Author Archives: Joel Derfner

After teaching a class last night I went to join E.S. at the winter party thrown for the psychiatric residents at his hospital. When I got there, he was roaring drunk, a state in which I have seen him precisely once before. Ordinarily a very laid-back, jolly fellow, he was now so filled with bliss and contentment that I almost punched him in the nose. I did push him slightly with my finger to see if he would fall over; he managed, disappointingly, to remain upright, although it did require some effort on his part. We stayed at the party a little longer and then went back to his apartment.

On the way we started talking about the party we wanted to plan for when we move into our new house. I proposed one idea; he proposed an alternate idea. Then we had the following conversation:

E.S.: So what do you think?
FAUSTUS: I like my idea better.
E.S.: Why?
FAUSTUS: Because your idea is bad and mine is good.
E.S.: You know, it’s funny. I’m very intoxicated, but I can still tell you’re wrong.
(Pause.)
FAUSTUS: You can never drink again.
E.S.: Why is everything so blurry?

When we got back to his place he wanted to stay up all night and talk but was, thank God, too drunk to do so. We fell asleep in short order and he woke up this morning in terrible agony, for which I gave him almost no sympathy.

Of course, the one time he has seen me drunk, I slammed my hand down next to my plate and slurred, “I’m smarter than everyone at this table put together!”, so I’m really in no position to throw stones.

When I was in tenth grade I did a project in geometry class about geometric string art. Like my Latin project a few years earlier, the geometry project inspired me to new creative heights. It featured a character named Wally the Math Nerd, who had a crush on another character named Hester Hexagon. He saw Hester across a swimming pool and started walking towards her, but she saw him and started walking away from him, and if you drew lines in between the points at which they found themselves at any given moment, you’d end up with some sort of curve the name of which I’m sure I knew then but have long since forgotten. I presented the project in character as Wally, with my hair slicked back, my pants hiked up above my waist, my eyes squinched together behind my glasses, and my voice as nasal as I could make it. I demonstrated the phenomenon not only with a piece of poster board with string sewn onto it (labeled “W” and “H” at the appropriate points) but also with a computer program I wrote myself, in BASIC. I got an A+ and had no friends.

Today I am 33 years old.

Thanks, everybody, for your birthday wishes.

In honor of the occasion, here is a poem, by someone named Dan Skwire.

We’re grateful that you called today
And sorry that we’re occupied.
We will be with you right away.

Press one if you would like to stay,
Press two if you cannot decide.
We’re grateful that you called today.

Press three to end this brief delay,
Press four if you believe we’ve lied.
We will be with you right away.

Press five to hear some music play,
Press six to speak with someone snide.
We’re grateful that you called today.

Press seven if your hair’s turned gray,
Press eight if you’ve already died.
We will be with you right away.

Press nine to hear recordings say
That service is our greatest pride.
We’re grateful that you called today.
We will be with you right away.

My thesis advisor from college, author of this poem, just sent me his favorite cartoon:

It’s a good thing he’s straight; otherwise I would have to leave E.S. for him.

Also, I turn 33 on Thursday.

So when I woke up from the dream (see my two most recent posts if you don’t know what I’m talking about), I instantly realized that the thing to do to give my life meaning would be to knit a brain.

Out of curiosity, I googled “knitted brain,” not really expecting to find anything.

And what came up was–I am not making this up–the Museum of Scientifically Accurate Fabric Brain Art. O world, I thought, I cannot hold thee close enough!

I emailed the curator at once, asking him for the contact information of the creator of the knitted brain so that I could get the pattern from her.

Within hours I got an email from her, saying that, alas, she hadn’t written a pattern, but she was beginning to wish she had, because I was the second person to ask about this in the past week.

The mind boggles.

I was consumed with both an intense desire to meet the person to whom I had been so synchroniously connected and a deep and abiding hatred of my rival. And then I started wondering, how many more of us are there?

But mostly I just wanted somehow to acquire suddenly a complete understanding of writing knitting patterns, because she sent me more photographs, and this is what the knitted brain looks like (click on the images to see a larger view):

Note the zipper in the corpus callosum above.

Okay, I have been eaten up with guilt ever since I made yesterday’s post.

Because I lied.

I did not in fact name all the parts of the knitted brain correctly.

I got many of them right, but some of them I faked, and I got away with it because nobody else at the table knew any better. In my defense, the dream brain was anatomically different from an actual human brain, so there were structures it would have been impossible for me to name correctly, because they don’t exist in real life.

Though I suppose that, since they did exist in the dream brain, they also had correct names in the dream, and I still didn’t know them.

So basically I’m a total failure.

Last night I dreamed I was Sydney Bristow from Alias and braved multifarious dangers to retrieve a microchip from a crowded amphitheater during an opera intermission, at which point I was suddenly sitting at a table with a group of people who thought I was a moron until I pulled out a knitted model of the human brain and named all its parts correctly, which forced them to revise their opinion of me.

I have no idea what this dream means, but I prefer it to the dreams I had when I was on Zoloft, which were both frightening and intensely boring. Like, I would dream that I got fired from my job and couldn’t get another one. Or that my friends got so mad at me they stopped being my friends.

Eventually I found a different medication, slightly less effective but without that particular side effect. It’s one thing to want to throw yourself in front of the subway train every time you walk into the station. But for your dreams to be stripped of metaphor–now that’s really depressing.

In the theoretical world in which I have a child, when that child’s children’s grandchildren graduate from college, is Stephen King still going to be publishing installments of The Dark Tower?

Two days ago I rented the first two DVDs from season one of Desperate Housewives, a show I had never seen before I pressed “play” on my computer.

And, having finished the first eight episodes, I see now what an empty, meaningless husk my life was without this program in it.

How is it possible that any of us found any fulfillment or real beauty in the world before this show?

And I haven’t even gotten to the pool scene yet.

Please, no spoilers in the comments.

And after all that, the ice cream maker and/or bread maker that E.S. bought me did not arrive in time for the holiday. But neither did my gift for him, so we’ve agreed to postpone the exchange of gifts.

In the meantime, here is the stocking that he bafflingly claims is more than enough of a present for him:

And I’m terribly sorry to inflict this Christmas photo of my dog A. on you, but I really have no choice:

God only knows what she’ll decide to do for New Year’s Eve.