8:32 p.m. 31 March 2002
I've somehow managed to lose my driver's license, so tomorrow morning I head out to the DMV (illegally, since I will, of course, be driving without a license) to get a new one.
Oddly enough, I'm kind of excited. I like id cards a lot. Well, just IDs in general. I really like my passport too. I'm not exactly sure what it is about them. Maybe it's the way they condense an entire person so neatly into a plastic square. Into a set of facts and a picture and some numbers that have no meaning outside the system of codes and signifiers.
I remember, when I was little, I used to have three or four cards my parents had given me that I would carry around. One was an old driver's license of my father's, his hair a perfect 70s Jew-Afro, Burt Reynolds mustache and a half-dazed smile. Another was one of my mother's expired licenses, showing her long, straight dark hair contrasting against a background of official mint-pea green, her smile showing the gap between her two front teeth. The front of that card was scratched and dull with use, and the plastic was thicker and shinier than what they use today.
I remember holding that card and what it felt like in my hand. A little square signifying Mama. An official her.
The rest of the cards were membership cards to things like the Baskin-Robbins Free Ice Cream club and a gym my mother had gone to before I was born. I called them "my credit cards." Of course, I didn't know what a credit card meant. What I knew was that they were important. They were official. They meant a presence in the adult world. In real things like desks and offices and mint-pea-green backgrounds.
I put them in my purses (even then, I was a bag fiend. I had a whole box full of purses) and my boxes (and a basket full of boxes), salvaged from band-aids and oatmeal and valentine's day candy. I rattled them around and held them in my hand and showed them to people when I wanted to make a gesture. When I wanted to be official. I kept them with me and they were my anchor to something. They were important. They made me important.
Still, though, I don't know why I loved them then, or why I still like them now. Certainly, I don't believe they signify me exactly. I'm the one who's always thinking that nothing is complex enough to describe a person.
It could be your life's work, noting little tiny detail after little tiny detail, compiling a dossier about every observable and inferable trait of a person you could possibly get, noting down everything about her, everything she did. Recording tapes and tapes of her conversations, saving all the papers she threw away, intercepting all the letters she sent and carefully peeling off the stamps, and you'd still never have her. You could fill all the rooms in the world with information, and yet know nothing about what she will do next or why she thought about her grandmother this evening while sitting at dinner, or even that she did.
Maybe, then, it's the fact that an ID card doesn't try. It's not you, it's not even a representation of you. It's an identification of you. It says nothing about you whatsoever. It is, instead, used for the purposes of placing you within a system. What it says something about is these things: the date of your birth. Your state of residency. Your country. Your height, relative to others. Your eye color. Whether you wear glasses. Whether there's anyone to pay for it if you get sick. And how much they will, if they do. It's a placement within society. Nothing more, and it tries to be nothing more. It is an illusion of you.
In some way, I suppose, every driver's license is a fake ID. And I, fascinated with disguise and mystery, love that. I am never myself. I am a number. I am a sequence. I am everything.
I've somehow managed to lose my driver's license, so tomorrow morning I head out to the DMV (illegally, since I will, of course, be driving without a license) to get a new one.
Oddly enough, I'm kind of excited. I like id cards a lot. Well, just IDs in general. I really like my passport too. I'm not exactly sure what it is about them. Maybe it's the way they condense an entire person so neatly into a plastic square. Into a set of facts and a picture and some numbers that have no meaning outside the system of codes and signifiers.
I remember, when I was little, I used to have three or four cards my parents had given me that I would carry around. One was an old driver's license of my father's, his hair a perfect 70s Jew-Afro, Burt Reynolds mustache and a half-dazed smile. Another was one of my mother's expired licenses, showing her long, straight dark hair contrasting against a background of official mint-pea green, her smile showing the gap between her two front teeth. The front of that card was scratched and dull with use, and the plastic was thicker and shinier than what they use today.
I remember holding that card and what it felt like in my hand. A little square signifying Mama. An official her.
The rest of the cards were membership cards to things like the Baskin-Robbins Free Ice Cream club and a gym my mother had gone to before I was born. I called them "my credit cards." Of course, I didn't know what a credit card meant. What I knew was that they were important. They were official. They meant a presence in the adult world. In real things like desks and offices and mint-pea-green backgrounds.
I put them in my purses (even then, I was a bag fiend. I had a whole box full of purses) and my boxes (and a basket full of boxes), salvaged from band-aids and oatmeal and valentine's day candy. I rattled them around and held them in my hand and showed them to people when I wanted to make a gesture. When I wanted to be official. I kept them with me and they were my anchor to something. They were important. They made me important.
Still, though, I don't know why I loved them then, or why I still like them now. Certainly, I don't believe they signify me exactly. I'm the one who's always thinking that nothing is complex enough to describe a person.
It could be your life's work, noting little tiny detail after little tiny detail, compiling a dossier about every observable and inferable trait of a person you could possibly get, noting down everything about her, everything she did. Recording tapes and tapes of her conversations, saving all the papers she threw away, intercepting all the letters she sent and carefully peeling off the stamps, and you'd still never have her. You could fill all the rooms in the world with information, and yet know nothing about what she will do next or why she thought about her grandmother this evening while sitting at dinner, or even that she did.
Maybe, then, it's the fact that an ID card doesn't try. It's not you, it's not even a representation of you. It's an identification of you. It says nothing about you whatsoever. It is, instead, used for the purposes of placing you within a system. What it says something about is these things: the date of your birth. Your state of residency. Your country. Your height, relative to others. Your eye color. Whether you wear glasses. Whether there's anyone to pay for it if you get sick. And how much they will, if they do. It's a placement within society. Nothing more, and it tries to be nothing more. It is an illusion of you.
In some way, I suppose, every driver's license is a fake ID. And I, fascinated with disguise and mystery, love that. I am never myself. I am a number. I am a sequence. I am everything.
Labels: ghosts, identity, memories, quotidian, spirit of the age
0 Responses to “123-45-6789”
Post a Comment