{bazima.com}

Welcome to the second installment 7 Minutes in Heaven with Bazima, a series that encourages discovery between people -- beautiful people -- through seven random questions often inspired by the importance of community building, networking, free promotion, self-interest, ass-kissing, invitations to more parties, and a vodka-cranberry with a lime twist.

Brooklynite Michael Barrish is awesome. He is serious when he says that his web site is a web site and not a blog. When you read oblivio.com you get why. His writing, which has appeared in The Morning News and Manual, has inspired many, including me. Last summer, I convinced him to buy his first pair of dark denim jeans, which I believe he has yet to take off. He loves good gossip, Ingmar Bergman, Modest Mouse, and orgasms, but certainly not in that order. When I told him I was having all 4 of my wisdom teeth violently ripped out of my mouth this very afternoon (hello, I'm sailing the good ship Vicodin right now) he said, "Wisdom is overrated. Please take a photo of your chipmunk face." Michael's mantra is motherfucker, motherfucker, motherfucker.

Blaise K: Hi Michael. How was your Thanksgiving?
Michael Barrish: I didn't really realize it was Thanksgiving until it was over. I mean, I knew it was Thanksgiving early in the day, because I took my girlfriend to Penn Station and we saw part of the Thanksgiving parade, but then I basically forgot it was Thanksgiving until the next day and I realized in retrospect that no one had emailed me or called me for the last twenty-four hours because it had been Thanksgiving.

Everything that anyone needs to know about me is contained in this anecdote.

Blaise K: Now, I've been told that it took you a bazillion months to come up with the perfect name for your site, which is oblivio. What were some of the other names you were considering?

Michael Barrish: variouslies.com. That's the only one I remember. I was living in Cambridge at the time and was going to the library every day after work to try to find a name. I did this for weeks. I would go through phases in which I'd try different methods to come up with a name. I found oblivio during my "foreign dictionary" phase. When I got home, I checked if it was available-and it was! But then I waited a few days before buying it, during which time someone else grabbed it. I had to pay the guy $500 for it, and that was best $500 I ever spent.

BK: You are both host and reader at the Oblivio Series at the Bowery Poetry Club, but you hate hosting and you hate shmoozing. So, like, how does that work?
MB: I don't mind MC'ing. MC'ing is okay. I think if I made it a practice to get really drunk beforehand, I'd be a pretty good MC-not great but pretty good. Hosting is different. Hosting means having two-minute conversations with everyone who shows up. I'm bad at this, and it makes me crazy. But anyway, how it works is, I think about it on the train and tell myself to try to stay calm and centered and be present and not get distracted by other people while I'm talking with someone. This helps for maybe fifteen minutes and then I feel crazy. I'm hoping that next time it will help for twenty minutes, and so on. I remember reading somewhere that this is how you train yourself to control your orgasm when you're a premature ejaculator-five minutes one time, six minutes the next. I figure I have to build up to maybe forty-five minutes of shmoozing tolerance. Oh, the other thing I do-and again this is related to premature ejaculation-is that I tell friends how crazy it makes me to do this. I mean, while it's happening. Somehow this helps me not get so crazy so fast.

BK: You write a lot about relationships. Now, I hear through the grapevine that you and your girlfriend are at the "making out in stairwells" stage of your relationship. I love that part. What are some of the other classic universal stages of relationships?

MB: Well, what comes to mind immediately is "not saying 'I love you' because it's too soon to say it." This stage and "making out in the stairwells" both come in the beginning, as does "supposedly taking things slow." It gets complicated because "supposedly taking things slow" often overlaps, at least in part, with "not saying 'I love you' because it's too soon to say it." Then there's "holding hands under the table" and "inventing new ways to have sex," which are also early stages. Right now I'm fixated on the early stages.

BK: List your job history in 60 seconds.
MB: 60 seconds in reading time or writing time? I'm going to assume the former because I can't write this in 60 seconds.

Paper boy, bingo caller, line cook, waiter, professional blackjack player, street vendor, personal care attendant, bar back, bartender, film projectionist, restaurant manager, food co-op worker, food co-op manager, bed and breakfast manager, scholarship director, program manager, web developer.

To save time, I skipped all the temp jobs.

BK: What was the last great movie you saw?
MB: Not to be too obvious, but Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I've since seen Bergman's Persona, but I don't think that counts because it wasn't the first time I'd seen it.

BK: The year, for better or for worse, is swiftly coming to a close. What will you remember most about 2004?
MB: Thanksgiving.

Also, the first time I kissed my girlfriend. I was thinking a lot about baseball then, because it had just been the World Series. One of ideas I got from baseball was this notion of a "quality at-bat." In baseball, even the best hitters fail to get a hit about two-thirds of the time, which can't be easy to deal with psychologically. So there's this notion of a "quality at-bat," which means that you go up and swing at the right pitches, and what happens, happens. It's kind of like a moral victory, but it's more than that. If you keep having quality at-bats, if you keep swinging at the right pitches, you're going to get hits. Maybe not this time and maybe not the next time, but over time.

Anyway, I was doing Nerve[.com] then, and having a lot of dates, and just trying to have quality at-bats. I was really thinking in these terms. A related concept is "hitting the ball where it's pitched." The idea here is to not try to hit a home run when the ball is pitched outside, which is nearly impossible to do, but to just try to hit it to right field for a single. Nothing spectacular. Derek Jeter is a master at this, which is what makes him such a good hitter.

So I was at the end of my first date with you-know-who, and we were standing outside her building, and I was just trying to have a quality at-bat and hit the ball where it was pitched. We were talking about god knows what, and I looked at her, and it was as though the ball was coming right over the plate, real slow-so slow I could see the way the seams were rotating.

This is what I'd like to remember from 2004-the way that pitched looked as it approached the plate.

Michael Barrish says it was fun answering these questions, but he may have just been saying that because his birthday is on December 7th and he wants a good present. To learn more about the ever-lovable Michael Barrish be my paypal, or visit oblivio.com. For some stellar, standards-compliant web work check out Blue Archer Media.