I like looking at pictures of Gwen Stefani. I do not need to know any more about Gwen Stefani than that she looks really good in red lipstick. Looking at pictures of Gwen Stefani in red lipstick with pale skin and pale hair and a white tank top and a baby on her hip provides as much information as I feel I need about Gwen Stefani in order to imagine Gwen Stefani in the way that I want to imagine her. Very occasionally, I like listening to Gwen Stefani, but listening to Gwen Stefani does not affect the way I look at Gwen Stefani and what I get out of looking at Gwen Stefani. When I look at Gwen Stefani in her red lipstick I think maybe I should try red lipstick one more time, just to be sure, though really I know the truth, and my red-lipstick desires are almost fully satisfied by looking at pictures of Gwen Stefani. All that said, had Gwen Stefani never come into my line of sight, the likelihood is high that I would not feel that anything was missing.
I like looking at photographs of New York City in the 1960s and ’70s to see if they remind me of something I forgot. I like looking at old advertisements. I like looking at B movies on Spanish language channels. I like looking at some of your pictures on Facebook, even when I don’t know you. I like looking at your bookshelves. I like looking at everything in hardware stores and stationery stores. I like looking at my grandmother’s sewing machines when I go out to the garage; they look like snazzy old cars, though they each weigh about forty pounds, I don’t know if they work, and I only ever look at them when I’m looking for something else. I like looking at tall shoes that cost a thousand dollars. I like looking at two men kissing. I like the slightly electronic thwacking sounds of the automated postal machine, which I suspect could have been made to be silent but were made to have this sound so that the user might feel a sense of accomplishment, a certainty of delivery, and which could have been any sound, a bell, or a chime, but which was decided, finally to be a thwack. I like the sound of Car Talk in the background on Saturday mornings more than I have a regular need for the content of the program. I like seeing old maps on your wall. I like seeing old black men wearing hats so much. I like seeing bodegas, though I rarely go in. I like looking at sculptures by Jeff Koons. I like looking at street art, sometimes, like when they cover lampposts and things with sweaters. I like looking at craft websites. I like to look at my craft supplies. I like to look at your craft supplies and see how they’re organized so much more interestingly and efficiently than my craft supplies. I like to look at numbers. I like looking at the same old brownstones again and again and again. I like looking at old warehouses with broken windows surrounded by vacant lots filled with weeds and rabbits. I like looking at Girls Gone Wild commercials in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep, the ones on network TV with the body parts blurred out. I like looking at videos of awkward twelve-year-old boys lip-syncing and dogs and puppies and cats and kittens and anteaters and anteater babies and unlikely animal friends.
Some of these things I would like in my house, some not, although mostly that’s beside the point. At first I thought I should simply say I look at these things, instead of I like to look at these things, but because I look at them for as long as I do, or as often as I do, I have decided that I must like looking at them, otherwise why wouldn’t I look away? I dislike looking at as many things or more, women in dresses with only one sleeve, new subdivisions with no trees, anything I’m told is intended to be “shocking,” grisly things in movies, the trash that blew onto your lawn, and the big gray sky. I dislike the word ugly, the sound, the meaning, the implication, though it is occasionally useful in instances of describing a blackness of heart. There may or may not be rhyme or reason to any of it. Sometimes I try to wish these things away that I do not like and there they still are.