Ornithological Nomenclature

“This is such an exhausting day,” I said to Missy, “But if you could give me your microphone now, it’ll make things a lot easier on all of us.”
“Here you go,” she said, putting it on the table where I still sat with her and Jeanne. “I planned to meet Jeanne to do this. She told me she was meeting you and I just said I’d go too.”
“Don’t you worry that I wanted to see each of you alone? Like when this started?” I asked.
“I didn’t take that into account,” Missy said. “You gave it to me in front of everyone else, why couldn’t you take it back in front of everyone else?”
“Well like, I interviewed Rory and Ireena this morning. Spencer I didn’t need to. I didn’t get Charles’s back even though I saw him. I think he’s trying to hoard it, but it won’t happen. Jeanne had questions I needed to answer.”
“Oh what did you ask him?” Missy asked Jeanne.
“Libel,” Jeanne said.
“I will change your names if you want! No one has to know it’s you!” I emphasized, “Even if someone you know reads it, and you think they’ll recognize you, I guarantee, you will be enshrouded by fiction, you will be an eternal fictional character, but your influence will have been the catalyst—this could not have been done without your help.”
“So when do we get paid?” Missy said, looking at me mock-seriously.
“Hahahaha, hahaha,” I laughed nervously, “Ah, I hadn’t really thought about that. You know, your payment is to have the book in the end. Fame is your payment.”
“Some of the things I did last week,” Jeanne began, “I’m not proud of everything I did. I can’t say it wasn’t exciting, but I mean, these are not things I want to live with when the rest of the world knows about it.”
“Jeanne, wait until it’s finished, and you can check it, and if you’re unhappy with your character, you can opt out, and I’ll completely change everything for you. You won’t be in it anymore.”
“But what happens to me then?” Missy worried, “If she’s gone, what happens to the scenes when it’s just the two of us? Am I just going to talk to myself?”
“Well, you’ll have the scenes with Spencer.”
“Am I just going to be at that party alone? God, I’m going to look like such a dork if you mess this up Jeanne!” Missy worried.
“Everything’s going to be fine. You have nothing to worry about,” I assured them. “You have nothing to be embarrassed about. If anybody needs to be embarrassed here, it’s me, because I’m, as Jeanne so kindly put it, a ‘perverted voyeur.’ And as Jeanne also kindly said, no one would want to read this thing anyways. I’m the one that stands to be knocked down and criticized and called a charlatan and to be inferred against that I’m nowhere near as big a sophisticate as them even though I’m the one doing the goddamn work and they’re the ones responding to the shit that comes from me, only me, so yeah, it’s personal. You’re safe though. You’re cool. Me though, I’m not. I’ve been a loser all my life—why would the critical establishment give me any more of a break than the rest of the people of the world have?” Jeanne smiled at me and I started to get excited that maybe she wanted to cheat on Marcus with me, but I told them I had to go home. My head had started hurting shortly after Missy sat down.
I heaved a sigh of relief after leaving the Starbucks, and I began walking back to my car. It took another twenty minutes to walk there. It was 3:00 when I got back into it—my Honda Civic Hybrid. I had to drive back to Lincoln Square, which was about a fifteen minute drive in the current traffic. I put on the new Interpol album and I screamed along to the second song, which seemed to perfectly capture my mood:
“Baby, it’s time we gave something new a try, although we may fight, so let us be three tonight,” Paul Banks sang.
I am so happy singing along to Interpol for two reasons. #1 is that I can perfectly match Paul Banks’s voice, and #2 is that Paul Banks and I went to the same school. We even did the same Study Abroad program in Paris, and therefore, we feel the same way about practically everything. For all intents and purposes, he is my indie rock double, and hopefully one day he will realize this and ask me to open up for Interpol, even though they’d open up for like, fucking Radiohead or something.
When I got back to my Lincoln Square condo, I threw my messenger bag on the floor next to the couch and collapsed. I put the back of my right hand against my forehead. I tried to take several deep breaths. I was alone. I had 168 hours of audio from five different people—Rory, Ireena, Spencer, Jeanne, and Missy. I still had to collect the other “168’s” from five other people—Luther, Penelope, Ted, Charles, and Marcus. I was halfway through my final task. It wasn’t so bad. I took out the discs, and they were already labeled by the name of each person who had recorded it.
I did begin to freak out though. The task ahead, the transcription, the re-imagining of events as they took place, the descriptions that would need to be concocted, the fear that my subjects would “look bad” and realize this and ask to be removed from said project. It wouldn’t work. There were too many different people, and they weren’t interesting enough. I really fucked up in one regard—diversity. All these middle-upper class, quasi-Christian-by-birth-turned-agnostic, attractive, appealing, obscurantist, drug-influenced, pseudo-intellectual, clueless, dead-end-job takers, hedonists, wannabe artists, deliverers of one-line inanities to deflect attention from the fact that they don’t know a goddamn thing they’re talking about. Who would want to read about such a group of losers? Jeanne was right. People wanted the fantastic, not the mundane.
Still, I convinced myself that what I was doing was important, that when everything was said and done, this would be a remarkable document which detailed the attitudes of young people in the post-war-on-terror-world. There had been documents of previous subcultures—bohemians, beats, hippies, yuppies, Gen X-ers—and people had been totally content to couch these portraits in stereotype. Of course, my document concerns the 21st century post-urbane hipster—the urbanite who is seemingly above what they are. They convince themselves they’ve reached the absolute top of the social ladder, and they can jive with anything because of their deeply studied tastes. They are tastemakers. They are also sheep. But they are very cool sheep. This personality type does contain elements of the previous “countercultural” types, but it is significant because it is certainly an element of now and not then, which tells us nothing new about ourselves, but rather points forward to the next countercultural movement. We are near the end—I can’t even imagine any more chaos happening. Soon we’ll be in lockdown mode, and the possibility of rebellion will no longer exist. There will be nothing left to fight against, and the only rebellion will be the rebellion against death.
I went into my bedroom. It was 3:30. I needed to take a nap. I set my alarm for 5:30, covered myself in my comforter, and thought about how this was all going to look when it was said and done. I imagined giving an interview, which would thereby allow me to justify my vision.
At 5:30 my alarm started beeping and I got out of bed to check my e-mail. I had to get going to the coffee shop to see Penelope and Ted soon, and then to the Hungry Brain after. There was only one e-mail in my inbox and its subject read only “Hey,”

You were right. I was talking so loud to try to get your attention. You were cute too, and as long as nobody hears about this, I’d love to get to know you better too.
-Liz

Okay, so after reading that, I really started freaking out—excitedly. I thought about maybe getting laid that very night. I wrote her a quick reply and told her if she wanted to meet up, the Hungry Brain was the place to do it tonight. I went into the bathroom to take a shower. There wasn’t anything else to do except to get to Uncommon Grounds.