The Blog of Wistar Watts Murray

They say that the sweetest sound in the English language is one’s own name. I heard a lot of it today. “Wistar, you have no blood vessels in your left leg.” “Wistar, can you eat some fruit cocktail, or do you think you might throw it up?” “Wistar, we’re just going to stick this needle in your vein for a hot second.” I am my grandmother’s namesake. I was there with Wistar, sitting beside the orthopedic hospital bed, editing an erotica novel on my laptop while Big Wis watched the first few episodes of Desperate Housewives, and we both started to get confused. “Hey Wis,” said my other, visiting grandparents, “Would you like to come to dinner with us?” “No,” said Big Wis, thinking they were inviting her, demobilized with infection on her fluffy pillows. “I don’t have anything to wear. I think I will just dine here tonight. I ordered mashed potatoes.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her that it was me who had been invited [that seems like bad grammar - me versus I - someone help me], that no one was dreaming of taking her out to dinner, that she was obviously bedridden while I was mobile and restaurant-able. The other Wistar. The young, healthy Wistar, who can hoist the 90-pound grandma onto the commode, who can eat a cheeseburger in 30 seconds, who can tune out the TV during Law & Order. As opposed to the elderly, southernly Wistar, who can catch a fever and be suspicious of Mexicans. Who can refuse to be hungry for dinner. Who can reject the circulation in her leg. One nurse came into the room and said, “My father-in-law is named Wistar. I’ve never in my life met another Wistar and here are two in one room.” “Terrific,” I said, “Make the other one get better.”

I know someone who went to Helsinki and spent $10 on an Us Weekly with this headline. Ten dollars seems extreme, but I can’t really deny that after a few days in Finland I might feel an expensive need to read about Britney Spears. Traveling outside of my comfort zone, where I know exactly who and what I’m contending with, I might feel so swallowed up by the sheer number of other, anonymous lives being led that I need celebrity reassurance. Reading about Britney might assuage my feelings of being no one in the world. She is a lighthouse around which we can all gather. “Come home to me,” she says. “Drink soda out of my baby bottle. Take shelter from the storm.” It comforts me that for a moment, one human can be the epicenter of the universe, even though she’s depicted as a bipolar cartoon from Louisiana. “You will not be anonymous for long,” she says. “Some people can break through the Earth’s crust. My genes are famous. My children have fan clubs. This magazine says I’m immortal. Do you want to bump uglies?”

We got back from our trip at 4AM. I drove the whole way from Brooklyn, fueled by dessicated chicken fingers, Diet Coke, chocolate chip cookies, and Necco wafers. The train ride from Montreal to Penn Station was beautiful - we saw the ruins of a Spanish castle on a Spanish castle-sized island in the Hudson River. We saw a drunk man stealing the seats of other passengers and then pretending not to speak English. We saw Poughkeepsie. We saw white sailboats moored beside motley trash barges.

After spending a few days in two big cities, I started having olfactory hallucinations. I smelled shit and feet everywhere. I started smelling it on me. I started smelling it inside my nose itself, trapped there like dust. Maybe I am a snob. Maybe I am a small-town girl. In the subway station we saw a man with his pants down sitting beside a garbage bag, and I thought he might be dead. Then a police officer put on black gloves before poking him with a stick, and the dead man started gathering his things. I am in a bad mood. Yesterday my mom told me that my grandmother has been in the hospital all weekend. She has a wound on her leg that won’t heal and on the train home I imagined I could smell it. Human infections have odors when the bandages come off. I saw her today and she is all right. She is propped up in bed drinking Boost and watching the US Open. Then my other grandmother came to the hospital for a visit. Both my grandmothers have their injured left legs wrapped up tight and they now share a doctor, who calls them the Profore Twins. We all sat in the hospital room and talked about the wonders of Montreal while they elevated their feet per the doctor’s orders. I have a friend who is convinced he smells like shit, even though no one else can smell it. He has been having this hallucination for a year. It gets so bad sometimes that he doesn’t want to leave the house. Recently I read a Martin Amis book that contained a character with the same problem. It turned out he was schizophrenic. Now that I am home, I don’t smell anything anymore. It is like a desert here. Now that the sickness I imagined is nearby, down the street instead of hundreds of miles away, the putrid odors have gone the way of the ghost.

My stomach is empty again. We might have people over for Labor Day hamburgers.

I am rambling and depressive. This is so you realize you didn’t miss me after all.

On my to-do list: sneak Dewar’s and dark chocolate into Martha Jefferson Hospital.

If I had known in advance that I was going swimming at the city pool this afternoon, I probably would not have had six beers last night and a cheese omelette/home fries/English muffin/french toast/Gobstoppers for breakfast. But if I had known that someone was going to take a crap in the city pool today, I probably would not have gone swimming. Darren and I discussed who might have taken the crap in the Washington Park pool. There must have been a hundred witnesses, all of whom had to evacuate the area promptly after the incident. Who took the crap? Was it a kid old enough to feel ashamed at being responsible for closing down the pool? Was it an oblivious toddler or baby whose parents had to suffer the wrath of all the other swimmers for not putting their kid in a swim diaper? The timing of the accident could not have been worse. There is a drought going on so it’s not like the city can just empty, sanitize, and refill the crappy pool. We’re all supposed to be conserving water. Summer is basically over now. At the Meade Park pool the lifeguards won’t even let you go off the diving board because the splashing depletes the water supply. You are only allowed to dive for ten minutes per hour, and the fat kids and I just had to make the best of it.

This morning Darren drove me down Locust Avenue to retrieve my car, abandoned the night before so we could carpool to Superbad. As I drove home, I realized how sleepy Charlottesville is. Downtown, I was the only person waiting at the stoplight in front of an empty Lucky Seven convenience store. The former gas station/five star restaurant Fuel had For Lease signs in front of it. The few cars I passed on the road dawdled along at 20 miles per hour, the dulcet tones of NPR emanating softly through their windows. Only the sidewalks were minutely populated with lesbians out walking their babies and cute kids out walking their back-to-school puppies. And I wondered if this soporific Saturday morning could be attributed to the arrest this week of Charlottesville’s serial rapist, a man who has terrorized women in the area since 1997. The alleged rapist was described by his neighbors as a kind family man with a wife and four children. He held two jobs - one delivering newspapers for The Daily Progress and one working in the meat department of the Harris Teeter grocery store. [On a side note, my older brother once described this UVA-coed-frequented grocery store as a “great place to meet chicks.”] But now, due to DNA evidence, the rape threat has been neutralized and the women of Charlottesville can unlock their doors again.

I don’t want to give too much away, but in Superbad Seth Rogen plays a cop and he explains to the victim of a liquor store robbery that there’s no chance of them catching the perp because he didn’t ejaculate on the crime scene, leaving DNA evidence. So smooth move, serial rapist. You are a stupid jerk. Now I will go brunch complacently on organic omelettes and fresh fruit from Whole Foods while reading the New York Times on my sunny, rape-free back porch.

This morning I was thinking about the earthquake in Peru and the victims of the latest bombings in Iraq, but how do you commemorate tragedy in a blog? People read blogs like this to escape, to be whisked off into someone else’s solipsistic universe. I actually thought of having “a moment of blog silence,” but then my eyes rolled out of my head.

I am cribbing another link from Gawker. Every once in a while, the folks at Gawker stop being snarky and show some genuine, un-ironic human emotion. Today they led me to this article about couples therapy (and marriage in general), because somehow this unaffected comment on the website slipped through the cracks: “Did you read that article in the Times magazine about couples therapy? Poignant, right? I cried at the end. And I had to wonder: is the dream of finding lasting love hopeless?” Reading the article, I got teary too. Perhaps because I was eager to sympathize with the Gawker staff. Perhaps because my own ideas about marriage are still somewhat nebulous. Perhaps because I want to have evidential trust in concepts that probably just come down to faith and work. I wanted to believe that science could heal any marriage, but love transcends science in a really frustrating way. A while ago the Times also did this little piece about “Questions Couples Should Ask (Or Wish They Had) Before Marrying.” And CNN linked to this similar one from Oprah. Journalists (unhappily married?) are obviously trying to heal our nation’s unhappy marriages. Will they be successful? Will that one hipster couple in Williamsburg decide to keep their relationship “open” and not legally binding because of some great article they read in the Times over Sunday brunch? Probably not. People will still get hitched. Sometimes it will work out; sometimes it won’t. Hopefully they can talk about why it’s not working out over a Bloody Mary and some home fries, and not let it fester for too long. Does all this chronicled unhappiness and emotional anguish make the people reading the news online not want to get married to their sweethearts? I doubt it, because the Times (I am sick of italicizing you!) also maintains this section of their daily paper, just begging us naive couples of the world to drop tens of thousands of dollars on string quartets and jumbo shrimp.

POLICE SKETCH ARTIST

Can you tell me what the perp looked like?

He was tall, I guess. He smelled like grapefruit. He was wearing shoes. It all happened so fast.

Can you tell me if the perp had blue or brown eyes?

He had hairy arms. Citrussy. Wearing pants, I think.

Did he have any facial hair? A beard or a goatee?

I don’t remember. He was wearing sunglasses. Or maybe regular glasses. Or possibly contacts.

Does this look like him?

No.

Last night I had a nightmare that I couldn’t finish my shopping at a Super Wal-Mart. Every time I thought I could check out, I thought of something I needed at the other side of the store. Then a bunch of assholes were in front of me in line. Then I needed a special kind of milk. Then I saw some broccoli on sale. It took me hours to get out of there. The climactic part of the dream, the part that woke me up in a cold sweat, was when I realized the day after the shopping trip that I had left all my groceries in the hot car.