four other sea-themed things.
Something bold: I went to the Coney Island Mermaid Parade—a collection of the most mermaids you could possibly see in a few block radius, if that’s what you’re into. I was very into it. And yes, in addition to the run of the mill human-head, fish-tail merperson, there were indeed fish-face, human-legs merpeople in attendance as well. Thanks to Charlotte for taking me there!
Something for the astute: Let the Mermaids Flirt With Me by Mississippi John Hurt—pretty song, pretty sad song.
Something borrowed: Okay this one isn’t sea-themed at all, but probably has C-the-note somewhere in it… Here’s the great song recommendation from the bartender I mentioned at the top of this volume—Oghniat Al Wadaa by Fairuz.
Something too good to be true: If you want to learn about life as a mermaid, BOY do I have a link for you! Check out the Weeki Wachee Mermaid Roster—all hail to Andrea Hall for showing me this for the first time years ago.
Special thanks to Sinclair for editing the hell out of this tome. Any issues? Take them up with him. (Too bad you can’t because he doesn’t have an IG for me to link to.)
As always, it’ll be nice to meet you tomorrow.
—N. Graney I
P.S. Lucky penny for your thoughts? I’ve been thinking about a Lyft driver telling me that the Bronx Zoo has animatronic dinosaurs for some reason. I haven’t gone to see them yet, but friend of the neuesletter Giles did when he was in town. Check out Giles’ comedy in honor of this selfless feat. In the meantime, send me whatever your brain’s been occupied with, and I’ll give you a cent for your two cents.
Are you new here?
I was at a jazz night at Fiction. It was one of the revolving door affairs where musicians rotate onstage whenever a song, their spirit or spirits move them. During a pause—
“He plays as good as he treats women!” A pianist, taking a break in the audience, quipped about one of the people who had just performed.
I was the only one who laughed at his joke, so we chatted about the neuesletter for a few minutes before I recommenced notebook-scratching in the dimly lit room.
He asked me to specify that he’s a pianist if this made the neuesletter. I’m not sure how he treats women, but he certainly was willing to subscribe to this woman’s publication.