The first time I was scared of dying

The first time I was really scared of dying, I was nine years old.  It happened in one fleeting moment, I felt it in my stomach and it traveled on a breath up into my chest and then crept up into my throat and sat there like a frightened rodent.  It happened at summer camp; it was in my first year as a Boy Scout, and I was as green as the canvas army platform tents that we slept in.  Alot of my time had been spent alone growing up, I walked in the woods alone, crawled under people's porches alone, tried to smoke leaves out of bamboo alone.  This was new.  Summer camp is social, everyone is sharing a similar sentiment of activity, and group activity is touted at these places.  

The first night, my bunkmate and I dug a trench around our tent, a moat really.  We were kings, and we needed to be protected from the inevitable flash flood that would threaten our thrones.  We disregarded the fact that the tents were constructed on platforms for a reason.  At about a foot deep and eight inches wide, this trench was not much to look at, but we recognized it as a modern marvel of engineering.  Besides, no one else in our troop had thought to dig a trench to fend off the muddy waters of a late summer thunderstorm.  That made us visionaries, at the ripe age of nine.

When the trench was done, we sat by the fire with fat marshmallows and pointed sticks carved with dull blades.  Most kids never had the patience to roast the puff, and instead would cram them into their mouths two at a time, like tiny white memory foam pillows.  One of the rich kids in the troop had actually brought a memory foam pillow to camp, which I thought was strange at the time.  He was older, and had a lot of colorful and new-smelling equipment:  a turquoise and black and yellow sleeping bag that he said would keep you warm at absolute zero, a hard plastic lockbox for his personal items, seemingly indestructible with it's black and gray exterior and red clamps to keep it closed.  He also had brought a wet suit, dark green with cobalt blue lines accentuating all of the seams.  It seemed to me that these lines would only highlight his weak spots to a killer shark if he wore the suit in the ocean, striping up his soft side and up under the armpit, following the soft white skin on the inside of his thighs and tracing his majors arteries on opposite points of the neck trunk up behind the ears.  I scoffed at his ignorance, but I couldn't understand why he had brought a wet suit to summer camp.  It took some courage to ask loudly across the quiet fire, especially when addressing one of the older guys in the troop.  I was almost certain he would reply with a dripping remark on how stupid I was to not have realized why he would bring such an obviously essential piece of equipment to summer camp, and I wasn't disappointed.

"Uhh, because of the scuba diving class, duh.  You need to learn how to read you little ewok."

Some of the older guys in the troop had started calling me an ewok, since apparently I resembled one of the small hairy creatures from the Star Wars installment, Return of the Jedi.  I had bleached my hair blond earlier in the summer along with the rest of my baseball team, and it had been growing out for a while, so I guess I looked like an ewok.  I didn't know.  

I asked with caution, "Where do they do the scuba diving class?  The lake?"

"No kid, they do it in the pool cause it's clear and everyone can see how to do it."

"How to do what?  It's just breathing with a tank underwater."  I didn't understand yet in my life that everything was a process.

Mr. Memory Foam laid it out for me at this point, with more than a hint of exasperation in his tone.

"Ah, alright, listen.  If you read the activity book, you'd know this, but the scuba class is kinda like a SWAT team thing.  It's not just about flippering around underwater with a breathing thing.  You throw all of your gear down into the pool, let it sink to the bottom, and then jump in with all of your clothes on." 

"Shoes too!" Someone to my right chimed in.

"Yea, shoes too, and then you swim down to the bottom of the pool, it's like 15 feet or something.  When you get to the bottom, you gotta take all your clothes off, except it's not like getting undressed before bed, everything is really heavy cause you're underwater, and your head hurts real bad cause you're so far down.  All the counselors watch from the side of the pool to make sure you do everything right.  Once you get your clothes off, you have to put the wetsuit on, and then put the tank on yer back, goggles on yer face, and the respirator in your mouth.  Then you gotta turn everything on, make sure it's working right, and blow all of your air out before you take a breath from the tank.  You gotta be able to hold your breath for like, two minutes or something like that.  I saw some kid do it last year, but he was older than me.  If I do it this year, I'll be the youngest to ever do it."  He smiled real big at this last sentence, revealing a little chip in his front top tooth.  

Another kid my age added his two cents, a bit too loud for the late night.

"Yea, I heard from a guy in another troop that," he was so excited that he could barely continue the sentence,"that, that a kid drowned one year trying to do it.  He fainted underwater, and the lifeguards didn't know cause he didn't float to the top cause the air tank was so heavy and also cause he was like 16 and they thought he would be fine doing it."

I thought about this for a second, and looked at the embers socializing in the bottom of the fire.  I was too close to the fire, and my face felt hot, like the little blond hairs on my forehead were melting into my skin.  I didn't mind the heat; I imagined how cold the water was when you had to hold your breath for a really long time, and how the pressure of that cold water pushed the air up and out of your lungs and you floated there helpless until you couldn't do anything but frantically kick towards the surface, thinking that any second your lungs might explode like two hydrogen blimps.  I swam alot during the summer, but most of my experiences holding my breath had been alone in the bathtub.  I would lie on my back, and slide down in the water with my mouth below the water, and my nose above, and then I'd pinch my nose between my index finger and my thumb, just in case I panicked, all I'd have to do was let go, like holding a live hand grenade with sniper rifles trained on my head.  Just let go, and everything will be OK.  

I wondered if anyone else around the fire was scared of drowning, but I couldn't ask.  It was against the law in our troop.  If you ever openly admitted to having fear, you were immediately labeled a pussy, and would no longer be asked to go on late-night missions in the woods, that is if you would have been asked to go on them in the first place.  I didn't want to be a pussy.  I wanted to be the youngest kid to make it through the scuba class.  A giant log fell off of the fire, and all of the sudden, it was much darker, and everyone stopped talking and watched as the log flickered outside of the ring with small red and orange dots of flame, scales like a fat burning snake.  My thoughts of the fame and glory I'd achieve through completing the scuba class floated my body off to my tent, and I mumbled goodnight to everyone around the fire as I wafted away.  

Inside the vaulted tent, curled in my sleeping with my hand clutching my penis, I thought about my mom.  She would be at home right now, probably not thinking about me, probably reading fat book with a dramatic cover and typeface, smoking cigarettes and drinking cheap white wine.  It was my first night away, and the differences fell onto my chest like an anvil.  My eyes adjusted to the dark quickly, and I saw a large, unidentifiable bug hunkering in the top corner of the tattered tent.  I wasn't worried, but I thought, this bug wouldn't be in my room at my house at home where I live.  Dad would have squished it with a paper towel a while ago.  He hates bugs.  I didn't hate bugs.  I just wondered if they acknowledged my own presence, if they wondered why I was there as much as I would wonder why they were there.  I began to drift off into sleep, my hand still between my legs, my brain showing me images of myself with a horribly mismatched front tooth and a ballooned chest.  I jolted myself awake to escape these images.  The giant bug was gone, probably walking around in the woods killing things.  I comforted myself with this idea.  The thought of being stuck underwater without an immediate escape was eating at me, this jumpy feeling of excitement in my stomach; it felt like a small terrier was inside of my stomach, yipping and snapping and bouncing up and down in the air, but it wasn't a happy terrier.  It was slowly ripping out my guts, one tube at a time, until it became an apple core of pain just above my belly button.  If I drowned, would they call my parents?  Or would they take my body and throw me into the lake, or even worse, roll me out into the woods and lay me on the crackle-leaf ground with the giant killer bug that hungrily exited my tent in anticipation of my passing?  I didn't know these things, I was too young, and I knew I was too young to know.  I wasn't scared of much, this I knew for a fact.  If my flashlight conked out in the woods at night, I wasn't scared, my eyes would adjust and I would be OK.  If I was caught in a thunderstorm in a large open field, I wasn't scared of getting hit by lightning, I would just break for the tree line.  If I came across a black bear in the woods, I wouldn't be scared, I would open my backpack and offer him some blackberry jam because I would know how much bears like jam.  The water though, the water was different.  Being in it wasn't bad, but being beneath all of those pounds of pressure, like holding the ocean on your back, that scared me.  The water eventually would enter my body, if I couldn't hold my breath long enough.  It would enter my body through my mouth, and throw my ears and through my nose and even through the spaces around my finger and toe nails.  I would look up through the distortion, and see flat fat people refracted on the edges of the concrete pool, I would see as they decided that I wasn't going to make it, and I would watch them walk away slowly, giving up on me.  I would be trapped, and they would be walking off to the mess hall to eat breakfast for dinner, cardboard french toast with water syrup, stiff sausage logs and eggs that looked like something you might win in a claw grab game at a family fun spot.  I would sit on the bottom of the pool by myself, in all of my clothes until my head caved in from the pressure.  There would be no blood, only water, because the water would have already entered my body.  The water would mix with the other water, and then my body would slowly fade away, and I would become part of the water.  The whole time this would be happening, I would have a white hot pain in the front of my forehead, and my chest would feel like there were a thousand hummingbirds inside, frantically trying to escape, since hummingbirds do not like water, only nectar and flowers.  I would be at the bottom, 15 feet down, all alone except for the hummingbirds, and I would feel sorry for myself, because no one would ever find my body, or tell my mom what happened, or make sure that the trench that I dug was working when that last thunderstorm of the summer came, even though the tents were built on platforms for this reason alone.  This was my first rational fear of dying, at the ripe age of nine.  

this is your life

i just woke up and ate a brownie

also, i drank some milk.

i feel lazy, but i dont want to

i need to do something right now

something that will help me be a more active participant in today

i think maybe a run, or maybe a bike ride

i need a reason to go somewhere

i dont like circles

i dont like squash

i dont like air conditioning

i like (                       )

i also like expensive hand lotion

weather.com told me it was 84 degrees now

and that the high would be 85

talking to other people makes me quieter

i should just go outside and talk to someone

we could comment on the weather, at least

no parking spaces

This was a world with no parking spaces.  People allowed their cars to drift to a halt, as if they had no control over where the cars would come to rest, reminiscent of Hawaiians in a skating rink for the first time.  Meter maids wandered around in utter confusion, asking each other if they could borrow quarters.  The meters themselves gathered dust, until the city mandated that all parking meters be cleaned and polished, so that people would want to start using them again.  No one did.  At some point, a self-righteous group of artists had taken it upon themselves to take color samples of all the asphalt and macadam in the world, and then have paint mixed at a local Home Depot in massive quantities according to the color samples.  This process took quite a while, but eventually, the painting began, and once it was started, a number of unexpected participants joined the paint party.  It's not like there weren't setbacks.  No one thought about cleaning all the streets before painting them, so alot of the paint rollers ended up being covered in pebbles and crushed glass.  Inevitably, a young woman decided to roll some paint onto a young man that she was pining over, and he suffered minor injuries from the glass particles lodged in the paint-soaked roller.  She felt bad about it and bought him ice cream.  They went on a date, and it felt like the game show Jeopardy, so after that, they decided not to speak anymore.  As they were leaving the restaurant, she couldn't remember where she parked her car, since there were vehicles strewn about like a toddler's playroom; fire trucks leaning on yellow construction equipment, tiny foreign classic sports cars with one wheel on the curb and their bumpers protruding out into the turning lanes, motorcycles leaning on their sides as if they had been forgotten.  He gave her a ride home and she tried to kiss him  over the cup holders and her hand slipped and her fist balled into one of the cup holders and she ended up pushing her lips into his collarbone.  He decided that he liked this, and they made another date.  

some old work

Here are some pictures of a room mural I did a while back.  It got painted over and I had just visited the space again recently and thought about this painting, so here are some images.  The images aren't the greatest, I should have taken them when the room was empty but it is what it is.  Enjoy.

poem found on desk

When you see the snakes in the grass

Wait on their ass

Bite your tongue for no one

A closed mouth never gets fed!

The difficulties of Decision-Making, part. 2

The roll of toilet paper fell onto the floor and unfurled itself slightly as it came to a rest underneath the little table next to the shower.  I looked at the roll with mild interest.  I was preoccupied with pooping, also with reading the local independent newspaper.  The article was about sustainable beef; I laughed a little bit when I read the title, and imagined cows consuming massive amounts of corn.  Cows don't need or use toilet paper, they shit on the ground.  The roll sat there on the cool cement floor, just barely in view, looking at me with half of a black eye where the tube was cut off by the ledge of the little table.  There was barely any toilet paper left in the apartment, except for that one runaway roll; would anyone realize that it was there?  Or would they be stuck on an island, no water, no food, and no one to talk to?  I imagined them petitioning the cat for toilet paper as he stuck his paw under the bathroom door, waiting to be fed.  I could just pick the toilet paper roll up, place it on the table in plain view, so there would be no unpleasant pooping experiences at someone else's expense.  What should I have done?  Extend my foresight to another future, offer graciousness in the face of apathy, expend my energy for the benefit of others?  This sounded like some sort of mandatory charity, an act that is almost a requirement mandated by all of society, so that no person should ever have to be stuck on a toilet somewhere without the tools to complete the job.  I felt like Ghandi, or Nelson Mandela, or maybe their bastard rebel child, if they were to somehow have conceived.  Was Ghandi ever faced with such a predicament?  Was it so easy for him to decide, was it mindless, was it obvious?  Why is everything so difficult, how does one be decisive?  The toilet paper didn't care.  He sat there and thought about the bright green bottle of shampoo that was lying on the floor of the bathtub, like some rejected character from that board game where everyone murders everyone else with blunt-force objects.  I suddenly had a revelation; despite my own inner turmoil over this decision, it could never be worse than the decision you are faced with when stuck on the throne without your scroll.  That decision presents a multitude of options, all of them awkward and all of them physically uncomfortable.  Someone else's  towel, an old dried up sponge crusted with Comet, used tissues from the garbage can, a sock, a shower, the journey to another part of the apartment, pants around the ankles and legs stuck together in an ultimate shame that makes others look upon you as if you have hit rock bottom.  This is much worse, I decided, this decision that must be made in a time of extreme crisis.  I thought, for the first time in a while, about how another person might feel in a certain hypothetical situation.  Is this what empathy is?  Or is this a prediction of empathy?  Was I a visionary?  I did not know the answers to any of these questions, but I made the call.  I picked up the roll of tissue, wound it neatly around itself, and sat it on the little table next to the shower, and went back to my article on sustainable beef, hoping that I made the right decision.

Would you do anything for me if I was sick?

"Would you do anything for me if I was sick?"

He received this text message at 5:30 in the morning, from an unknown sender.  The number was unfamiliar, but had a pleasing pattern of digits.  He thought, hm, good, maybe I am important?  He didn't know whether or not to respond to the message.  He turned over in bed, knocked a few books onto the floor, and sighed.  His back cracked solidly.  He was sleepy.  He thought that maybe if he saved people's number with their corresponding names, he wouldn't be so confused.  He thought about sausages.  He thought about someone lying in bed with a bad cough, a beautiful girl, only made more beautiful by her infirm nature.  Her cheeks were pink from a fever, and lips enlarged, naked in the rawness of her flushed skin, not as pink as her cheeks, but a lighter color, and to touch them would have been pure joy, better than sex, better than winning a long foot race, better than diving into a pool of petroleum jelly.  Her hair was dark brown and tousled, bed-headed and busty, like some precarious scaffolding erected on an unleveled surface, her perfect skull.  He imagined her without any hair.  Still beautiful.  There were some light sheets and a white down comforter, accented by hundreds of crumpled tissues.  They looked like failed origami, cranes, sheep, dragons, lizards, all twisted and crushed.  Good.  He imagined her voice vacating her weakened body, and she was writing under the blurb of an old paperback book, telling him what she wanted.  He would do anything.  He knew this.  She finished writing and showed him the book.  He rolled back over in bed, to the upside-down V of his cell phone, glowing blue on the sheets beneath itself, a tent of technology.  He picked it up and hit the reply button, and typed Y-E-S.  Send.  Good.  He drifted back to sleep, and thought of fruit with extremely painful exteriors that were extremely tasty once you got past the spikes and needles.  

With the Flow

I am who I am

So who loves the sun?

It is what it is 

So don't try to run

Go with the flow

Like a rainbow trout

Go where  you'll go

A swirling waterspout

(refrain)

Take a step back

View it with a bird's eye

Look for the tracks

From your position in the sky

Go with the flow

(refrain)

Fall back limp

Don't look down

Go with the current

You surely won't drown

Like a rainbow trout

(refrain)

Tricks of the trade

Stones in the grass

Both are the same

Both break glass

Go where you'll go

(refrain)

Find the warm water

Soak it up like a bath

Now soak in cold water

And you'll have the last laugh

A swirling waterspout

(refrain)

If a penny is a penny

And it's all that you've got

Flip it up head or tails

And call your own shot

Go with the flow 

Like a rainbow trout

Go where you'll go 

A swirling waterspout

The Difficulties of Decision-Making, part. 1

A bus drove past slowly and he decided then to be clearer, more concise in his decision-making.  This was the first step, of course, this fledgling decision.  Fledgling, he thought, like a bird with new wings, good wings that would not be damaged, even in the act of mistaking a reflective storefront window for the infinity that is the sky.  

He thought about how he could take small mental steps, and how these steps would be used to build a mental staircase that would help him to reach new heights of clarity in thought.  One step at a time, he thought.  Now, walk deliberately back to the bus stop and catch the next bus, because your bus just drove away slowly and you were certainly not on that bus and you needed to be on that bus.  This is what he was thinking at that moment, but at the next moment, this goal became somewhat lost in lieu of a new thought: rating the quality of brands of paper towels based on their absorbency, like in the white lab coat commercials on TV.  This thought brought him away from the bus stop bench, and into the grocery store on the lot adjacent to the bus stop.  He thought briefly about how the bus would be seen pulling up from the windows of the grocery store, a brief nod to his previous goal.  He was elaborating, multi-tasking, getting so much done!  Do one thing while waiting for something else to happen, what an idea!  He remembered something about this idea that wasn't sound, a freezer door that wouldn't suction correctly, and all of the thoughts and cold air inside that freezer were escaping.  

The doors of the grocery store parted without being prompted, and like an opium king, he stepped inside, dazed and with a slight sense of self-importance.  Cold air hit his face with surprising force, and he felt his own hair in a very distinct way.  The paper towels were in the front, capping an aisle, on sale, with four different varieties to choose from.  He approached them like E.T. brandishing his index finger as the scientific standard for paper towel absorbency testing.  He used his mighty finger to stretch small holes in the plastic.

One, stretch, rip, rough, diamond patterns, deeply perforated, too deep, the liquid would run into the ravines and escape from the other side.

Two, stretch, rip, too soft, nice colors, but with illustrations of women sewing invisible garments in the rain.  

Three, stretch, rip, poke.  So thick, like a tee-shirt that's been washed for years and is now sitting in the garage soaked in oil and stuck with sawdust. 

Four, stretch, rip, feel, caress, smooth, lackluster, a hybrid of old computer paper and wispy tissues with pointless ridges riding the curved wave of the cylinder.

Out the windows, behind him, the bus pulled up quietly to the stop, opened it's doors, saw no passengers, and pulled away leisurely, leaving him in the cold grocery store, poking paper towels with his index finger.

the bread of jesus

Jesus breathes hip hop, two fingers for blunt to rest in.

Mind blank, solid wood scrabble pieces

No black, fallin on some habit creases

Jesus Christ, the man himself!

Hold the good book up and creep in so stealth

For ya health, it's yummy in ya tummy dummy

And gummy

Words so wet they be dryin out ya mouth

Cotton ball lyrics I been soaking up the south

Workers getting all on my grant

Summer in the shade, oh no I can't

Hummin songs about the future of life to be

Free black men shoutabouta wife for free!

See, Jesus never really did part that sea,

Held his bread about the water, swam casually

Have faith you say, well I say baloney

Tamahto, salami, hey you ain't even know me

So don't front me try to make me a sandwich

Cause Jesus brought the bread and he's making a Manwich

wanting to know, but not understanding the answer

Paint chips fall onto my bed from time to time.  It has become a habit to brush the sheet off with my hand before I lie down.  I wonder, when I do this, with what level of efficiency is the task being completed?  Am I wasting my time?  I worry that in my determination and speed, I am really only causing my hand to push down too hard on the mattress, and then the crumbs of lead paint are either flung back over my rapidly moving hand in the opposite direction, or they are further pulverized into some cancerous dust that ingrains itself in my 200 thread count sheets.  I am especially wary of the latter scenario; I am prone to lying on my stomach when I sleep, and I also don't rest my head on a pillow very often.  I feel as though this is the perfect storm of cancer-related bedroom accidents, and I just hope the amount of lead paint dust that I inhale is small enough to preserve life for a little while longer.  

Carrion Luggage

The man arrives at the airport early, early enough to sit outside the security gates and have an espresso with a croissant.  He pays in change and saves the paper napkin, neatly folding it into fourths and then placing it softly inside his button-down breast pocket for future use.  He has three pieces of luggage, all identical in color and design.  One over the shoulder, a smaller one over the other shoulder, and one squeaking along behind like some small terrier.  He approaches the ticket counter with the big conveyer belt that children and adults always want to climb on, but never can because a man with absurdly high boots and an M-16 would grab you by the scruff of your neck and pluck you from the moving floor beneath you.  

The counter woman eyes the man as he steps forward and clicks her long acrylic nails on the plastic blue countertop.  Clicicictick.  Clickictick.  Click.  She greets him without inflection or emotion, and he takes this as a cue, smoothly sliding his oversized pamphlet of ticket information across the counter.  She wrinkles her nose slightly, and flexes her large nostrils, searching for some fetid odor.  The man shifts his weight uncomfortably and glances over his shoulder, his weak chin brushing against the collar of his shirt.  The moment passes, and the awkward and abrupt sound shift quickly dissolves back into the calculated mayhem of an international airport.  

She still has not spoken to him short of the initial hello, and her hands like wack-a-mole mallets, spanning the keyboard, smooth and brown with deadly precision and raging speed.  Finally, the question arrives, sharper than a new winter hatchet:

"Will you be checking any bags today, sir?"

He slowly shakes his head, no, and digs in his pocket for a phantom vibrating phone.  The woman says nothing, reaches over the counter, curling her wrist and finger together like an organic backhoe, and taps on a plexiglass sign with her oblong index nail.

"Two carry-on items per person.  Additional luggage is subject to fees."

The man sighs out of boredom and partial despair, allowing the woman to loop some identification flair around his wheeled luggage, fluorescent green and orange stickers clashing with the carefully chosen colors of his designer bags.  This flash-typing woman is equally adept at looping luggage, but again, something causes her to pause, some sickly sweet odor wafting from places unknown to tickle miniscule nasal hairs.  Again, the moment passes, and normal speed is resumed.

"Enjoy your flight, sir."

He nods at her and his squeaky wheeled case disappears through the yellow translucent noodle mouth of the baggage belt.

At the security gate, everything smells like feet.  Dr. Scholls come flying out of shoes like small rubber dolphins, flip-flops are flung with surprising accuracy into plastic gray bins, shoe laces are untied and re-tied without reflection of how this skill was perfected in the first place.  A family with two blind parents stands ahead of the man, their young children leading them like shepherds into the desert of the A wing terminal.  Their bottles of expensive spring water are compromised and confiscated, and they stare at an empty space next to the security attendant with anger in their blank eyes as it to say, that four-dollar bottle of water might have held the power to restore my vision.  You have taken it from me.  Thank you.

The man steps slowly forward as his turn comes, neatly places his glinting brown shoes into the stack of gray bins as they embrace each other from below.  Gold wrist watch, phantom cell phone, all go in the bin along with his obscenely thick wallet that could act as a booster seat for a toddler.  He then gently lowers the bags from his shoulders, a married couple of luggage, one the size of a beaver and the other the size of a beaver-shaped basketball.  Somewhere across the cornfields of security lanes, an argument has broken out in at least four different dialects and there is a collective sigh, followed the sound of hundreds of wet rolling eyeballs, people trying to look backwards into their own skulls and understand why their brains aren't working well enough.  They ask themselves why they are bored and cannot find suitable answers.

The man pads quickly and quietly through the metal detector, socks vaguely resembling the blue and gold-diamond pattern on the carpeted terminal floors.  He waits for his bags to arrive on the belt, but no such sushi glides up.  There is a problem, and in just a few short moments, there are six security agents crowded around the small X-ray monitor like it's game 6 of the '86 World Series.  There are hushed tones, a few sharp glances at the man; one of the guards hurries away quickly to the staunch white innards of the security offices, and comes back towing a stern-looking superviser in a blue blazer and a diagonally striped tie.  There is more pointing and looking.  The man stands straight, shoeless and without possessions like a well dressed brahmin.  Finally, blue blazer man makes an executive decision and the bags are advanced from the dark tunnel of transparency.

The locks are cut with some menacing hand tool, and the once-rolling eyes all snap toward the mystery threat, many people hoping to witness some sort of carnage.  Security drones form a ring around the bags, but when they are opened, there is no need for sight.  The putrid and sticky sweet smell of rotting flesh rips through the security gates like a nuclear bomb, waves of people being brought to their knees in growing concentric circles as the stench spreads from the epicenter.  Women vomit into their Gucci purses, grown men faint, teenage girls scream in pitches inaudible to human ears.  The conveyer belts are strewn with people, gagging and hacking as they try to expel the taste of rotting animal from their acid windpipes.  

The shoeless man is handcuffed by uniformed men with tears twinkling in the corners of their eyes.  He is led away by the four blurry-eyed men, past legions of cursing detractors, insults being lobbed like flaming volleyballs in myriad languages.  The shoeless man walks elegantly with his detainers to one of the benches facing the massive windows overlooking the taxiing jumbo jets and luggage trains, weaving like Indy cars on unseen courses.  He is seated facing the action on a vinyl, ochre bench.  He does not move or speak, simply staring out the tinted glass as he is poked and prodded by questioning faces.  

Suddenly, the corners of his mouth turn up slightly, invisible to everyone except the imaginary camera hovering inches from his face.  The reflection of a silver 747 glints off his wet left eye, and glowing reflection appears in his cornea.  He looks on as, off in the far distance, a vulture circles gracefully over a snaking luggage train.

snap shit

the young man cried out fan-fucking-tastic

i said young gun ain't that just a bit drastic

rhymes pinched tight, sweatpants with elastic

girl had dsls i said fuck the comcastic

ringing in my ear old man piece of plastic

old men who stir their drink with glass picks

make me so mad i just wanna smash shit,

class drips, old water smelly like the aztecs,

silly smiles shining saxy like some brass necks

speedy little fingers picking out those fast licks

get over it like vince carter, fuck this rap shit

my house

catatonic cats fight with gin and tonic rats,

spiders in the playroom with supersonic bats,

pretty little flowers are growing up the wall,

scintillating sawblades are lighting up the hall,

prayerbooks in the bathroom soaking up the mess,

dingos in the kitchen thinking that they're blessed

pregnant predators are acting in the attic

wine is in the cellar, acting malolactic

iron on the front stoop waiting for the rain

pillars on the back porch thinking that they're stained

leaves up on the rooftop baking in the sun,

earthworms in earth below searching for a gun.

the woods

a tree is wood, 

trees are the woods,

whales are in the ocean,

birds are in the sky,

workers in the factory,

cars in the garage,

ivy chokes the house,

smoke chokes the chimney,

frogs take lives,

flies take hostages,

men make bridges,

bridges make spaces,

blossoms find bees, 

pollen finds blossoms,

otters slide through rocks,

beavers break big sticks,

women bury babies,

babies bury their toys.

kick it from the head

fecal faced catty in the french fried alley

leftover yogurt from the red ribbon rally

smeared on his face and matted in his fur

tastes good too only forty-five calories

bending over backwards to pick up his feet

spinning on a whirlybird, attacks with the teeth

fire flawed wrecking ball melting all my soda

square root round wok messing with the beat

tiny little ant legs, pounding on the door

momma's on the inside, sitting on the floor,

daddy's in the garden playing with the hose

i'm up in my box room, sweating with my prose

find alotta time, find alotta time, done,

find alotta time, find alotta time, one,

find alotta dimes, find alotta dimes, luck,

find alotta dimes, find alotta dimes, dumb,

ripped up speakers like week old homework,

corrugated rooftops like organic rope jerks,

find a little time and your money's in the bank,

find alotta time and your moneys got perks

freestyle in the shower

cuttin niggaz in half i spit like a bandsaw,

sick like salmonella my shit be so raw,

catchin you from behind please dont go off,

believe this ease, i got that slow drawl,

southern boy pantin and paintin, tether me back

be rantin and ravin n cravin, gimme some slack

slack-jawed cause you just not with it,

eyes open wide like what the fuck is quidditch?

boys in the school yard, not too tall,

dont be long, your mama gone call,

wrong song, wrong time, right ball,

stay on top, keep rollin, dont fall

excessive force

His head was crushed like an egg, thin shell crumbling in your hand as you try to throw it with more force than the egg can withstand.  Clear sticky liquid drips like slow spit from your curled hand and the bulbous yellow yolk quivers like a scared amoeba in the center of your palm, poising to slide off the edge and splatter on the cement floor below.

Bear hugs

I had a friend named John who used to give bear hugs to everyone.  He wasn't even that big, a normal-sized guy who liked to wear flannel shirts.  Any occasion could call for a bear hug; you got an A on your physics test, great, c'mere and gimme a hug!  When a small child screeched with delight because a cat suddenly woke up, that warranted a bear hug.  If someone's frail great-grandmother was celebrating her 92nd birthday, bear hugs for everyone!  I might cringe in such a situation, watching him squeeze what could be the final few years out of this poor old woman.  His force and power and passion were incredible; it felt like six elevator doors closing on you at once, only the door would be coated in soft flannel and smell like a soft blend of vinegar and red onions and Old Spice.  I think that probably there is a ubiquitous fear among people of being crushed; something about your rib cage collapsing around your own heart is incredibly primal, rib bones fracturing into sharp white spears that then inch closer and closer to your increasingly throbbing heart until one punctures your pulmonary artery and you feel warm blood filling the inside of your chest.  That is what getting a bear hug from John was like.  

John and I were good enough friends that we could just walk into each other's houses without knocking; it was commonplace, so if you were planning on doing anything private, go somewhere quiet with a deadbolt on the door.  It was understood.  So you can imagine my surprise when I walked into John's house on a Thursday afternoon and found him in the living room, warmly embracing a large, brown grizzly bear.  They both looked at me apathetically, and I felt my legs buckling from a mixture of confusion and fear, so I sat down on the soft carpet and watched them.  The bear had his too-short arms over John's blue and green-gridded shoulders, and his massive claws were digging into John's back.  I smelled blood, but I couldn't see any scary-looking stains, so I let it pass.  John's own arms were up under the bears armpits and his head was nestled into the bears chest.  I imagined the amount of dander and hair he must have been inhaling and made myself cough a little bit.  The bear snapped his head towards me and emitted a sharp, quick bark, as if to say, hey, we're having a moment here, so can you please shut the fuck up?

The mountain of fur was almost eight feet tall, and I didn't really want to walk past it to get into the kitchen; I felt it would be awkward, so I asked John if I could borrow his car.  The response was muffled and coated in hair, so I slowly stepped over to the coffee table and grabbed his keys.  The grizzly bear searched me warily with one eye and dug his claws deeper into John's back.  This only made John squeeze the bear harder, and they were both breathing with a considerable amount of restriction.  It occurred to me at this point that maybe I was witnessing something sexual, and that John and the bear were too wrapped up in each other to ask me to leave.  In any case, I mumbled some weak good-bye, jangled the keys once to make sure John knew I was taking his car, and walked out the front door.  I never told anyone about that day, and John never mentioned it to me either.

neighbors

Like a clumsy cat jumping onto a piano, their idea of the neighboring country was both surprising and awkward.  Their country was a shade of marigold on the large dusty maps that inhabited the libraries and elementary schools around the urban areas.  The neighbors were an ugly gray-green color; the shape and shade both mocked a chip of lead paint that surely coated all of the dilapidated factories that pock-marked the countryside.  People in the yellow country thought that people in the gray-green country didn't know how to download things, or how to use navigation systems in their SUVS.  They assumed that the gray-green people didn't even have SUVS at all.  Their feelings of superiority were only boosted by their recent theft of the gray-green country's culinary advancements.  People in the yellow country would cook on their large gas stoves and bake things in convection ovens, only now, they began to use the food that grew and ran wildly within their own country.  The flora and fauna of the yellow country was almost identical to that of the gray-green country; after all, they were neighbors and shared a long border.  The gray-green country had not become advanced enough to pay massive sums of money to import food and goods from other countries; they realized that they had a wonderful and bountiful land, and couldn't understand why someone would pay so much money for an apple from the other side of the world when there were beautiful, fresh, crispy apples dangling from the namesake tree just outside their door.  The yellow country took these ideas of using the local ingredients in cooking, and then elaborated on it.  They began to make large quantities of the local food, and then pack the meals in large clear bags, after which they would take a vacuum and suck all of the air out of the plastic.  Then, each meal would be place in a box with a nice picture on the front of a yellow-country person eating the food inside and smiling while eating.  One of the boxes that was produced showed an older woman smiling with a piece of spinach in her mouth.  Somehow it wasn't caught before mass-production began, and all of the woman's friends poked fun at her until she couldn't take it anymore and moved to the gray-green country.  No one in the gray-green country had ever seen a box with food inside that was already prepared, so the woman didn't feel self conscious anymore when she ate spinach.  No one would be lurking with a camera, trying to immortalize her in the frozen food Hall of Fame.  Life in the gray-green country was good; sometimes people left, but mostly, they stayed, because there wasn't anything that they really needed that couldn't be found inside their own gray-green haven.

CNN news coverage

Browsing news stories today, I came across this dandy that was splashed on the front page of CNN.  It's highlighted in yellow, try to ignore Bernie Mac's giant dead head (may it rest in peace) and read the wording of the headline.

Now I'm not usually one to call foul play on the media, I just let them do their thing and try not to trust everything that's said, but in this case I'll make an exception.  If you read carefully (I know the print is small), the headline reads: "American killed in Olympics attack"

If I'm the average reader, I'm thinking one of three things.

1. Oh shit, an athlete was killed by some Chinese conspirators.

2. Oh crap, an athlete's family/friends were killed by some Chinese conspirators.

3. Oh fuck, Chinese people are randomly killing Americans visiting the country for the Olympic games.

Naturally, I read on.  The CNN article, which can be found  here is surprisingly (or not) frugal about the details they're providing on the story.  At first I was surprised, but then I realized their strategy.  Less details in one story = more stories = more readers trying to stay updated = more business etc.  The strange part was certainly the headline though; in reality, that attack was carried out by an older Chinese man upon tourists who happened to be the father and mother in-law of the current men's Olympic volleyball coach.  In the CNN article, it makes no mention of whether or not the attack was related to the Olympics at all; it skirts the issue completely after implying on the front page that the motive behind the attack was in fact Olympic-related.  In another, much more in depth article on ESPN which can be found here, it is reported that the US embassy spokeswoman stressed the fact that this attack was not motivated by anti-US Olympian sentiments, and that there was no apparent reason for these two victims to have been targeted besides being tourists.  The ESPN article really provides the necessary information;  CNN does not.  Go figure.  Fear-mongering from a major news outlet in the year 2008?  Not surprised.  Turning to a sports news outlet for accurate reporting in 2008?  Maybe a little surprised.  

sushi apology letters

We sat for most of the night in a fluorescent light sushi place, writing apology letters.  It started out with me saying something about how I wished I could atone for all of my transgressions, not the ones that were against businesses or other conglomerates, but the transgressions that were committed in lieu of another person.  I didn't say it like that at the time, it was more like: "Man, I wish I were more honest."  We ate sushi at first, when we were hungry.  Eventually the waitress realized that we were not going to buy anything else, and she left us alone.  My friend was a an old one from high school, a girl I had sort of grown up with.  We had drifted in and out of touch over the years, but she was one of those people that I could always sit down with and stay seated without feeling like I had to go the bathroom, or get another beer, or go outside to make a fake phone call.  We both had that ability to open our minds to each other, like some red glow Cyclops (from X-men) beam of honesty and understanding.  Sometimes we lied to each other, but it was always known that the lying was happening, so wasn't that almost the best kind of truth?  

She came up with the idea of writing the apology letters, and there was a moment when we both felt like the laziness of sushi and sake and more than anything, life, would overcome this brilliant idea.  I asked if she had a pen, because I did not, I always in a constant state of losing writing utensils.  She did, of course, in her big brown diamond patterned purse bag thing, and I, of course, had multiple small notebooks in my pocket, the kind that are very thin and flexible and do not have lines, so you can draw pictures too without feeling like your drawings are being impaled by ultra thin gray lines of doom.  This was really going to happen, had to happen.  This was something that I must have been waiting for, although I was careful not to say the word destiny at any point, because that word usually destroys the moment with it's weight.  

The first apology I wrote was to my cat, Bellhop.  Once, when I 12, I became obsessed with this one rap song called "Get At Me Dog", by DMX.  I couldn't understand how someone could be so angry, with the voice, and the grunts, and the saw blades that this man was shooting from his mouth.  It was like someone had injected a lot of air bubbles into his blood, and his heart kept trying to pump them out, only they would get larger and larger inside his body until they popped violently like an over-inflated balloon, and that pop was a line in one of his songs.  I was infatuated, he was my hero for that week, and my poor cat Bellhop was forced to listen to this one song over and over again, while I learned the A-bomb lyrics to the point where I could mimic the dog grunts to a T.  It was a terrible moment in my life, but surely more terrible for Bellhop.  He was never the same after that summer; I think it might have had something to do with the random dog bark explosions that seemed to punctuate DMX's music.  Bellhop would walk around for the rest of his life, always looking over his shoulder, his tiger ringed tail flicking with the nerves of an inept security guard in a Wesley Snipes movie.  He didn't deserve that week, so that's why he was owed an apology.

to be continued...

disorderly conduct

Shouldn't law enforcement agents encourage this kind of behavior?  It would be pretty difficult to run from the police when your jeans are hanging down below your ass.

gel

Ok, so I have this job that can be, at times, extremely stressful.  I work in fine dining, and sometimes, it's like the whole world is trying to make you fuck up.  Someone needs steak sauce for their filet mignon, or there is a 4-top of deaf/non-speaking table who also happen to need approximately 14000 iced tea refills in a 2 hour period, only they can't make a polite gesture, they feel they must bang their glass on the table to get my attention and made it known that the iced tea has mysteriously disappeared.  I have, however, found something that melts my stress away like a warm sword through tapioca pudding.  It's this little piece of gel rubber that the geniuses at Crest attach to the outside of their "Crest 360 Toothbrush" packaging.  They glue this little piece of gel, which looks and feels exactly like the piece on the back of the toothbrush above, to their packaging so that people will touch the gel rubber with their fingers and say to themselves: "Wow, if it feels that good on my finger, imagine how great it will feel in my mouth!"  I fell for this marketing ploy, and I fell hard.  I bought the toothbrush, which is great, don't get me wrong, but the best part is that little piece of gel from the packaging.  I peeled it off of the plastic and stuck it on the inside of my check presenter (little black book servers carry).  It's about the size of an M & M and it's bright green and it's prickly and soft and adhesive and rubbery and it just feels great to rub my finger against whenever I get a little stressed out.  I highly suggest stealing one of a 360 toothbrush package, or you could just buy it, cause the toothbrush works really nicely too.  So if you ever come into my restaurant and you see me fingering my check presenter, maybe give me a break and don't ask me to wrap up your bread for you to take home, cause I'm probably a little busy.