West of Eden

Sacred space

2012-02-01T12:50:00.000-08:00

Eliade talks about modern man as a creature mired in practicalities, leading a profane existence that breeds confusion because all things are relative, and all contexts are always in flux. Admittedly, as a Westerner I feel beset sometimes by aggressive advertising. Billboards everywhere encourage me to buy, to use, to discard, and for a few extra cents to supersize my experience. Temptations are everywhere and they are juicy, cancelling for a time all other voices in my head that whisper about health and wellness. But some people hear no such voices. So I imagine they are easy preys for temptations. American advertising stirs, dares, pokes, lurks and stalks. An ad will linger, through some mnemonic and subconscious legerdemain that only advertising people know, on our mental taste buds long after we've ingested it. What is the most effective thing that displaces the memory of an ad from our mind? Another ad. They never shut up. And so it is that time off from work does not give me the respite my brain needs and I return to work just as lethargic and fed up as I left. I often long for a vacation from advertising.

And yet, according to Eliade, modern (nonreligious) man is also capable of creating his personal sacred space, despite his pragmatic and unsentimental environment:

"There are, for example, privileged spaces, qualitatively different from all others — a man’s birthplace, or the scenes of his first love, or certain places in the first foreign city he visited in his youth. Even for the most frankly nonreligious man, all these places still retain an exceptional, a unique quality; they are the “holy places” of his private universe, as if it were in such spots that he had received the revelation of a reality other than that in which he participates through his ordinary daily life."

I do remember certain firsts as landmarks in my life, far more memorable than other subsequent similar episodes. For instance, the first time I traveled to Belgium - also the first time to Western Europe - everything was magical. The streets sparkled under the incessant drizzle, the French-speaking people were chic and picturesque, as if teared right from pages of Vogue. The bread was fluffy, the pastries light as air, the beer more flavorful than the richest mulled wine I'd ever had. I idealized everything.

And then there I was, my first time in the States, on the shuttle ride from Atlanta to Macon. It was like a journey to another planet, and I was full of trembling excitement to hear a Southern lady at the back of the bus speaking in her native droll, talk which a few months later I found especially irritating. The lush, humid heat of the green Georgia summer was exotic and intoxicating, like a mind-altering drug, and this heat too I later grew averse to. Yet in my mind, that first ride to Macon was like going to Wonderland, and I not realize that a starry-eyed, 20-year-old me experienced, in that beatific heat that steamed up the windows of the white minivan, a shard of sacred space.

About a water pump

2011-12-02T09:37:00.000-08:00

Here I am, trying to write something at Starbucks. Part of my ten-step back-to-writing plan. I remember an episode of Sex and the City where Carrie moves in with Aidan, and discovers all the inconveniences that come with togetherness. A writer with a deadline, she has to relocate to a local Starbucks to write her column, since she can’t find peace in her own apartment. She used to think, she says, that those sojourners in coffee shops, mugs of coffee by their side, silver apples glowing on their laptops, were posers. But now, in her predicament, she realizes they are just people who recently moved in with someone. She meets their eyes, smiles, and empathizes.

And so it goes. I’m here for pleasure rather than necessity. Walking here is my daily cardio work-out. I walk fast, trying to down out the noise of cars revved up, of rude honking, of the loneliness of walking in Albuquerque. Unless you are clad in some type of athletic wear, some Adidas or Nike or Pearl Izumi gear that justifies the activity, you feel you’re trespassing upon some unwritten code of conduct. Walking, for the sake of it; for zero emissions; for exercise; for slowing down and looking around; for a change. Locals don’t understand it. They slow down by my side, roll down their windows and offer me a ride, honestly wanting to help. I still can’t get over it. For thousands of years people have walked without asking why, and it’s only now, in the 21^st century, that we’ve reduced this antediluvian praxis to an athletic niche. You have the bikers, the runners, the rock climbers and... the walkers (and the power-walkers, but they are just walkers with pent-up anger).

The pair that sat down on the sofa next to me talks as if they are either slow or positively crazy. They are mother and son, both seemingly addicted to meth or some such mind-numbing agent. For the past half an hour they have been laboring to look up “auto repairs” online. But they are stepping on each other’s toes like an old married couple who loathe each other with a passion.

“Mom, get me a chocolate scone!” he demands before even sitting down.

She starts to protest, but he raises his voice, sounding now like an overgrown, hormonal child.

“Mom, get me a chocolate scone,” he clamors a few more times as if he knows for a fact that Starbucks has bore and nurtured a chocolate scone destined precisely for his highness. He looks about seventeen, a tall and ponderous American boy raised on hamburgers and deep-fried delicacies. With an apathetic, unfocused gaze, as if his eyes are almost rolling in his head, he accosts me.

“Excuse may, what’s the Way-Fay called here? His teeth extend over his underlip rodentlike.

The mother is in her mid-fifties and flaxen-haired. Dark shades cover half of her face and she makes no sign to remove them despite the nearing evening.

“They don’t have a chocolate scone,” she says after having inspected the pastry window. “But they have a huge chocolate chip cookie.”

They proceed to negotiate, the son insisting on his predestined scone, the mother touting the oversized cookie, their voices overlapping, indistinct. I know every one in this coffee shop can hear them even though they’re pretending not to.

“Just sit down here,” he commands suddenly. His voice sounds like a digitized whine. He reminds me of Beavis and Butthead – even the shape of his head matches. And the mother, I’m almost sure I’ve seen her in Breaking Bad as the crack-whore who dwells at the Crossroads Motel downtown.

“No, I’m not getting you anything to drink, sorry,” she says stiffly.

He must have asked for a beverage while I spaced out. All right, now I’m curious. You come to Starbucks but you don’t get drinks. What could they have come for? The pastries? Hah. Is she trying to cut down on sugar? But then a cookie is out of the question. Does she not want to spend too much? I smile at my own naivety. For any sane American, eating expenses are not to be tallied, doubted or given any thought. So it can’t be that. By this time I’m absolutely riveted with curiosity: why the embargo on drinks?

Finally, they connect and are now typing away into a search engine. Meanwhile, the mother has brought over two large chocolate chip cookies, wrapped separately. Last time I was paying attention, they were talking about splitting one. Two large cookies, but no drinks. How enigmatic.

The mother has now turned to calling auto repair shops. A timing belt is the object of interest, and she wants to know what it will cost. Earlier today, Pep Boys tried to rob her blind for the item.

“How much did he say?” the son demands.

The mother looks at her idle phone as if expecting it to deliver the right answer in the form of a prophecy.

“No, he’s talkin’ about a water pump, too.”

This is her answer. The same inane conversation repeats itself identically.

“How much did he say mom?”

“He’s talkin’ about a water pump, too.”

Hardly a conversation, but rather two separate conversations played at the same time.

To my joy, they’ve now decided to move to another table nearby. I can still hear their exchanges. A cat could make more sense than these two. It seems they’re each talking to somebody else, someone in their head.

“If we was in California, I’d’ve gotten it cheaper,” she says with a loud snort.

“Mom, you’re sittin’ on the cayble.”

“What, baby? He was sweet-talkin’ me. He was talkin’ about a water pump, too.”

Negatively mad

2011-11-25T16:11:00.001-08:00

What makes a photograph? I mean – what makes you stay, not look away. Is it the colors, the technique, the subject, the lighting, the unexpected factor? I am asking myself this because I’m contemplating a new photo project. In this project, I take photos of mundane objects in the house and try to make them poetic. A rudimentary keyboard, for instance, with the black trapeze keys rising in perfect order like soldiers, each one holding up a coded flag, all backlit in a discotheque of neon colors. Something like this - only in images. Fernando once told me a story about a class he taught, where the students, with their cameras, were locked in a classroom for several hours and were asked to produce their final class project right then and there, having as subjects only the items in the classroom. They came up with the most brilliant things. The lesson is that limits challenge us and stimulate creativity, leading us to talents we didn’t even know we had. It’s definitely a hypothesis to which I am partial.

But really, I am not trying to be one of those would-be artists, you know the kind, who explain their would-be art and prompt for oohing and aahing from the audience. If I am a good artist, I should at least hope that I wouldn’t have to explain my art. How am I different from a poet, who formulates the lyrical with words and vernacular fireworks? I strive for the same, but use another medium. So then, if the poet’s verbal imagery limps, not lending itself easily to be conjured in one’s imagination, then the poet probably stinks. And in the same way, if my photography makes little sense without my profuse attempts at explanations (where I use tangled abstract words and run-on sentences to mystify the audience, who will nevertheless nod spastically as if they grasp everything so thoroughly), then, well, I must stink as a photographer too. Yes, it really is that black and white.

I have yet again spent the entire day indoors. Such days, when I am cloistered in my tower, are more numerous in my life now. Here’s how the idea for this new project was born, sitting at this table quite simply and boredly, eating a carob-chip cookie that I made myself. I spend so much time looking at these objects every day, and in my dejection they are even more trivial than their mundane design and purpose have already cursed them to be. They are beyond dull and nondescript, they are irritating and exasperating, and they are angering me. I could just stand up right now, get closer to this haughty chair and smack him one with a hammer, just to show him! Serves you right, chair. Or! – tomorrow, when I wake up, I could arrange the blinds just so, make a studio out of the sunrise light and find some inspiration to take a portrait of this chair, as if it is smiling. You see? It really is a challenge. But wait, don’t call the funny farm on me just yet.

A year after

2011-11-21T09:17:00.000-08:00

November. A sensitive time for me, a sort of purgatory. This year the topic for December is “aging” – as it is every year, thanks to the relentlessness with which the world celebrates birthday anniversaries. Perhaps we should mourn them instead. I briefly glanced over here last week, with dread rather, and it happened to be November 11, exactly a year since I wrote my ominous last post. So I became even more resentful of myself, if that is even possible at the moment, and resolved to write another post the same day, an anniversary post, if you will.

Evidently, I failed. One cannot simply sit and decide to write, as I knew too well. Words don’t come easily, and even less so when they’re rusted with disuse, as are mine. I’ve tried to discipline myself and attempt one of those spartan challenges, where the gratification of an impending need is conditioned upon the completion of a less desirable and more arduous task. I browsed for ideas through the cliche hand-holding techniques they teach you on Yahoo. No breakfast until I write one page (but I am hungry!). No shower until I come up with one story idea (but I need one!). Puerile as I find these things, they might be the only way I’ve left to marshal my now-slothful mind into some sort of constructive routine.

Halfway through the first paragraph, I did prepare breakfast. I toasted wheat germ, mixed it with some yogurt of a dubious expiration date (but I wonder if yogurt could ever go bad, since yogurt is already milk gone bad, in a sense), and with dried cranberries. But I am still writing. A satisfied stomach feels good, the yogurt did not kill me, the heater purrs happily next to me like a napping cat, no life-threatening things have happened lately. Life is good. Nathan and I arrived at this conclusion yesterday, when we summarized that: we have enough food to eat, we have all our limbs, our minds are healthy and we do not live in North Korea. So we are lucky. And then Nathan made one of those jokes that hardly make sense even to himself, something about grandma’s house, if I remember us playing there when we were children. Then he looked at me with a dumb smile, as if I’m supposed to understand something arcane within. Many of these jokes do, for all their randomness, become prophetic in some way, as most ambiguous things are, and little did he know that I was thinking of precisely that, of grandma’s house and of being young and careless. Neither of us has yet figured out how to be an adult, I suppose, and so far we both find adulthood rather disappointing.

And since my talents are becoming less numerous and I lack a photo of my latest feats, as befitting a resurrection post, I decided that the pizza I made last night could well fall under the “feats” category, since cooking, unlike writing, is still something I am good at. Entirely-home-made pizza with whole wheat crust, evil pepperoni and wholesome vegetables on top. Goes well with a nice Chardonnay, by the way. Thanksgiving is coming, so in the spirit of being thankful, I am happy for pizza and wine, for being alive and for having not lost my marbles yet.

A lack of focus

2010-11-11T11:06:00.000-08:00

Since I joined the faction of those who sell their minds to moneymaking ventures, I have felt, organically, my brain contract. And a strange propensity has taken over me, one that I had previously recognized in my working-world friends, but which I thought would have no claim on me: the sin of lassitude. I must have postulated that I was made of a different material, perhaps, that I was far too intellectually-engaged to be conquered, or even tempted, by idleness. How haughty must I have been.

The cruelest part, I find, is that I am fully cognizant of what is happening to me, yet I am unable to curb it. I cower before forces I no longer understand, and my control over myself, over the things that happen to me, dwindles. Mondays segue into Fridays, and the weekend catches me in a stupor. Overwhelmed by too many choices and the terror of limited time that flies, I sit in complete paralysis at the kitchen table, wondering what to eat. This seems to be my most dominant concern. Food gives you an illusion of activity and a prosaic impression of fullness. I am lured into the notion that I am doing something that justifies the time, and the neglect that I’ve shown to writing and aesthetics. And still, although the fridge is perpetually packed, and the seductive smells of your cooking never lacking, I feel empty. E-mails remain unwritten, photographs unshot, books unread. The more these undone things are piling on me, the more I cower, the sicker I get, the stiller I stand, at the kitchen table.

I can’t explain, really, why it’s not easy to simply get off my ass and do something. I marvel at my own brain sometimes, how intractable it is, how resistant to discipline. The strategies I used to employ in college to make myself study or read are inadequate now for this much larger monster that’s challenging me. That this is real life, no longer its dumbed-down replica that was college, lends my lassitude additional significance. For anything bad that happened in college, any shameful behavior, any destructive tendency, could be forgotten in the afterlife. The real world is when we start over, leaving college and its frivolousness behind. But in my case, the evolution is backward. If in college I was studious and diligent, obsessed with good time management and personal conquests -- usually intellectual ones -- it is only now, in the real world, that I’ve become prey to shopping online, reading celebrity gossip and preferring the indoors to the outdoors. That these preferences are even on my list, that I even considered them, shames me. There is no need for a greater penance than the contempt I sometimes feel for myself, the betrayal I’ve committed of what I could do as an artist, as a writer, and the time that’s stolen every day from these possibilities.

I recently received in the mail a copy of a magazine that published my photography. My hands stroked the glossy cover, also one of my photographs, and the contrast between past and present saddened me to no end. The sensible aspiration is to be on an ascending curve where experience and knowledge and value increase with time and age. A parabola, not a hyperbola. And while I am fully aware that lethargy is poisoning me, that it was some time in the past, not the present, that I best approached my desired version of myself, I see no exit from this specious argument. Hours spent at work, office chit-chat and computer nonsense, talk of operating systems and corporate tools to learn and master, lay ravenous claim on my saddlebags of energy. Evenings, I sit at the kitchen table and we play cards, because I cannot decide to whom I should reply first, whom to call, where to begin a blog entry. Too much energy is necessary for anything of value. And I fall asleep at 9 p.m. because my eyes can’t stay open long enough to read a full chapter of East of Eden. If I feel brave, we’ll watch a movie and I’ll be sure to fall asleep, without you even noticing, and at the end I’ll force my eyes open, to save face. The next day is probably Friday, or any other day of the week that looks, from my point of view, just like Friday. And once again, I’ll contemplate myriad options, and choose none.

Frightened Rabbit

2010-07-14T18:02:00.001-07:00

Hours pass and no books are read, no pages written, no bike mounted. Today, for the first time, the kitchen sink is dry. Have you made pizza, she asks, and I hide flooding eyes behind a guilty smile. My failure’s well hidden. I could walk the streets and look like a real person, not the specter I am. Only the walls know, having kept me secluded for the past three days. They’re sick of me too, as I am of them. There’s a crowd outside the building waiting to stone me, chanting my name with acrimony, someone who promised and never delivered. I almost hope there is.

Leave it to me to write about depression while depression’s trying to write me off. It’s only the respite that affords contemplation, in the end. There’s too much bedlam here, enough to preclude any explanatory effort. I can’t share something I don’t understand myself. Wounds keep cracking, oozing, hurting. No healing happens. The phone is mute, pokerfaced and cruel. I’ve no pride left for self-persuasion, for silent wars. I stare at the little thing and plead, drops tickling my neck as they roll down, wondering what I’ve done to deserve this. It’s overdue, this self-flagellation, and so is all your advice, years too late, poisoning those phone calls that would otherwise speak of concern and friendship. Stop asking what I am doing. I am sinking. Once the Titanic was hit, what could you have done to keep it from going down?

It would be better if you didn’t have to watch. I’ve half a mind to elope somewhere where nobody knows me, and bleed my failures there. My vocabulary, once a cornucopia, is now a tribute to contingency: could, would, should and should have. I was once told that I was the most brilliant person on campus. I thought it was a joke, but by her face I saw it wasn’t. Today I unearthed my wide black and white prints and looked at them, marveled at the things I used to make. Yes, apparently. I used to make things. And write things. And win things. I think of myself as a discontinued person, like a page break, where a “brilliant” one ends and a failed one takes off, with nothing to link them, save for a name. Had I known that school was the only thing I was good at, I would have stayed there.

The devil you know

2010-07-01T12:40:00.001-07:00

Somebody flushes in the apartment upstairs. I jump in my seat, silence the online radio. The carpet feels soft and warm under my feet, like a freshly dead animal. A wood splinter from a certain sunny deck in Macon has left my heel tender. I walk like a thief. Behind the door I expect to find somebody and I prepare my vocal chords for dramatic yelling, no less. In my dreams, someone is chasing me, and I try to scream, my mouth open, taut, but nothing comes out. Nobody saves me. I stand there silent, waiting to be killed over and over.

When I look at people, I wonder if they’re smarter than me. I lose at chess twenty times every day and I come back for more each morning. I’m thrilled by being humbled by a novice computer. The plight of being intellectually less equipped than the majority of the population consoles me, like the empathic hand of fate fondling the rough edges of my head. I’ve succeeded to deceive everyone. It is entirely possible that my infrequent accomplishments have been the result of the fortuitous alignment of chaotic elements, the same kind of alignment that now stubbornly refuses to occur. Is it not possible that an otherwise second-rate person to appear, under certain contextual light arrangements, exceptional? Such an inference depends as much on the onlooker as it does on the subject, and with society defining common interpretations according to a variety of signs, it is likely that several onlookers will infer similar conclusions when looking at the same thing. And they could be wrong.

If I were to receive an award each time I am told that my resume is “impressive,” my very resume would expand exponentially. With all the career advice I am reading these days, instructing me to translate my pedestrian projects into coming-of-age experiences, I feel virtually pulled by the sleeve to be original, outrageously original. Chances are that others will find my originality outrageous. Fortunately, I can write to Yahoo and complain about being screwed over by their advice. They will fondle the rough edges of my head.

These days, I imagine myself ever more often in Bucharest. Places have a familiarity to them, although really in this city I am more of a stranger than I’ve ever been. In this barroom I’ve landed, there’s a guy who feels like family. Every single thing about him reminds me of someone I know. His face, of my grandfather, a young version. Light skin and reddish around his blue eyes, the nostrils and along the edges of his ears. His hair reminds me of my librarian benefactor, light blond and grey. His peaches-and-cream shirt, of my grandmother working in the garden at the countryside. His running shoes, well, of someone I know who wears running shoes in all the wrong places. His walk, of Katherine’s lopsided gait.

People are so much alike that it scares me. But collectivities are different. People negotiating coexistence, giving and gambling, playing, strategizing, compromising. In these practices, people are remotely dissimilar. I like the collective American, rather than the individual. As to the Romanian, I like neither the collective nor the individual. Come to think of it, I am not so crazy about myself. Especially not right now.

But I, at least, am a devil I know.

A world without zero

2010-06-28T19:53:00.000-07:00

Three minutes until ten, the digital clock alleges. How many resumes have I sent today? I won’t even ask the other question. How many replies...? I won’t do this to myself. The number of times I went out of the cave: zero. The number of things I burned on the stove: zero. As it turns out, zero can also be a good thing. The number of movies I watched today: zero. Most often, however, it’s a bad thing. I wish the zeroes in my life, these impostor digits, were replaced by real numbers made of flesh and blood, real numbers that laugh and cry and hurt, like me. Zero is a travesty.

One is a lonely number. Dave Matthews sings “Two’s a perfect number, but one, well...” One’s imperfect. Like me. It stands in want of completion, of closure, of a twist. One has no twist. But two, well...

Father taught me arithmetic before I went to school. We went over the entire first grade curriculum the summer before I enrolled. This is why, unlike the other kids, I loved numbers. Scholastic tedium hadn’t gotten to me before the magic of mathematics had. It caught up fast, however, and left the latter eating dust. Now, scholastic tedium is indomitable, as any pupil and student can testify.

I should not say I am in the most confessional state of mind, nor in the most verbose. I count my thoughts on one hand’s fingers, and I’ve some to spare. But I sat myself down, perhaps unwisely, to write this soliloquy. I did it to arm myself against solitude. Surrounded by your thoughts, you’re never alone. And so resolute was I to mark off another blog entry for the elusive June, that I started to count my posts, as a sort of scale for my achievement, as if it could be something I could boast. I counted them, as I would apples at the market, thoughts measured by the kilo. So I stopped. I was doing myself a disservice.

If it were for me, I’d write every day. But my new rule is to bar myself from dreams, and especially from the image of me acting them out, which haunts me. When I come to, disillusioned, it’s unbearable. Until I get to act out my dreams, I will just write, but not about the dreams at all. In fact, I’ll make every effort to overlook them. I’ll write instead about ennui, and about the strain and the leap. What happens when there is nothing more to aspire to? Is it called happiness or... clinical death?

Necessary places

2010-06-27T11:35:00.001-07:00

It was around five in the afternoon yesterday when I decided to peel my ass off the chair and peer out of the cave. Through the barricaded window came a luring breeze, the hot but playful air of heavy Georgia summer. I’d spent a good part of the morning braiding bread and burning some dead animal on the stove, and the better part of my afternoon pushing down shovelfuls of job applications down the Internet funnel. My head rang with a dull ache and my legs longed for hard asphalt. With difficulty, guilt pressing down heavily, I rose from my cubicle and shouldered my bag and camera. With closed eyes I locked the door behind me, lest I entertain thoughts of going back.

Down Johnson road, past the liquor store which I’ve bookmarked for my following nights of unemployed desperation, houses rise like mushrooms. On a Saturday like this, I thought, nobody is home. So I stopped to contemplate the edifices at length, like an architect planning his new project, scouting for ideas. No wonder people call houses “homes” in this country. Personality abounds. There’s a perpetual competition of design and colors, a rivalry for originality. When I was young, Eva and I received a gingerbread house as a Christmas present from France. It came in parts, and we built it as we fancied, an absurd, brazen structure that didn’t care for physics. It looked wonderful. And it remained so, wonderful, something to look at, not something to eat. It was months before we could bring ourselves to eat the gingerbread house, and by then it was hard and chewy, and hardly as enjoyable to our mouths as the sight of it had been to our eyes. So as I walked down Johnson road looking right and left at the houses, I thought of them as gingerbread houses. Expressions in aesthetics, rather than dwellings made to last.

The big Southern mansions with their solemn columns, like Greek temples, have a forbidding air. There’s something royal in the way they stand. A footpath extends from the street to the house entrance, dividing the trimmed lawn right down the middle. It has the expectation of a red carpet, this path. I halted before one of these houses and waited, as if any moment Gwyneth Paltrow were to come out of the house, laughing, her head thrown back in a guffaw, and I was to take her picture. I waited, until I saw a curtain pushed to the side and somebody looking at me from the upstairs floor.

Other houses are like trees, negotiating their position with the slope of the land. Some are perched up on the hill that rises along each side of the street. They seem secluded up there, like mountain cabins protected from the eyes and ears of curious people. One of these aloof establishments had a fence that girded it all the way to the street, and along the fence stood seven or eight mock-antique lanterns with fire burning inside, in the middle of the day. The house itself was farther from the street, with a roundabout before the entrance, and an artesian in the middle. The dark walls and black frames, and the overall dubious countenance of the place, reminded me of the location of the Hieros gamos fanatics in Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut.” I shivered, and walked on.

And in this parade of designs, there are some houses that keep a low profile, built below ground level in a sort of pit. You have to look down from the street to see them, as if gaping down from a bridge. One of these houses made me stop and look more closely. It was all wood, the blue-black color of overburnt cinders, and British red window frames, with wooden window covers opened to the side. It lay obscured by trees with full crowns, sunlight sprinkled over it as if through a strainer. This is where I would like to live, I thought. A dark house, a haven, a little tree burrow that leads to a subterranean passage, where badgers like me dwell and plan their lives.

Now, when I’ve nothing concrete to call home, I look at houses as I would at fossils in a museum, with little personal interest. They are objects of utility, no longer repositories for memories. My concern is now, where would I find a quiet place to write, to think, maybe at Starbucks, maybe the park, maybe our morgue-apartment that I’ve already killed with my dreary thoughts. Henry Miller writes: “It’s hard to know, when you’re in such a jam, which is worse – not having a place to sleep or not having a place to work. One can sleep almost anywhere, but one must have a place to work. Even if it’s not a masterpiece you’re doing. Even a bad novel requires a chair to sit on and a bit of privacy.” As for me, today I have both. Tomorrow, well, who knows?

Atlantis

2010-05-31T18:47:00.000-07:00

Past Freedom Parkway, past the streets with names of pioneers, and the skyscrapers, is the Interstate. It cuts right through the heart of the city, dividing it, like a pulsing vein with blood running on energy drinks. Once you reach the Interstate, you know where you are. North or South, it’s hard to get it wrong. As we drive down 14th street, over the Interstate and into the industrial quarters, I notice signs that announce, I-75 South. But there are no signs for North. The road pulls you by the sleeve to drive South. It is the place to go.

This time, we are not going South. Like all city folk, we are going shopping. It seems that there are few fulfilling activities save for that. I remember Thoreau at this point, and I cringe, for he’s been crying bitter tears ever since I’ve been infected with consumerism. I think of him warmly, remorsefully. But the light turns green and on we go, away from the luxurious Starbucks and the fancy Waffle House of downtown, toward the secluded place where Wal-Mart is. After all, we have a list to satisfy.

There is no silence in the car. We’re both making ourselves guilty of the garrulousness typical of old people who’ve nobody to talk to. And now, finally, someone. I don’t know if our talk is trivial, if we’re making inane comments that I’d otherwise roll my eyes to. Right now, we’re just talking. Times are good. On the way home, she reminds me to take a left on Piedmont, and I rejoin with a pretentious formulation that means Duh! Again, a redundant comment. It is nice to have somebody to make redundant commentary to, even if it serves no purpose. It’s a way to say “Hey, I’m still alive.” Under the numbing effect of the repetitive motions of life, I welcome any occasion to say it.

“Have you ever been to a gay bar before?” she asks me as we pull into a patio barroom where the multicolored flag flutters in the wind. And I remember Synergy back in Macon, where we went to cavort under neon lights and demented music with all the topless gay boys. How easy it was to not worry about some guy’s palm evaluating your butt. How liberating to not be afraid that it would happen. The girls in Synergy, the gay girls, well, they’d never do such a thing. They have a radar, I’m told. They know we don’t play for the same team. So it’s peaceful and exhilarating at Synergy, this crossroads of divergent targets that coexist so well, and half-forget themselves in that drugging music.

“So, have you?” she brings me back from the reminiscing lapse. “Many times.” So we sit there feeling weird, among so many eccentrically-dressed people with all kinds of agendas, and we’re wondering if they’re feeing weird sitting next to us. I am sure they don’t. And, as far as we’re concerned, we feign we don’t either. We have cake, the American portions, I forget that we should have split one, because we are in supersize country, and we are normally-sized people. I almost finish the monster. She merely contemplates hers. As we walk back to the blazing car, where the sun has made our very own Hades, we carry our to-go boxes and admire their design. What a pleasure to feed an entire conversation with such trivial things.

Back home, she discovers that her chocolate’s melted in the car and throws a tantrum. I’m a little scared, mind you. I retreat on the floor, where the hurricane will hit me the least. Under the pretense of checking my e-mail, my fingers tap relentlessly on the keyboard. Tomorrow I will buy new chocolate, I promise myself. Under my eyebrows, I watch her feet entering the room. Even her walk is irritated. She sits down at the computer and sighs. She’s begun a conversation on Skype, the one she really wanted to have. I can almost imagine what she’s writing, a word from him will make her smile, and as I snap my fingers she’ll metamorphose, like a caterpillar into a butterfly. In fifteen minutes she’ll emerge in here, where I am, and, with all gall dissolved, she’ll ask ingenuously, What should we eat? That’s the thing about us, computer-huggers. Somehow, we always end up wishing that we were somewhere else.

No goodbyes

2010-05-21T07:08:00.001-07:00

Sylvie est apathique. Not without reason, no. One could say that the stifling Georgia heat would beset me enough as it is, but as it turns out it wasn’t the only factor in my pitiful deflation. The last few blows I received from The Institution were formidably petty, and it was the shock of them, rather than the implications, that shook me into slow-motion. I have not shaken it off yet. I suppose time heals everything. So I wait for the mighty Chronos to deliver me.

An excuse for why I haven’t been writing. I ought to try to persuade myself that it’s not laziness, a decidedly unflattering motivation for any writer, however minor. So this is what I tell myself: it has nothing to do with being lazy. And in fact, it’s almost true.

But now it’s time for departure, and I’ve no last words, no goodbyes. Yesterday we went to play trivia, the last time for me, I suspect, and I didn’t even look back at the place, measure it with a ceremonious look, as I’d have done in another time. Perhaps if I had, the memory of the place would condense into that last view of it. The high ceilings with fans whirling insanely, people carousing down below, rubbing their potbellies full of beer, a rosy-cheeked Dargan hollering undecipherable things into the mic. A small town barroom, and yet, a place of returning, of affection born of habitude, a place where eventually people know your name, and fear you as you grab the pencil and the trivia sheets. Ah, moments. Moments make so much more of places than they really are.

Speaking of visual memory, I ought to snap a photo of the many boxes that surround me. But I don’t like to remember this sort of circumstance. Moving is a time that makes me wary. Packing is an activity that makes me nauseous. In our Brownian movement through the topography of this continent, a lot of energy is expended. Energy from fear, while so inevitable it is to fear uncertainty, to find yourself at the mercy of an American law that counts freedom in days, like an hourglass, pouring and pouring sand, ominous and hostile. Personally, I find it frightening. I seek a little bit of balance and, when I find it, I sleep, as if to make up for the three sleepless years at The Institution, where I’ve bargained my life and my health for some promised distinction that in the end I didn’t even receive. It’s shaming how much we are ready to sacrifice for a travesty. And even I, who so resolutely advocated content over form, eventually fell for the form, and cried for it. I cried as I buried fairness once more. Remember Battleship Potemkin, dear communists? Dignity is to not be given food with worms in it. As to me, I’ve a worm stuck between my teeth.

I eventually took a photo of the boxes, because this moment must be documented. Another departure rings its bells, but luckily there won’t be anybody here when I leave, to see me lament. I’ll go silently, just as I arrived. As I back out of the driveway with my overweight car I’ll make sure to have Kleenex handy. So, this is it, Macon. No goodbyes.

Life goes easy on me, most of the time

2010-05-05T23:03:00.000-07:00

And so it is, April will be remembered as the month that allowed me only one entry. Allowed, I say, because it’s not about crumbs of time, here and there, to get another paragraph down, and at the end of the day collage them onto a webpage. It’s a state of mind, this writing affair. Affair, I say, because it’s like a fling, on and off, today I’m brilliant, as somebody says, tomorrow I’m lazy and rambling, another’s words. Cut the fat, he says. Well if I cut the fat, I have but an empty page. And so it comes that in April this page is barren, like Saskatchewan in December, like my head after red wine straight from the bottle.

And so it is. April, the month of frenetic, intrepid applications. "Apply," my new voodoo word, like “Voldemort.” Life’s galloping along and I’m standing still, my computer and I, cheated by inertia, applying, applying madly, relentlessly. A life of applications. And it was breezy until here, she says. Now you’ll see how it gets tough.

What is this tough we’re headed toward, blindfolded? They lure us with all sorts of promises. An education, they say, opens doors. So I twist the knob. But the doors are firmly shut, so I’m knocking now, applying again, as I’ve done three years ago, as I promised myself, for the last time. How seldom we keep the promises we make to ourselves.

It occurred to me today that there are two kinds of people in the world. There are people who build, and people who demolish. You can write false dichotomy on my cross, if you will, but I’ll say it either way. I don’t find that there is anybody in between. There is such incongruence between the two that they polarize into mutually exclusive characters. One who builds cannot demolish, for in sabotaging another builder, he vicariously sabotages himself. The one who demolishes does it because he is incapable of building and, since he exists in the world like everybody else, he has to find something to do. So he demolishes what others build, or prevents things from being built at all.

To be clear, to demolish is utterly necessary. If nature needs creatures to eat other creatures for the world to keep running, who are we to take issue with nature? People who demolish are necessary, no doubt. Often times, they demolish things that are redundant or noxious. I praise them, really. They complete the food chain of our creative operations, which are ever so fecund, ever so postmodernist. But demolish is what they do, so they do it with all that exists in the world, not just what is superfluous. So many builders are buried in this way, thwarted beyond recovery, interred together with their inchoate creations, or under them. Tant pis, you’ll say. You’ve got to toughen up. Strong people succeed, weak people cry.

Yes, I know. And yet, what’s life like for softies, I wonder. I bet it’s not so bad?

A synonym for loneliness

2010-04-09T10:49:00.000-07:00

I slither back here, a prodigal daughter. I’m afraid real-time confessions with human listeners will never parallel the kind and patient ear of this cave of mine. So I return, time and again, and one day I’ll raze this page and conjure another, with another name, different chromatics, but still a monument of distress, just like this. It’s just like I wrote once: bloggers are not happy people.

Perhaps I should be flattered by occasional comments shaped like compliments, that indicate, possibly, a popularity I never intended. I will tell you, though, it is the first spam that lands on this page that changes things, quite irreversibly, because spam means traffic. If my manifesto was ever some claptrap about writing for myself, for catharsis, not giving a damn if anybody read it, or some such sanctimonious thing like that, well, it was a lie. It’s something all writers do: trying to preempt failure. Popularity tickles a writer, but he declares he has no wish for it, no use for it, and that’s just in case he doesn’t get it. A writer doesn’t want to look like a fool. So he sits there, perched on his intellectual throne, and pontificates: I am an artist. You can’t understand me, because your minds are simple. I’ve no use for your heed or your comments. Leave me to carry my genius in solitude.

I, of course, am no different. I would love to have readers galore, but it’s not like I’m going to admit it like this, with my index finger and my thumb at a ninety-degree angle. The praise that comes my way, though, is like a paintball that defeats and smears. It’s not a sign of victory, but of loneliness. There are readers who admire my writing because it’s more skilled than theirs, and readers who dismiss my writing because they don’t understand it. An equal, however, a light beam at the same frequency, is hard to come by.

I’ve learned a new American idiom this week: to blow your own horn. She sat on a stool among easels and said “I’ll blow my own horn if nobody else does.” Stacy, sitting on another stool before a nascent canvas, approved wholeheartedly. I was bothered, not quite knowing why. I thought it was presumptuous to say a thing like that, even though, at times, I think very highly of myself as well. But at least I do it privately. I remember when Maria cautioned me last year that I “ought to learn some humility.” It was in the cafeteria, I know because I had an overpowering urge to throw edibles at her. And that was when I knew I’d told her too much and now I was vulnerable. Stupid of me. I took it as a betrayal of her, especially of her, the personification of conceit, I thought, to castigate me so. This token that oozed of hypocrisy I didn’t appreciate. You remember, perhaps. There were no more rides to the new mall after that. But you weren’t the only one who thought so, not by far.

So here it is, another day when humility’s absent. I recall a line from Tarkovsky’s Stalker:

"A man writes because he is tormented, because he doubts. He needs to constantly prove to himself and the others that he's worth something. And if I know for sure that I'm a genius? Why write then? What the hell for?"

I used to reason exactly like this. And you know what? I don’t know if anything’s changed.

Unfree

2010-03-10T15:18:00.001-08:00

My desk is a piece of art. That is because I see it every day. It is lithe, angular, white like marble. It stretches from one corner to another, a liaison between two walls, between two pieces of my life: the actual and the mediated. The former is growing scarcer, I’m loath to report, because school. I’m too afflicted with chronic vexation to elaborate on this sore topic. Suffice to say that it’s been some good weeks since I’ve left campus. Bill’s doesn’t count, though, since it’s still Forsyth and the presence of the College magnetizes, malevolent, even there.

No, one must be at least ten miles away to feel freedom. Freedom is felt chiefly with the ears, in case you didn’t know. It’s probably the legacy of our ancestors the dogs. When you’re rolling on a road, any godforsaken road, window down, ears flapping in the wind, and you’re moving away and not toward, that’s the life. You feel yourself liberated, the shackles undone. You rub your wrists to alleviate the pain or to check if they’re still there. Yes, I have a body, you conclude exhilarated, a whole body not just an ass, not just flesh that sits but flesh that moves and runs, blood that flows with glee delivered from stagnation. You rediscover small organic weaknesses like panting and flushing from all the movement, and it’s like an epiphany.

You want to run and hug strangers on the street, tell them you’re so happy that legs hold you up, that there’s all this sinew that you’d forgotten about, and it’s still there, and you’d almost lost hope, thought you’d turned to stone sitting at your desk, probably your resting place too. You used to be Homo Erectus, but adapting to the circumstances had developed into Homo Sedentarius. What a bad dream, you shake it off at once. Then you come to, and your fingers are still typing, eyes narrowed into the incandescent screen. It was the escape that was the dream. You’re not going anywhere. Still Homo Sedentarius, wasting your time with callow daydreams. And in the meantime, there’s the desk.

Fifty pages of pompous poppycock, equals exactly two weeks of zombie-scribbling, equals coffee scent that’s so deep into my clothes, into my flesh, that I’ve resigned myself to making it permanent. But hold that razor – I think the end is near. Everybody hates their thesis, he tells me, and I nod. But no, wait a minute, actually, I wanted to like it. In fact I remember a time when I did, it seems an antediluvian time, it must have been before I plunged into the quagmire headfirst, thinking it was water. I couldn’t see well, it was dark. Now this slimy creature’s enslaved me and won’t let me go. He says his name’s Perfection, the bully, but I just call him Dick, since that’s what he is. The end is near, I whisper to quiet myself down. The end is near. The sobs are dying down. One more guileful promise like this and I’ll fall asleep.

Friends? I don’t know you anymore. I’m quite lost to the world, as the situation will have it, but there’s still hope left for you. So save yourselves. Just run, toward the light. I’ll just close these blinds to see the screen better, and I think I’ll seal them with tape too, since I don’t think I’m ever getting out of here. And you know what? get me some chocolate when you’re out, please.

Into the tunnel

2010-02-15T09:27:00.000-08:00

Seven a.m. and Georgia rain says Good Morning, rapping relentlessly on my hood, seeping deep into my shoes. Yeah, well, fuck you too. Steam envelops my glasses and I greet this person I bump into, accidentally touch her breast to steady myself. Ha, ha, it’s all right, she says affectedly, and I’m sure she’s making unflattering remarks about me on the inside. Of course we can never say what we mean.

So, what do I think about when I’m swimming? Nothing in particular. I move after dictation from the clock, a prepossessing supervisor really, more a foe than a friend. Speed is distance over time, I tell myself while wheeling my arms backwards in continuous motion. Whatever the result it’s not enough, so I smack my lips in dissatisfaction, spit the pool water out of my mouth and fasten my seatbelt for godspeed. The woman in the other lane is hefty and breathes hard. She smiles at me from a distance, I only see a fuzzy spot where her face would be, the pixels slightly shifting. I smile back half-heartedly. Maybe she wasn’t really smiling at me.

And as I amble to the cafeteria to be fed I can only think of one thing. A fifty page endeavor that’s still in embryo. I’ve foreshadowing promises of pride about it, as if from a child I’ve spawned. But not yet. Now there’s only the idea, like the potential energy of an object that has weight but doesn’t do anything. I predict nights of feverish writing in the night, the rush of caffeine already placebo to me, given that energy from ideas and prickly fingers on a keyboard is so much more nutritious than any energizing drink. This is me being positive. An angle I’m not used to.

Is this treatise going to be ready on time? The devil sits perked on my shoulder, the other shoulder angelless, and whispers all sorts of discouragements in my ear. His lips tickle, suck the sleep away until there’s no serenity left. Four in the morning comes, worries haunt me and I’m nowhere near action. I’ve potential energy, you’d argue. Thus hopelessly stuck at cathode, say, where’s that positive angle when I need it? Why doesn’t optimism visit more often? I’m not old and smelly. I don’t talk too much. I don’t understand. I crawl back into my cave and wait.

The rush or the patience

2010-02-10T14:27:00.001-08:00

"I’ve been blinded by glitter and gold
My eyes need to rest from this light
And sleep well at night."

If I could get drunk every day, I’d forget a little. I’d loosen up, you’d say, but with loose not being my manner at all, I’m not entirely sure it would be a good thing.

Too many ideas and too human a body, not even fit to grapple with sleep deprivation anymore. Getting old, is this what you were talking about? Perhaps it’s abuse taking its toll, a visceral reaction to this Poker I’m playing with my future. “Going for a straight?” he asks tentatively, nudging me with his elbow. I’m not that lucky, I whisper to myself. “Come on, girl, play,” they beckon. “It’s a full house in here. “ Give me a minute, I can’t hear myself think, I plead, flushed. There’s too much noise here. Perhaps I should step outside, I whisper to myself between swift hands exchanged.

Perhaps I should step outside, I goad myself in the rear-view mirror as I sit in my car clasping the wheel. Ready to take off. Destination irrelevant. Into the real world, as she and I chuckle between bites at lunch. Our lives are makeshift, insubstantial like bubbles of soap. Only time is real and inclement, like an ice storm beating you up after you’re cold and wet and hunched with the weight on your shoulders. Target nowhere in sight. Or, maybe, somewhere beyond the fog, beyond the manic suspension, maybe it’s there. We’re creatures of hope, after all.

They say, life is what happens while we are busy making other plans. If this is life then what is living? Is it flurry, Brownian movement? Is it the rush or the patience?

* The Cardigans - Lead Me into the Night

From the Calendar, with Love

2010-01-31T20:30:00.000-08:00

Here is a January of more guilt, more crumpled sticky notes on the floor, items half-checked off to-do lists. Postponed. Everything postponed while I am trying to graduate from this beloved institution and off into the godforsaken land of no-jobs. Everybody complains about the future, while my future is now and I'm staring it right in the face. Wanna step outside, future? I say, brandishing my silver tongue.

If only there were more time, I grumble as afternoons segue into late nights and mea culpas, and futile questions like, why in the world would I take a whole hour for dinner? Did I really need to hear all that? To hear myself talk, to hear them babble? Why can't I be a hermit as befitting my career goals? And so on. I will eradicate meals, it's the only way.

So this is the last lunch we have together, I told her. February is my month, censorship of activities enabled, entertainment be damned. I'll be a Road Runner through the cafeteria, gone before you know it, too fast even for hellos. You'll see. February's for 50-page papers and more overnights in the dark room. It's all about timing, my dear, and you should understand since you sleep so little, too. So after I told her all this with a grave voice we stayed, nostalgic, in the cafeteria until dinnertime, for five hours or so just talking, with the surly staff cleaning around us, assuring us we're not in the way. We stayed, for the last time. Unless they have cookies tomorrow.

And now, the February of guilt, staring me right in the face. Come on, February, wanna step outside with me?

In the Shadows

2010-01-19T16:54:00.001-08:00

“Aren’t you going to miss this place?” I remember asking her. “No,” she said looking right at me, almost defiantly. “I miss my family, Canada, everyone. I’m glad to go.” “Well,” I shrugged, “then I’m happy for you.” I lied. And I was sure she lied too. For how does one debar herself of nostalgia, I don’t figure. It’s always there, nostalgia, for me at least.

Through the mist that envelops my future I have to consider my present in context. So – will I miss it, I thought as I climbed the stairs two at a time. There are Nepali cooking on the second floor, one of their smelly dishes, surely, sticking their finger inside to taste, then licking it and sticking it right back. On the first floor are Koreans who giggle incessantly and barely mind me as I squeeze myself along the wall to bypass their flurry, their racket. The Chinese walk around in flip-flops unkempt and blank-faced, like androids. All irritates me, their obliviousness pressing hard on sore points, on years of loneliness. Will I miss it. It’s hard to imagine I will.

It’s hardly the first time I’ve asked myself this. Even though time’s not been kind to this memory I’m gleaning, there are good things here. Really, like what? I retorted. And to refute this skeptic intimation I took to taking photographs. Trying to prove something to myself. There is beauty alright. Plenty. But it is tainted, stained by what I know, the ugly side of the funfair, which doesn’t get printed in brochures and news announcements. The backwards of it, the pantomime, the energy that goes into appearances, all for form and in want of content. Well if it’s appearances I cherish, these tall trees and neatly-trimmed grass, red buildings and squirrels galore, the more the landscape dissolves into idyllic the more egregiously it deceives. If it’s only appearances I’ll miss then I’ll miss nothing, because there’s scarcely anything to miss underneath. I’m beginning to understand what she meant.

We watched Battleship Potemkin today. The sailors found worms in their meat and made a revolution for a decent meal. Women and children were killed but the insurgence held fast. Of course it was not food they were after. It was dignity. Dignity is to not be given food with worms in it.

Redivided

2010-01-15T13:13:00.000-08:00

The life of a writer is the life of a loner. I think it must be so. If I am to build a new world and make it believable it is imperative that I distance myself from the reality of the present. It distracts me, like a voice buzzing in my ear as I am trying to formulate speech. Stuttering is a symptom of distraction, of a mind preoccupied and thus unfocused. Writing with interruptions is like stuttering, thoughts that hiccup instead of flowing make for a story less credible. Bill tells me he cannot write, and although I’ll never say it to him, for better judgment, I’m more inclined to think that he is just distracted. Like most everybody else.

I was interrupted while composing this. Who knows what the hell I was going to write. All right. Start over.

We were walking down the street and I noticed that you looked different somehow, that pink scarf pulling the features of your face into more angular geometry and making your curly hair glow with a matte finish, like flashed photographic paper. You’ve grown up, I thought. It was only last year I saw you last, but the last time I really saw you, really looked at you, was long time ago. You will agree, I think. The shift we’ve undergone is to be expected, given that college is the time for action while high school is a time for dabbling. Nothing really happens in high school, or whatever happens has a passive quality rather than participatory. Things happen to you rather than with you. So in college you’ve gone out and did, and you were nobody’s fool, except maybe your own. And now you’re lost again, or perhaps found, but still a gambler, always a gambler. A gambler for dreams, you’ll say, and I’ll chuckle. It’s a wonder that you, a dreamer, and I, a skeptic, would ever be friends. And yet.

I asked you, apropos of my reason for snubbing you, if one day you discovered that the cup of coffee you’d been drinking every day contained poison, would you keep drinking. And you, instead of evincing some kind of outrage that I’d liken you to poison, said with naivety and stubborn benevolence that it’d depend on so many factors, like what kind of poison, or what damage it would do, clearly resisting the analogy with a feeble defense, but in a cute way. We are slaves to our perceptions, I fear, and yours is that I’m now the bad guy, and mine’s that I was right to cut you off.

You told me how there’s no more affection in your friendships, a deficit of caring between you and them, and you complained how she, whenever you talk, will only talk about herself. But there are too many who make themselves guilty of self-absorption. Truth be told, my intuition whispers that you’d do the same to me. This nostalgia born of habitude sometimes obscures realities which can seem blunt or insensitive, but they’re nevertheless in our faces, like an elephant in the room that nobody talks about. If I told you “this friendship’s done for” you’d probably console yourself accusing me of hostility, victimizing yourself, and since I’m the one who’s actually severed the connection, it’s clear who’s the evil one here. But you know, I don’t feel like the evil one. There has to be someone to say the emperor’s got no clothes. I merely called what was already there. And that’s all my defense.

Turn the Page

2009-12-31T13:48:00.001-08:00

A peaceful birthday, I’d say. Everything in moderation, as you wisely taught me. No excesses today, I promise. Fruit cake in the morning with elders and stories that come with lots of sighing. Earmuffs on and steady on the treacherous sidewalk I walk with her offering my arm for support, while she tells me what my estranged cousin has been up to. Ah stories. I miss them all, as I miss everything that’s past tense.

After that, a walk in the park followed by a problematic attempt to get coffee somewhere on New Year’s Eve. All doors closed but our tongues quite open and lively, so we’ll sit and talk about men and love and all this rigmarole of life once more. Men are stupid, she’ll say, and I’ll laugh wholeheartedly at her thesis in which she wholeheartedly believes. And are we, distinguished females, any different? Resolution for 2010: find out.

A subway ride, with little boy sitting across from me ogling me with resolve. He is wondering why I am holding a rose. He whispers the question to his mother, she sits there silently looking at me. I look up from my book and meet her furrowed brow, as if she’s pondering or she consummately dislikes me. Cheer up, woman, it’s New Year’s. And it’s my birthday.

Of course, there is someone who calls too late. Someone who forgets altogether. Someone who pretends to forget. And really, perhaps I’d have spent tonight with you if you weren’t so histrionic and sloppy. If there were anything genuine coming from you rather than irreverent, irrelevant passes I already reprimanded. Do you even listen? We could drink wine and watch artsy movies, comment like in the old days, you’d see that there are other forms of caring aside from lewd ones. But I give up tonight. I’ll be where I am wanted, not because of hormones or loneliness or doubts of self-worth, or to increase the attendance number. I’ll go where I am wanted quite honestly. Guilt and atonement be damned, I’ll put them in the 2009 trash bag.

Wait – they are clamoring for me to open the champagne. We are starting the countdown. Fireworks sound like it’s the end of the world. It’s not the end, people. It’s just another day. It just happens to be the last day of the year. But we don’t get so worked up about the last day of every month, do we? The date is nothing but a number, and so is age. I am just informed that I am older. But I don’t feel it. Do you hear me, baby? I don’t feel it.

Ghost Town

2009-12-25T02:23:00.001-08:00

How many times have you told me to come over for New Year’s? How many times have I asked you not to get me any present? It’s clear by now that we don’t understand each other. There are things you can only talk about with me, you say. But I find it as unfair to be somebody’s confidant as it is to be more than one person’s dream girl. Naive souls, I’d say, and at this point I’d positively have to tell you how high school you are, even at the cost of your irritation. But no, you’ll beseech me, you know. Oh, you know I am all that. And I’ll say you know nothing, and we’ll argue like this all night, because there’s no putting us in each other’s shoes, not for a second.

Well, why did we crowd to see the people in the past? Because I miss you guys! their plastic voices sound, and you know that’s not the reason at all. We came to point fingers delicately and laugh with gusto. Look at that blonde! Ha ha ha! Didn’t she use to have bigger boobs? Ha ha ha! In the meantime I’ll certainly be pierced by disapproving looks from the girls, since I’ve decided to be once again one of the guys, but sorry girls, what was I to talk about, boys and make-up? There is only one flavor of nonsense I’ll swallow in one night, and I’m afraid it was accounted for when I agreed to come to this carnival.

It’s ridiculous how we choose to meet in the same places, go to the same cafes as before. Not even their tearing down that perennial McDonald’s at Universitate will stop us, we’ll find another to have profound talks that are just like slicing the sausage, as she’d creatively compared. What kind of metaphor was that, anyway? We analyzed too much poetry in our days, it drove the meager sense we had into mutations of the fabulous. I leafed through old notebooks and was in constant jaw-drop to discover the last page, which is a kind of school epitaph for any respectable student. Saccharine lyrics, bad cartoons and curlicues, a cheap escape from scholastic boringness. Did I really write the name of some guy on four pages? I’m sure you’re wrong, she’ll say embarrassed, and she’ll burn it all to get rid of the evidence. Hand me the matchbox, will you. What – is there another way to deal with the past?

In Foreground

2009-12-13T07:43:00.001-08:00

Not to forget. This is the primal purpose of writing. Mine, at least. I’d forgotten Bucharest, like one forgets the name of an actor. What is it, Tom-something...? A momentary lapse of memory and then it comes back, in pieces that put together make a memory. One memory, like a page from a book I am leafing through without much interest. One, like a drawer with things thrown potpourri inside, that has to be forced to close so we seldom open it because, well, things fall out. And it’s just too complicated.

The subway has been renamed. I almost missed mine because a nasal voice in the ceilings spoke a destination I hadn’t heard of. But I hopped in, at the last minute, long after the conductor had informed that the doors were closing, and he probably scolded me under his breath, seeing me in his rearview mirror. Names with communist resonance have been replaced by benign names of abstract concepts and anonymous pedagogues I learned of when consulting the encyclopedia of Romanian relics. Fears are always in the names, the wrongs ignored, should there be no veneers thrust in our faces for dramatic reaction. If we don’t see them they’re not there. It’s always names we have to fight. Words. We have swords for those, different tiles to cover up old titles of subway stations. Or not even that – adhesive bands will do, as I’ve seen. We’re damn brave when it comes to words. And then we’ll say, as if it’s always been this way, that this train is traveling to “Precision!”

After I saw you to the bus station, left you with the precious books I brought you, I walked home. High Heels cafe is as stilted as its name advertises, the windows a moving caricature of authenticity. People inside talk hungrily, affectedly, as if they’re saying witty things, making funny jokes. Their partners are playing along, responding with hilarity at the prompts, faces stretched from ear to ear, meanwhile checking their watch under the table. To get to the eerie tunnel that takes me to my street I pass a sex shop. Neon lights spell its name vertically. They have redone this one too, I see, in all glass windows, candidness that says we’re not so prudish after all.

The eerie tunnel’s now only an alley, for two thirds have been occupied by a new edifice, a makeshift house for the workers who are drilling down the road. There’s a sensor light on the corner of the house that lasts exactly two seconds. In the quiet darkness of the grey tunnel the light scares you more than a human presence would. And then my street, albeit now throttled by tall new buildings, is an eerie tunnel in itself. Hot steam comes out of a sewer, dissolves into the cold air, and as I walk through it for a couple of seconds it envelopes me and I’m warm. And then my nose turns numb again, liquid forming at its tip, and it’s getting ready to snow, which it does the next morning. Now it’s winter proper, I suppose, even in this city that’s, in all its foibles, the antipode of pure white.

Airheaded

2009-12-08T16:14:00.001-08:00

This is me. This is me eating bread. I close my eyes and hear Shreeti informing me, ingenuously, that there’s cold rice in the fridge, if I want some. I’m way past strangeness, I know. I open my eyes and I’m back here, on Europa’s horn, dipping bread in butter, yes, dipping it alright. Alexandra does not agree with what I’m doing, as I know very well. But what she wouldn’t give to be here eating this soft, fluffy French bread with this fatty, authentic butter, this I know too.

I am on the fifth floor of an apartment building which we will leave soon. We live close to the airport and I often hear planes passing overhead, they rush with an unbalanced sound around them, as if the sky’s vibrating and they’re struggling to equalize. In the dark it is a tickling sound, as if it’s me who’s leaving, safely, so I imagine myself on my way to something and I relish the thought, even though I don’t really like to travel. But in the day time the arrival of the planes reverberate in quite different tones. There is a primary school next door and our balcony overlooks the school yard, where children play during recess and cheer loudly, with infantile sounds and merriment. If you don’t know what they are, the planes sound like waves. Ripples of water coming with elan, breaking against the shore, fragmented in smaller and smaller waves that abate slowly. The laughter of children overlaps with this ambiguous noise and there are moments when I could swear that the beach is right outside the window. Children are playing in the waves, the sea is prodding the shore. It reminds me of Rollercoaster Tycoon, that marvelous addiction I managed to debar myself of, the guests yelling in awe and wonder and the aquatic rides doing their number with jazzy, mechanical sounds. So this is what I hear when I sit here eating bread.

Ever since I failed the NaBloPoMo challenge I’ve been wary of this blog. It’s become the protagonist of my nightmares. It chases after me, catches up and beats me up. Could I be seeking more sources of validation? Could I? Every thing that’s convivial’s sooner or later infected with seriousness and here I am, one more thing I have to worry about. I wish I’d bring this back to where it was only a place of thoughts, a desultory collection, when nobody read what I wrote, when I didn’t start sentences with “My blog...” Some light things are better just being left light. Did I even understand the concept? Could I be taught?

Echoes

2009-11-10T07:56:00.001-08:00

There is a special smell in that house. Not an ugly smell. Not smell of old people. It’s her perfume, her hand cream and smell of clean, of scrubbed, not of new. I wonder what they are doing now. I imagine them as peeved about this unyielding rain as I am. She is in the kitchen, knocking wooden utensils about, pots clamoring for want of space. She’s wearing the plastic bonnet that hangs on her forehead, on her glasses, pressed hair sticking out of it in tufts. She pushes it back with her clean wrist. I say she looks medieval and she shoos me out of the kitchen. “You’ll catch smell of food,” she says. And then she embraces the “good” coats in the hall-stand and takes them to the other end of the house, lays them on the bed in a distant bedroom, lest they catch “food smell” too.

He’s in the living-room, sitting cross-legged on one of the two side-by-side armchairs. He holds the newspaper as you’d hold a map. Through thick brown-rimmed glasses he peruses important pieces of sport news, I am sure. No, I’m wrong. It was economics he was reading. Should it surprise me: as if he doesn’t spend every day teaching that to an amphitheater of students. If I don’t make an audible noise he doesn’t detect my presence until I’m in the middle of the room. “Whatcha doing?” he asks. “Looking for something to read,” I say inspecting the bookshelves. Then, inquiring: “Have you seen Foucault’s Pendulum?” He ignores his paper to look at me, then at the bookshelf, a considering look. I’ve already moved to the other bookshelf, too fast to follow, and in a microsecond declare with satisfaction: “Found!” “So fast, you are,” and it takes him a moment for the sudden changes of situation to register. I crash in the armchair next to him and read the preface. Curiously he peers into my book, newspaper paused. “Umberto Eco,” he enunciates, then “Ecco,” with an Italian ring. “Ecco!” he chants. I laugh. He with his newspaper, I with my Ecco.

She speeds through the living room on her way to the balcony. She is going to water the geraniums. “Why don’t you turn on the TV?” she says in passing, seeing us both sitting there in silence. Cold air is now coming through the open balcony door, numbing my toes. “Nah,” I say. Then I follow her to the balcony to see what she does.

Four

2009-11-04T20:24:00.000-08:00

Will I walk the long road?
We all walk the long road... *

There are four cardinal points. Borne of the East I head West, a genuine person of contrast. I’ve been wondering today about eschewal. Immigration is a big eschewal, and so is vagabondism. When we run from something we head in the opposite direction, with the caveat that we don’t always know what that antipode is. We understand distance, that much is elementary. Where would you like to work, she asked me. I don’t know – far. New York, Chicago? No, I was thinking Montana – or Seattle, even. Do you like rain? I don’t know – I’d have to try it for a long time. There are a lot of things I’ve left to try...

I told her yes, I’m looking forward to graduating. Why. For the same reason that Thoreau left Walden, I answered. “It seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.” She laughed. I don’t expect her to understand. And here I stand at the carrefour of thoroughfares, one busier than the other, and I’m still drawn to obscure little alleys. The compass wavers and careens, aberrantly, more and more to the West. It calls, like a lonely wolf, like a long road.

* Eddie Vedder - Long Road

Three

2009-11-03T20:55:00.001-08:00

Aller guten Dinge sind drei. *

We hurry across the road that should be called Church Road, considering how many such edifices lay along it, but is actually called something else. It is the Styx that we traverse toward places that, although within a stone’s throw, make us feel we are off campus, a wonderful feeling sometimes. There are three of us, the exiles who roll their Rs, the Eastern Europeans. On the other side of the traffic cosmos we meet another trio, fellow students, whom we ignore. They do the same.

In the fluffy chairs at Starbucks bleak thoughts surge and envelop our nebulous minds. We realize how busy we’re kept in this “school,” that we don’t have time to think about gloomy realities. Maybe it’s a good thing. Maybe it’s coffee that brings them back, blast it, this intoxicating harbinger. “When I was in the hospital this summer,” she says, and it’s not until I hear these words so simply stated that I feel fortunate, grateful for things I’ve taken for granted. What is a good body? A body that doesn’t hinder you from doing the things you want to do. If I am real good, will I be young forever? Will I, Santa?

Darkness is pervasive, now as present inside as outside. We tread through the thick night in quasi silence ruminating, glee somewhat amputated by too earnest a conversation. We chase gloom away with trifling topics that turn, invariably, into serious ones. We’ve gone rabid tonight. “They don’t tell me when they go out anymore,” she says blankly. “Last year it would have hurt me, but this year, this year I just want someone to talk to.” Just like that, a playback of a former version of myself, and I want to offer some reassurance that I never had then, some kind of promise that I know I won’t keep. What could I say? “I’ll come to visit.” That’s not true. “There’s Facebook.” And of what use is that? So instead of lying I admit the scarcity of her options, I steer her toward the only sane path I’ve found for myself: “There are always the profs, you know.” She knows. And on this final note we part. The last vestiges of Eastern Europe left in this prestigious institution, two almost alumnae and one halfway there, the most resilient, but I suspect also the loneliest, of all.

* (German) All good things come in threes.

Two is

2009-11-02T19:52:00.001-08:00

All alone, or in twos,
The ones who really love you
Walk up and down outside the wall. *

How many families I have.

How many chances I think people should get.
How many fingers I raise in class when I’ve something to say.
How many times I’ve been broken up with.
How many passions I feed.
How many people I trust.
How many countries I’ve lived in.
How many books I carry along when I go out.
How many clubbing nights I’ve had in Macon.
How many twos are in my age.
How many scars I have.
How many it takes to tango.

* Pink Floyd – Outside the Wall

One

2009-11-01T20:15:00.001-08:00

We’re one, but we’re not the same
We get to carry each other...*

One was the prefix of my age before all this madness started. Fall, vacillating between amber and grey, breeds melancholy. I miss being twelve, when the difference between the sexes was merely a technicality. None of that “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours” crap. Pragmatic children we were. I like to play with Lego. Got Lego? I’m yours. Yours, until somebody shows up with more Lego. And then I’m gone. Bucketsful of plastic polyhedra, geometry in pieces, cocktail of primary colors enough to steal anybody’s mind. The little people aligned with their disposable hairdos, braids or bangs or red devilish curls. Restive fingers mix-and-matched torsos and hair pieces and heads. From the great Lego massacre a large unisex population emerged, so we built a large bus and shoved them all in it. It never occurred to us that the Lego people would rub against each other in a less than innocuous way, or pick-pocket their peers. It was so elementary then. Lego people riding the bus. No agendas, no stealthy foes or amorous carnival.

And now? Now there is a protocol for everything. Even for poetic things, with poetry itself submitting to the frivolous, compromising its esthetic accoutrements. For spontaneity. Now we have so much to say that we no longer pay heed to obstacles of form. They bore us. And so does romance. What credibility is left to romance when we convey maudlin facts with emoticons and announce we’re engaged on Facebook. Expediency and productivity concern us deeply, dating is a conveyor belt of fiascos and successes that end up, invariably, in fiascos. The praxis of love has changed, but has its nexus too? Independence has a component that blinds, success too bright perhaps, fools us that we stand so tall on iron legs. I need no one, I proclaim. Come on. Longing is everybody does, the object palpable or merely envisioned. When veils come off, claims dismantled beneath the heavy reality that defines each of us, a truthful definition, all that’s left to do is to carry each other, because nobody is strong all the time. And “I need you” is not a shameful thing to say.

* U2 - One

Abrasive

2009-10-31T22:25:00.000-07:00

“Alors,” I hear her through the vent between the rooms. She punctuates her speech with Alors, the voice so shrill and ebullient that I’m grateful for this stabilizing sound. Alors. In my technical cave I am out of sight. I hear their maladroit stutters in French, their scribbling in notebooks, pro forma. But they cannot see me. They are playing a song, once, twice, five times. The tune catches and my eye is now grabbing through the vent, trying to see the name of the song. Is it written anywhere? I listen to the lyrics: la liste des choses que je veux faire avec toi. Google is my friend. Thirty seconds and I have it, playing silently in my Youtube. Je sais je suis trop naïve... La-la-la. I’ve a new obsession. I play on repeat until my shift is over.

A screen is all I know. The world becomes a display that flickers, a skirmish between eye and fancy. You should get out more, I tell myself half-heartedly. But it’s just like Bill’s plans, Bill’s myriad plans that are consummate chimeras, theoretical unlikelyhoods. So I sit here and build platonic solids out of white card, stick the tape on the inside for neat effect, and I think of all the stuff I’d do if I were not pinned, by noxious infrastructure, to this chair. How I wish that we were given education for the body as we are given education for the mind. It seems to be education for the butt, actually. An endurance test. How many hours can we sit down and listen. How many years. I am being schooled in liberal arts and I think that what I am performing best at is Sitting. My diploma will attest that I graduated summa cum sitting, which is to say that I’ve spent so much time fastened to a chair that I deserve to be praised.

And they ask why I will not hear of grad school.

Stories are fugitive, skeletal. They shine for a moment and then leave me, inchoate, and I unable to keep up with the pace of reality I wither in my cocoon and go back to the computer, where all my work is. Work that others give me to do. How much more work is there to do in the world? If I stay up all night, will I finish it? Will I be free then from this enslavement to the screen? I feel myself softening, caving in like a paper in water. Detrition builds. When this extrinsic reduction becomes intolerable there will be fracture and depression and drama. Then, I will start up again. My story is in want of moderation. But there can be no temperance in a world where there is so much sitting. Have a seat, she says, and breathlessly I retort that I would rather stand, so she looks at me as if she finds me odd. How could she guess that I am going mad. How could anyone.

On Target

2009-10-26T21:47:00.000-07:00

This is my new dalliance. Sunday mornings, when the dorms shudder with snores of indolent students and the churches swarm with the promptness of the pious, I go to Target. The first time I went to the Target in Macon I was indirectly repelled, because at checkout I read on the cover of People magazine that Britney Spears loves to shop at Target. But they did have cheap m&ms, which always lulls me. I did not return, however, until it dawned on me that it stood a nice bike ride away. Just demanding enough to leave you short of breath on scorching summer mornings, when the hills of Edna Place swell up into ever viler monsters that must be defeated, always lower gears and aching knees and never resignation.

So the circle and dot is today part of my weekly program. I am already familiar with the museography and know where to find each thing. I conduct myself through the isles with the grace of mermaids, for I feel quite at home in there as if it were my private cave. I try on things, which normally bores me to death. But Sunday morning the fitting rooms are empty and lonely, so I put on ridiculous garments and waltz solo along the corridor between the rooms like a harlequin. Nobody’s there to see me.

In theory I don’t buy anything. But invariably I end up picking something off a shelf and paying for it, something insubstantial like tea or, yes, m&ms. Partly I find it unsatisfactory to leave a store empty-handed, and I’m well aware that I don’t need things, but given that I’d like things, a transaction has to occur, however small.

But this Sunday I ended up going home with a blue sweater. A baby blue boucle sweater (if you were a fabric-fetishist like I am you would know what boucle is and how fantastically warm it is) for which I will not justify myself, suffice to say that I wanted it. Arriving to my palace-dorm room with three closets, however, and opening one of them to be drowned by my overflowing collection of vestures, I had to recant. The blue sweater had to go back.

As I drove to Target in my blue car, the blue sweater slouched poignantly in the passenger seat, I thought titillating things. I have never returned anything before. The solicitousness in retail, peculiar to America only, makes me stand in awe. Diffidence has kept me from taking advantage of these unprecedented paths until now. So here I stand, before two women who are folding things without particular enthusiasm, declaring proudly that I want to return a blue sweater. One of them calls me with an outstretched arm. I remove the despondent creature from the plastic bag and hand it to her. “Way too blue for me,” I offer. She chuckles, and so does the other woman. She asks me how I want my refund processed. I answer. The other woman catches my accent and asks at once: “Where’ you from?” Always amusing, the reactions that “Romania” educes. “Wow...” Both remain dreamy for a full second, surveying me like I’m a brochure for exotic holiday destinations. “Do you like it here?” she asks me, and happy to know the right answer to this one I rejoin “Sure! What’s there not to like?” “Yay!” one of them says and the two of them rejoice, that I’ve validated their homeplace with my European sacred seal, that I’ve deemed their country more appealing than my own to live in.

And this reminded me, so painfully, of a scene in Belk some three months ago, mother and I at the register paying for the matryoshka set of suitcases that she got, making smalltalk with the two boys who worked there. They asked us where we were from, mother’s verbal presence making it so much more difficult to camouflage my foreignness, and we told them. It was exactly the same reaction, a dreamy “Wow...” and wanderlust wafting in their eyes. It made me think about Steinbeck’s conversations with people he meets along his Travels with Charley odyssey, locals who tell him that they’d like to “go” too. And the child who begs him to take him along, cozens that he’ll earn his ride cleaning and cooking and whatever need may be. Such were the two boys at Belk looking at us as if we were Martians, asking us with their eyes to take them along, wherever we’d go, promising they’d earn their fares. “I want to go to Romania,” one of them said seriously, and then mother said something that was silly and gratuitous and displeased me: “You will, someday.” Like one of those things they say at the end of mawkish movies. I wish she hadn’t said it. The boy will probably not travel anywhere farther than Mexico, and if his possibilities should expand he’d surely choose something more “occidental” than godforsaken Romania. Well, so much for dreamy youths.

We spoke at length, Maria and I last year, about poor students, mostly black, who don’t know to point Europe on a map, who don’t know what the capital of Iceland is, like we do. We – who can do math and speak in full sentences, we who every winter fly home on tickets bought by parents. The smart ones, the internationals. We scoff at them, they who remain in the ignorance in which they are born, such degage criticism we offer.

But really, when is one supposed to learn geography when working at Target, folding things all day to feed how many, perhaps, as many as our extended families in Romania. Ignorance not chosen but rather borne, like a cross, while in the background imagined journeys and remote dreams smolder away. Is this not what movies are for, simulated adventures for the poor, the busy, the overworked or the demure. For the people who work at Target or Belk, who sleepwalk home at night with one wish: to sit the hell down. Unreasonable? I don’t think I’d want to open a book either, or study a map. I think I’d like to space out for a while, maybe stare into a screen that tells me nothing intellectual, and hit the reset button on myself so I can live through another day. That’s what I’d like to do if I spent my life folding things. And the highlight of my day would be a girl with an outlandish accent who’d bring back all the chimeras I’ve worked to silence. She’d tell me how great it is to live in the States and I’d avow how I’ve warped things into gloomy, how it’s not so bad after all, especially since a European says so. And out of the blue, under grayscale October sky, the day’s a little brighter.

A Ride

2009-10-04T08:17:00.000-07:00

It always comes down to weather. Moody, you’d call me, but actually it’s only echolalia of nature, this is what I’m made of. Build, therefore, your own world, Emerson exhorts and so I do. Today’s gray but not rainy, still but not bleak, chilly but not harsh. It looks like it’s ready for something to happen, something of note. So we wait. There’s that smell in the air, that heavy smell that The Toad told me was from a paper plant nearby and Bill told me it’s what Georgia clayey soil smells like in a sitting pond. Balo told me that she always thought it smelled like the garbage they forgot to take out. It’s perception that drives the schism between people, unconditional loyalty to our own symbolism what exacerbates these rifts. What smells to me like odyssey smells to you like gasoline that’ll take you to the mall. What smells to you like garbage smells to me like vespertine walks along the Ocmulgee river, at length expatiating on how unbecoming it is for Otis Redding’s statue not to have any eyeballs, and promising that I will fashion him some out of bubble gum. “I won’t let you do that,” you said solemnly and I, defending the argument, “But he’d be able to see us!”

Yesterday, since it was deliciously autumnal outside, I beseeched Nemesis (since we’ve developed a species of friendship I decided she must have a name) to take me on a ride to Lake Tobesofkee, at least that was the plan, a tour originally mapped for 70k which ended up reduced to 50, for reasons that I find somewhat humiliating. As a parenthesis, my firm-framed friend has been named after the goddess that delivered the reckoning for arrogance to the Greeks. She replicates this image quite well, for more than once I’ve seen her rehabilitated in the eyes of other bikers who had illusions of outspeeding, since she’s only a mountain bike after all, and not a fancy one either. She has been goaded, on occasion, to keep presumptuous drivers in check too, especially those who want to turn right on a red light and surmise, naively, that she’s not part of traffic. This reminds me: I’ve got to get a horn. All things considered, I’ve found Nemesis a fitting name, for other mythological reasons as well, but I won’t burden this story with them, especially since I think there are some things that ought to remain between my bike and me.

So I went, westward past the interstate, where the road narrows and climbs steadily, then climbs steeply, and what I wouldn’t give for a bike lane sometime, a little ribbon of asphalt that’s all mine. But this is Macon, after all. Further up, the road is edenic, with orchards on each side, miniature farms and tractors, and yes, a kid doing stunts on a scooter in his back yard. Hardly any traffic at all on a Saturday morning this far from the city. People are gorging themselves at Chick-fil-a, out for a movie at Amstar, having brunch at Starbucks, leaving this marvel to me, all to me, and how I jubilate and chant for universal shallowness. Following the map in my head I count the imaginary miles, more going downhill than uphill, since when I’m climbing I have a hard time focusing on anything else than trigonometry. These hills of Macon are such nuisances sometimes, as they worm their way onto the surface of the earth in a demented sinusoid that drains and drains, my shirt wet before I’m even 10 miles into the trip.

So at this point, where at the top of an agonizing hill I find deliverance in a road sign saying “Estes,” where is where I’m supposed to turn, I realize, like a fugitive flash of intelligence, that I can well hear the chain of the bike. Now, from my scarce experience with these animals I know this to be inauspicious, much like doing a headstand and hearing my back cracking, that’s when I know that I should stretch more often. Then I remember, an epiphanic flashback, that I never oiled this bike, and that I adopted it following a long period of idleness in Bill’s sunroom. Knowing Bill and how much he actually applies all the activities he plans, I’m not sure in fact whether the bike has ever been oiled. So here the mystery is elucidated, why it’s so hard to pedal, why I feel life squeezed out of me with every hill, and as I palpate the viscera of my Nemesis (so fitting the name just now) and my hand’s still clean, grease consummately absent, desperation enters.

Pulled over I muse, study my map, quickly improvise a shortened version of the trip, not considering for a minute going back, for I’m sure living with myself after such a failure would be impossible. So I climb on, chain parched and plaintive, but this Estes Road is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen and I forget all about my distress. Sun sifted through the trees, corrugated patterns on the grass. And a horse, two horses grazing, not even looking up as I pass with all my mechanical noise, they are in their own world and this space has no place for me, I’m merely a peripatetic observer, and even if I wanted to stop I could not.

After Estes reality is nauseating, busy thoroughfare with rushed drivers. And a dog! Yes, halfway up I see a dog sauntering toward me, quite an exotic character around these places. The traveler is a Pit bull and I’m going uphill on a thirsty bike, so precaution advises me to proceed on the other side of the road for a while. We pass each other, he seems to consider me and dismiss me as part of the landscape. Cars honk insanely as they see the itinerant animal and finally, someone elicits more traffic noise than me. On the same road a mattress leans against a mailbox, covered in flies, and I really can’t help but stop for photos. I’m goaded by a similar image later on, but quickly rebuffed by canine guards, so I snap one fast before their raucous threats turn into action.

There was a point when I actually considered giving Bill a call, a casual call to check if he’s around, if maybe he feels like driving a little out of town, where, oh nearby, nearby, not far at all, and it’s not that I’m in trouble but I’d really like you to see this route I’m taking, so bucolic, and maybe... give me a lift? And it’s right at this moment, providence and her sleight of hand, that a troupe of race bikers passes me. I know that they do this on Saturday mornings, but I didn’t imagine I’d run across them like this, so nakedly, at the intersection of Maynard Mill and Shi, when I’m in such an unflattering position and they’re so fast, and polyester-clad – some topless – and lofty somehow, going downhill at the speed of light, a flock of birds in full flight. Twelve of them perhaps, pedaling compact, and as they pass me they ask, each one of them, if I’m all right. And I, holding my camera which I’ve produced I don’t remember why, probably as an excuse to stop, nod reassuringly and pretend everything’s fine although it’s not, the chain getting drier with every mile and it’s palpable, especially in my thighs that scream with horror at what I’m doing to them. But for this fraction of a second, while they pass, everything will be just fine, I will look contemplative and impossibly fresh-looking, and they’ll have something to talk about as they continue downhill.

Coincidentally that’s my path too, Shi Road that is, so I blast after them and as I discover it’s all downhill, steep hills that anybody’d be downright crazy to climb in the opposite direction, so I slide with my brake pressed hard and still I fly. But well, these Southern lands are treacherous and whenever there’s a reprieve I know that there’ll be hell to pay later. And this happens soon, on Zebulon, where hills get the last sap of me, sometimes stepping out of the saddle and wondering if I’m dead or alive. Photos are no longer in the program. And still, there’s a mailbox in the shape of a school bus, so I have to stop for a minute to get that on film, and before I depart two bikers pass, struggling with the rough climb I’m descending, a he and a she. He, in the lead, salutes and smiles and I respond. She is behind and I wait for her to pass me, eager to say hello since she’s the first female biker I’ve laid eyes on in Macon, but catching sight of me she speeds up, visibly clenched on the bike and fierce to catch up with her man, and she does not so much as glance in my direction, even though I’m three feet from her. It’s OK, I tell her in my mind, women don’t usually like me. I’m not upset. But in reality I’m bothered.

It doesn’t matter how I got home, does it? In truth, it was one of those trances that we wheedle our bodies into, to go on automatic pilot while our mind meanders through other places. That’s how it was. The pain’s all gone now, after a good night’s sleep of seven hours, a royal treatment for me, really. Oil the fucking bike, a green post-it says. But now the world of Java awaits again, weekends crumpled into dialog with a compiler that argues with me about syntax and makes me want to pull my hair out, which occasionally I do. All this code, I loathe it. And even if you’re there to tell me what to do, to bring equanimity to my dementia, to give me a saintly hand out of quicksand, code is still something I suffer through, like purgatory, which I’ve the power to curtail at any moment, yet I don’t. With Java I feel dead. With Nemesis I feel alive. That’s just me and, don’t I know, it’s high time I stopped betraying both with this specious stagecraft.

Phobos Claustrum

2009-09-29T19:31:00.000-07:00

Once boundless, the sky is framed today. A tiny Polaroid blemished by vertical stripes marks the boundary between freedom and its skeleton. Timelessly I sit in expectation until the sun, for a glorious and fleeting moment, traverses my viewfinder. Under its warmth I melt, the specter of me alive again for a respite until purgatory returns for yet another day. The moment’s gone and icy walls close in on me, brandish their bastions in warning. My boiling mind notwithstanding, I am resigned to being trapped.

But the more circumscribed the body the freer the mind, it seems. For now the opacity of things has cleared and from turbid waters I see clear bottoms. I am a pendulum poised in revelation. Perhaps it is one of the great ironies of life that captivity makes ethics so much more obvious. Without oscillation time ceases its flow and stands still. The same day repeats itself ad infinitum, a well rehearsed act by the cold, the grey, the vertical and the geometrical conspiracy in this mise en scene designed to hijack my mind. But I’ve yet to yield to insanity. There is still much to read, and although this living is by proxy and anachronistic at that, since I’ve a penchant for the classics, it is the only kind of traveling I’m allowed. However meager for this ravenous wanderlust, I’m afraid stories will have to do, for now.

I remember as a child I always craved for the sweets that were not on the table, however diverse the selection. To want what is absent, to summon back what is discarded, to detail people who leave and disregard people who stay, these are the symptoms of the contretemps between man and life. It occurred to me yesterday that I would have given anything for a ride down a water toboggan, that is what I lusted for. The yearning so strong, the possibility so bleak, that I felt I would have gladly relinquished a part of my flesh, a finger or an ear, to have this wish granted. Perhaps I am not far from insanity after all. In hindsight I figure that on the outside I would entertain similar yearnings for seclusion. What I wouldn’t give, I would say, for solitude and silence away from this racket of the city that silences my mind. Yet restored from exile thoughts run in hungry floods and it’s a challenge to tame them. The hand scribbles madly in the journal, now my vade mecum which I’d never part with, and here’s me doing one more thing I thought I’d never do.

Another day through the viewfinder, the sun shines with promise. Life is but an afterthought, but I’ve no regrets and as I shed my scales to this catharsis I’m prepared to receive whatever’s in store for me, since for any scenario I can imagine something that is much, much worse. Optimism, one more thing that deprivation breeds.

Nobody's Business

2009-09-27T03:54:00.000-07:00

Easter of yesteryear in bus 331. A pauper dozes in the seat reserved for handicapped persons. Opposite him, a coquettish redhead winces like the smell bothers her. In the back of the bus a rubicund gentleman looks through the window. Two crones gossip. The air, of an inebriated hue, hangs. Closed-eyed, the pauper twitches, as if chasing a fly away, then settles.

The city is dead. Through the window a nondescript germination happens. Bucharest is a city of Lego with little plastic men stabbed in the asphalt to dissimulate human activities. The bus flies past them monotonously, heedless of signs and traffic lights. My lids weigh heavy, sleep presses and I am close to surrender. But the bus takes a sharp turn and I am woken by a thud.

Eyes hurry to the front of the bus, where the pauper has collapsed on the floor. He lies crouched in the middle of the bus, his body inert like a wounded animal. I look around. The other passengers avert their eyes, the window presently more riveting than the obvious spectacle. I take two steps toward the human mass and realize that I cannot lift him by myself. With horror I wonder if anyone would give me a hand. The driver condescends a brief glance in the rearview mirror. Not his business, either. Lines of embarrassment dig into the faces of people. Would anyone react if I said something? Would they look at me if I yelled? Numb, the bus rolls on.

Still, the pauper lies lifeless on the floor. His clothes grey, his skin ashen, his cheek indifferent against the grey floor where microscopic grains of mica glitter in the sun. He looks like a child groping for a toy in his sleep. His feet remain thrown over the base of the seat. Urine darkens his trousers in rivulets and continues on the floor. Concerned, the redhead raises her shoes to safety. She does not look at him. All around people feign preoccupation. Men and women are absent. There are only their carcasses here.

Breathless, I press a red button. The doors open and I gush forward, like a frothing stream against a manmade dam. My limbs are made of gum. Movement disconcerts, stillness nowhere in sight. I speed up to get home, where there are colored eggs and family, and everything is well. In front of my building lies the corpse of a giant mouse on which flies feast, ravenous. How picturesque, I conclude, putrefaction in the most select quarters of Bucharest. My hand poised on the doorbell, I cannot ring. I stand paralyzed, with my disgust, my shame. I weather a disease that must be faced stoically to acquire immunity. And then I do the only thing that we can do in Bucharest to live in peace with ourselves: I turn my head.

The Other Matt

2009-09-21T18:24:00.000-07:00

He has forget-me-nots in his eyes. I noticed this when we were meeting at the swimming pool, by chance, two flip-flopped pairs of feet dragging toweled bodies in the outrageous hours of morning. He asked me something once and I rejoined, perhaps with a clever remark which made him laugh, and then I heard his thundering laughter too. I see him almost every day now and he is still as intriguing, even more. Forget-me-nots rest on me sometimes and he smiles at once, a celestial rise, and I feel as if he’s seen me shiver and given me a coat. “Thank you,” I want to say. “I’m not chilly anymore.”

He likes my take on Thoreau, I suspect. Under his score of “97” I roll down like a crepe and jubilate. But immediately I want to ask “Um – where did those three points go?” because old habits die hard and arrogance is another battle I’ve yet to win. So I smile and say “I’m glad” in a tone that’s not humble at all, but at least the intention’s there and I have to hope it counts for something. He collects his papers under his arm and proceeds toward the door. I did not imagine him as tall, taller than me, and so massive, a friendly teddy bear. Grayscale hair, pellucid eyes and blazing teeth, he is a tonality of the dark room variety, not a man but a portrait, an esthetic interest at most, because he does not really exist, not in this version I’ve collaged of him anyway. We are face to face now and I feel petite, so few occasions for me to feel this way.

“So, what are you going to do when you’re out of here?” So I tell him, I confess my disorientation, probably use some profanity, which pussyfoots into the conversation too fast to detain, but I feel that now is the time to be honest, so I throw the curtains aside and just talk. “But are you set on the States? he baits, the corners of his mouth quivering upwards. “For instance, have you considered Canada?” I cannot contain a smile, my face much too naked for this professional hierarchy that was here a moment ago, but now...? So in this mutual amusement in which I know he knows, he knows I know he knows, he tells me what he thinks is better in Canada and, while I take notes in my mind, the moment of information gives way to the moment of revelation, for the implications of his question are gigantic, an iron bridge across such taboo waters. He is a person and I am a person and we are talking, regardless of how many springs I have behind me or how many words I know, how much politics I understand. He’s read my writing and he knows there is something here, in this coffer on top of my neck, and he does not need more than this to give me a vote of confidence, intimated as it is. My status notwithstanding, he does not see me unfit to do as I do.

So here is my comeback, not a revenge but a comeback I say, one defense to stand against all previous gratuitous evaluations kept covert, under the tables where at surface level there’s only smiling and benign jokes. But it only takes one, doesn’t it, to have a majority of one, and it is still a fallacy to say that an opinion is truth because so many people hold it.

At tables there are always levels, I suppose, even though our chairs have us at the same height. But in the intellectual strata I am the troposphere, this is the consensus. And hereby I must step into the armor of the quiet and passive, because I am twenty-two and what could I possibly know about life or about a culture that’s not mine. According to the Adulthood for Dummies, 46th edition, children must not be allowed to dump their gibberish at our dinner table. You have nothing to say, Silvia, and it is easier to acquiesce to this profile than try to refute it. It makes things more comfortable, if not for you then for everybody else, and doesn’t the greater good supersede the individual, really? As fretful as I am for truth, as averse as I am to lie, I would parrot this cartoon of me, only to make everything easier, if only, if only I had your vote, at least.

Somehow in this simplification it always boils down to an inequality that’s negative across the spectrum except between -1 and 1, a narrow margin, as narrow as my waist, and because I look like this would be pretty much the only reason why a 39-year-old, for instance, would want to be with me. But superstition is not truth unless you believe it, and folklore will always be the intelligence of the many because, well, it is comfortable to think that life fits in stencils and that to understand new things all we have to do is look at old ones.

“Let me know how it works out,” Forget-me-not says as he saunters off, his innocent statement connoting more than what is obvious. So walking back to my dorm room, which although devoid of festoons and paraphernalia of teenage dramas is still the room of a student, I can only be a person. I am a person who considers the world and quite simply tries to understand, if interest and curiosity are the only arguments I can employ in this unpopular defense I’ve improvised. Considerations of status I would have never thought override the reality of artifact. It is all an honest man can do to negate slander, whether frank or oblique, not by rhetoric but with artifact. In the end what you are is tantamount to what you can do and I find that a fair equivalence. Everything that’s not certainty is faith, or promise as it were, a bet in a race where I think that this particular horse has a good chance to win. But there is risk in this speculation, I concede, and although I could really use your vote, which you’re withholding, I’ve yet to be defeated, even with a majority of one.

Travelogue

2009-09-15T17:11:00.000-07:00

Cobwebbed eyes measure the interstates. Borders are irrelevant, if not for speed limits. Seventy in the South, sixty-five in the North. We care less about life at the bottom of the map. Heat and dust and grapes of wrath have us moderately insane. The gas pedal whines with my wavering foot, but no matter. Press on. At the other end of the state Bill unfolds route maps and worries. I have gone itinerant on you and, considering my flighty nature, you know, it was bound to happen.

Somewhere in Tennessee silhouettes of fleshy mountains are etched in the dark. Tents bolstered by the stars ahead. Another hill and I am there, at the base of the behemoth, but after each pinnacle there is a chasm and my wheels hurry greedily within and fall, like fluff. This is the cardiogram of night, of any night: a sinusoid that changes its mind so inconveniently. Here goes the first can of Coke, half-spilled on my white peasant shirt, the remaining half tasting of sweet awakeness.

Kentucky. The anonymous Kentucky creeps in with no welcome signs, no special recognition. Exemplary modesty, one could say. I am carefully inserted into the envelope of heavy fog and sealed inside. The night is opaque. Hades is puffing his pipe in the Underworld, smoking us out. Not much for courtesy. One more Coke before I yield to these heavy lids.

The endless Ohio. I arrive in Cincinnati in its most glorious hour. All alight and angular, a man-made organism. It breathes into me as I pass. Eyes flung open, mind sharp, I drink. The streets are barren but life palpitates, dormant like a hibernating animal. Ahead, the highway is all mine.

Columbus is a ghost town to which I have no desire to return. Creatures that sleep so peacefully make me drowsy. Not a twitch. Another tab clicks, contents effervesce and I look but straight ahead, where the night shudders undecided. Somewhere in this endless Ohio I bully a guy in an SUV to make it clear that I am awake and he is hardly. Petty delights of this monotonous drive. As I pass I take a sip and my aluminum goblet glistens in the moonlight. He is looking, I know. Adroitly I slide and sneak back into the safe lane, my alacrity conceited for sure. In my taillights he drowns ignobly. Another exit, an orange dot intermittent and I’m alone again.

Sun enters before Cleveland, for which I am grateful. But this is when sleep catches up with me and goads, the poisonous rat, the light of morning notwithstanding, and I slide from lane to lane, describe infinity on the road. I yell at myself. Concerned, I pinch my arm. Another can froths. Right and left there is nothing to entice, the eyes still trapped in long exposures. Although I am nervous I can’t conquer this wayward flesh that softens. A city, Cleveland, please. Please, sooner.

Along the water everything is different. After the Endless Ohio Pennsylvania is a meteor, short-lived eye candy. New York would be too, if it were not for tolls every ten miles. A full tank of tolls. It is right when you gain some speed that you can see the yellow booths up ahead where petulant people hand you unfathomable cards. A wordless transaction. Except for Niagara: there they smile and wish you a nice weekend.

Two more tolls and I am there. Cars line up in Fibonacci sequence. Passports ready. Origin engraved on backs of cars. New York, Michigan, Ohio, Ontario. Georgia. I advance before I am called. A border gaffe for which I am heavily reprimanded. The driver behind makes room for me to back up, contritely. Everyone is looking. I blush pathetically. Behind her dark glasses the officer’s expression is murderous and she scolds me again. I melt with shame for this poor introduction. First time in Canada? she demands. And with this question a door opens, a sort of crevice to look though which I do, thirstily, like children who don’t have money to go to the cinema but love the movies. The pleasures we fight for are so much more delicious than those we get effortlessly. What is the contentment of an American living in the States compared to mine?

There is a stamp on the passport, reluctantly granted I suspect, but my paranoia sometimes misleads me. In any case there is a river I cross and then a road, just one road with two lanes, where I am informed that in Canada the speed limit is 100 km/h, which is 60 mph if my math skills are poor. After my brazen driving heretofore the sluggishness feels bizarre. I crawl lento in the right lane, the big trucks passing me, everyone passing me. I am doing the right thing, at least, and hereby I imagine that I atone for advancing before I was called at the border and disrupting the events. No, nothing will atone for that. I am not a person of good introductions, after all. Never have been. I am hard pressed to imagine that anybody ever liked me the first time we met. I am for patience, forbearance, for second chances. For this reason I am not in a hurry to get anywhere.

You drove to Canada in one day? he asks later. Well I’ve looked at these Americans, always ready to get up and go, essentially a bunch of nomads without roots, balloons without strings. There is plenty of risk in this constant Brownian movement, of course, but there is also beauty in the breakdown and the possibility of happiness is always more attractive than decided unhappiness. I learn too, see? Few things are impossible and they seem even less so when you are doing them. I am telling you, on the other side there is more light and less fear and seventeen hours behind the wheel feel like a pat on the back, if anything. There are much harsher things in the world. Much worse places to be. Much more unfortunate shoes to walk in.

Pois(on)ed

2009-08-31T16:16:00.001-07:00

“I want to get out of here,” she says as she devours her beloved hummus. And me? I am praising my plantains. I say nothing. What is she hurrying towards, I wonder. She is going to graduate school. Her decision is made, nailed down. Today she left for an interview in Arizona. She’s a smart cookie, she’ll do well.

My superfluous encouragements notwithstanding, there is no envy here. Only a few resolutions. I know less what I want to be than what I want not to be. One of my reinforced decrees: I am boycotting grad school. I want to be one of those crazy escapists who stand against academic inflation with iron legs. We are a small crowd, I suspect. This cause is doomed to begin with, quixotic like some artistic statement. Like sympathizing with Humbert Humbert, yes, as risque as that. Do you hear me, Bill? Humbert Humbert has my vote. No – shut up. I don’t care if she was 12...

I had to write about my revolt against career patterning because today I discovered the hand-outs that Mi Amor (forgive me, your moniker is so apt that I could not find another to supersede it) has left me. A resume, a list with questions commonly asked at job interviews, another mumbojumbo sheet with what to wear, what color of folder to have and other such rigmarole. I have also been scheduled a meeting, it seems, with our career advisor, who in the past has failed to reply to my e-mails and fulfill the promises that she herself, without my request, has made. I must come up with innovative ways to elude the encounter with this fickle character, of whose helpfulness I am sincerely skeptical. How do I wedge myself in these situations where I am surrounded by people who want to help me against my will, I don’t know.

And then, how do you explain to somebody who leaves you half a pound of brochures meant to enlighten you in your professional crusade that you don’t give a crap about all that. That Corporate America is as attractive to you as fried cockroaches. That – slap me – your type is more that of the freelancer, which is the fancy word for an artist, itinerant, hippie, hobo, that sort of thing. Maybe I can afford such arrogance because I am good with computers. After all, the nerd stereotype is the Google guy in Hawaiian shirt and flip-flops who saunters in and out of angular buildings as he pleases. What a joke, no? Everybody knows that I detest flip-flops. But that Google-guy archetype is not so objectionable, I think. Not at all. To Mi Amor, I am sure, it is anathema. I will tell her tomorrow to test the reaction. I will bring a glass of water too.

Making plans, how onerous a project. Can’t I just go with the flow? If I could only find the water on this parched soil of promised land where foreigners are, suddenly, persona non grata. We have had enough fun with this full ride, it has been decided, it’s time for us to slide off the toboggan and make room for the local variety of achievement. It’s a shame that achievement is not endemic to this place where I drag my days. In any case, my days here are numbered. They are the color of anemia, of sedate boring colors, probably the color of the folder I will be carrying when I present myself in my solemn deux-pieces for an interview to be a bean-counter. In the meantime, I am going with the flow, the imaginary stream that separates the worthwhile from the pedestrian.

This Starbucks is all reggae today, Bob Marley and the Wailers, what a nice memento for sunsets with sand, waves and Shaorma. Shake it off, quickly. Better not dig up the switch for nostalgia. Presently I must leap onto my Pegasus and propel myself back to the temple. And, like much of my existence, the ride is all uphill.

High-flown or Crest-fallen

2009-08-26T18:03:00.000-07:00

After four hours of forced sleep I stare at myself in the mirror. Eyes bulging froggily, hair hanging like straw from my scalp. Red dots around the eyes, burst capillaries from too many headstands. Punctuation marks dead-center, the freckles I always wanted. Why do you do so many headstands, he asks, and when I tell him that he spends too much of his life vertically he laughs. “But upside down is vertical too,” the smartass. Yes, but it is inverted, my infantile friend. Like a ketchup bottle. Ketchup? Oh, that he understands well.

Nascent To Do lists germinate under my pen between bites of apple. I sit at this desk every morning and count the minutes. I make an inventory of time. How long until I go to breakfast. How long until my morning penance. You are two minutes late, my friend, and yes it makes a difference. I have exactly 78 seconds to make a sandwich and storm toward the library gobbling it up. How long is this going to take, Professor? The clock on the wall defies me with smug delay while my watch insists for accurate time, obnoxiously. How long, how long.

My hair is tangled in my watch and I materialize into the Room With Fancy Chairs holding a cup of tea, arm suspended awkwardly in the air, ridiculous even for morning scenes. Are you OK, he offers, earnestly concerned, and I smile bashfully and curse in my native tongue and take my seat between two neophytes who make me miserable.

It is the second time he calls me high-flown and for the first time I mind. I do mind, yes. I refuse to litter my speech with the word “like.” I will not be one who tells stories that sound “So I was like...” “And he was like...” “But I was like....” “And then he was like...” I just don’t want to. So I am high-flown.

At dinner I make a sandwich again, as if in a hurry. It’s because I don’t have time to spare that I leave, yeah, that’s why. I survey the premises and there is no soul that I would sidle to, no face that invites me, not really. I sit briefly to compose my layered meal and across from me there is yet another person who finds me hilarious and she has a friend with her, so I acquiesce and perform for them both as they expect, and I leave them laughing with tears. As I walk away my face is blank and there is nothing funny, nothing really. But this has nothing to do with the fact that I leave. I run because I am in a hurry. That’s why.

Back in the chambers, another To Do list to slay and carry-forward, into never-ending future tense. I develop new phobias, of the future for instance. A few weeks ago at trivia we learned that the most common phobia in America is arachnophobia. What exactly is the phobia of, is it an aversion to many-many legs? Is that because Americans don’t like to walk? What a bizarre zone I’ve landed.

The light flickers in the bathroom and it is me again, yes it is me, only with sunken cheeks this time too. Whenever did I develop such angular features. The same red dots, polka dot tegument and laserbeam eyes. Time for another headstand. As I stand inverted I make plans to delve into Walden and deny reality all claims upon my consciousness, which means not to open the door unless force majeure. But I am wrong. Presumptuous, too. I read in silence and there is no knocking, no solicitude. Tonight no one needs a thing from me.

So on this hard floor where flesh finds finally respite from pain I discover the pleasure of horizontality again. I nestle into this serendipitous ataraxia and feign, with all my heart in the theatrical performance, that I am not as lonesome as I feel.

Bivouac in hell

2009-08-25T17:00:00.000-07:00

He is dressed in pink today. He takes the laptop out of my hands without so much as an inquisitive glance. We have settled into a familiar silence around here. Broken? - Yup. It’s fixed, come get it.- Thanks. And there is always “I give up,” but that needs no words, it’s all in the air. I know, we are all overworked, Kelly said to us last week, and I remember wondering if those who dabble are as “overworked” as those who try to fix something. It depends on our unit of measurement, I suppose.

So I careen down the hall and seclude myself in the room that used to be a closet and is now a help desk. If I had been polled I would have named it helpless desk, since we are all helpless in there. Before the rigmarole and travesty we turn numb, like lifeless limbs, staring at each other and asking “So... any more problems?” A problem that is never fixed but perpetually patched is bound to surface some time, I suppose. All we can do is to become more adroit at ignoring it. Here, at least, we are doing well.

In the same manner of inertial complacence I stare at this screen and talk to it. I become one of those people who talk to computers as if they were fastidious humans. “Come on, computer. Please.” I roll my eyes and crave for a drink. My ghost in the holiday house extends a lanky claw toward the tequila bottle that I left, with unmistakable precision, under the fish tank. She gulps the anesthetic and sighs with her ethereal being. But I feel nothing. Nothing burns my esophagus and life is as bitter as ever. Eyelids open and the screen ogles me impolitely. Come on, computer. Please.

Last night while I meandered through the boisterous rooms looking for some machine to fix I came across this tiny creature who insisted that her computer hates her. You exaggerate, tiny creature, I said to her without letting her know how irksome her existence was. But she would not relent. Malevolent computer with a life of its own, full of hostility. Hates her, by god. A horse that would not let himself be tamed, is that so? Well, tiny creature, computers don’t do things unless told to. Perhaps the fault is yours for not understanding how it works. Perhaps. Do you even hear me?

Closing the door behind me I disfigure myself with a gigantic grin to shake off the irritation. And off to the next one. My computer hates me. If I hear this one. more. time.

Finally back to the temple, where I plaster up my face with pink clay and engage in my secret single behavior. Wait a minute – I don’t have that anymore. Last year I decided that the secret single behavior took too much time and too many cosmetics. It did not fit well with my future life as an itinerant. To be honest it would not sit well in my autobiography either. So I discarded it without second thoughts. Now I only do the clay. It freaks people out. It gives them something to talk about. And they need it.

It is more than fatigue that contaminates my existence these days. More even than ennui at my job as a versatile pawn. Ever since I saw that movie I do not seem to settle anywhere. Even as I am sitting the mind races, overheats, overthinks. I have not been on my bike for days. I wish that everybody could go to hell for a day so I could take off into the opposite direction. But there is no shuttle to hell. There is only one to the mall, every Friday at 6, and there was one to the Social Security Kafka novel today. Nothing else on the itinerary. So I sulk and with infinite reluctance lie on the floor to read soporific literature from ancient times. I do it stoically, mind you, only because when I am done I will have deserved to switch to my beloved Nabokov and end the day that way.

Somehow every day seems to end with a Russian.

Not all who wander are dead

2009-08-23T06:26:00.000-07:00

Through some conspiracy of celestial scope every time I sit at this desk to write it is Sunday morning. A time tunnel of Sunday mornings. Last night I spent it with Crevecoeur and, when my patience subsided, Nabokov. The former idyllic, the latter caustic. I weed through Nabokov’s tortuous prose like a turtle in brushwood, but still obdurate despite obstacles of form. You use too many SAT words, he says, and I say, man, you should read Nabokov, a little irritated but still patient with him because he does not understand that I do not do it on purpose.

As I paraglide through the pages I realize that I hardly need a dictionary anymore, here and there for things that refer to inanimate objects, like “crucible,” but this is only to be expected since there are not many crucibles in my life. How much of all this richness of language collapses into oblivion for lack of use, it saddens me. Words must be remembered on stray pieces of paper, on post-its, on documents on the desktop. I must retain them, for words are meaningful and beautiful, even SAT words, despite what anybody says.

Atypically early I brought the pages of the book together and Ada said goodnight, settled under her own weight on the nightstand. I sent my nightly epitaph and before I fell asleep I thought about the movie I saw today. Into the Wild. It finally dawned on me why Bill asked me four times “Do you really want to watch this?” and then implied that I would have to watch it alone. And I did. The best way to watch movies, if you ask me.

But it left me hollow. Words don’t come anymore, feelings either. The garments of emotionality stand at the gates, guarded, for fear of being brutalized again. Trapped, I feel a need to read Thoreau again, which I will today probably, since all I can do is read. Read and listen to this. As I listen I think about the guitar chords to play it and somewhere beyond mechanical perception there are thoughts about all the blog entries I will write about the movie. But still, words don’t come. Feelings either. I force myself to write four paragraphs just to prove myself I still know how.

London, Thoreau, Kerouac, Steinbeck, come back.

Please, come back.

Kindle

2009-08-21T15:43:00.001-07:00

“Can I sit with you?” she asks at 7.30 in the morning.

“Sure,” and the smile I put on is not feigned but earnest. I look at her and she glows somehow, it is not the blond streaks in her hair but something within. This is worth waking up for, I can tell.

We converse over bowls of soggy grits and mushy biscuit. She made the first step, I reason, so it is my turn to be affable. As I gnaw at carbonized bacon I ask if she is a freshman. Of course she is. “I’m Kendal,” she says. Silvia, nice to meet you. “Sylvia?” she clarifies. Whenever I inform someone of my name I meet surprise. Is it such an unusual name?

People here have me labeled as antisocial, I think, because I don’t sit to eat at busy tables and I always bring a book to meals. This comes from my early training in meal etiquette, which haunts me still. Don’t talk while you eat. Don’t chew with your mouth open. Don’t drink water until you’re finished. An American, of course, cannot understand this – neither the rules, nor my commitment to them.

Maybe they think that I am not very talkative, either. Oh god, how wrong they are. Tell them, Bill, how I talk like the radio, all the way to Savannah and back. “You are quiet,” Shreeti said to Mother. “Your daughter does not take after you.”

When Kendal sits across from me I switch into verbose mode. I push the edibles aside and want to know everything. Where is she from. An hour and a half north from here, she says, and she tells me the name of a town that I forget immediately. Oh, I know where it is! I lie, and relish at the content look on her face. She is majoring in Women Studies and is considering Chemistry too. How wonderful, I hiss. Thinking about the zealot feminists in that department and the no-longer-new 13-million-dollar Science Center that is our mascot, I say: “Those are the most interesting subjects to take around here.” Another lie, I congratulate myself. Well, what are you supposed to say to a freshman? “Don’t worry, it will all be over soon”? You say this in their junior year. When they are like this, nascent and pristine, you say “You’ll get used to it.” I ask what she thinks of the cafeteria and her cute eschewal is a reply that I could have anticipated. So that is what I say: You’ll get used to it. She understands.

Pointlessly she stirs with the fork in the grits and takes minute bites. She eats awkwardly, she knows that I am watching and is averse to this silence between us. She has bright, blue-green eyes emphasized with black eyeliner. What is that, a nose ring? Did she really have one or did I forge the memory? A freckled face, this I am sure of. Her hair is short, straight, with blond streaks. A flattering haircut, I appraise. “You remind me of Rory Gilmore.” She looks at me and her brow contracts in puzzlement, how adorable. A few seconds elapse until she gets the reference. “What – Oh! I love that show!” She finds that I paid her a compliment and I am pleased that my comment reached the target.

Well, Kendal, I must leave you. The 8 o’clock class beckons. As I say her name I wonder about the spelling and all I can think of is “Kindle,” but I know that it cannot be it. Of course I don’t ask. I will look it up in the e-mail address book later. I tell her that I like the name. She smiles, Rory-like. See you later.

I remember coming here, two years ago, a novice myself. I was scared of everything, always worried that I was doing things wrong. Surely I was not smiling enough. I was being rude. What a freak. These new people seem much more at ease, presumptuous even. Is it true, or is it a veneer and underneath there is bedlam. If so, did I put up such a persuasive performance of composure back then? I wonder. In any case: “You are almost out the door.” That is what you say to a senior.

To the hermitage, Godspeed!

2009-08-19T04:07:00.000-07:00

I have an hour to write a post. Strange how my schedule changed so suddenly. From sedate reverie my life has transformed into demented running around. If only I were more flexible so as to adapt more comfortably to these abrupt shifts. It feels like plunging into cold water, needles and pins and my lungs lapsing into irregular suction. Breathe in, Silvia, the coach says, and he steps on my hands to make me let go and take off. So I do, I flap my flippers into blue cascades. Now let us see if I remember how to write.

Please, wait! the machine instructs me nervously and as the barrier lifts I thump the vehicle in first. I blast off and cut in front of the guy who drives parallel to me because I am a woman and he is a man and this is how things ought to be. For the same reason I park on two parking spaces, outrageously. Each time some karmic purpose brings me to the Atlanta airport I think about Bill. Bill, the perpetual vicarious traveler, always the one who waves to people who disappear along labyrinthine walkways marked “Have passport ready.” He is never the one who leaves. Never the one who arrives. It is always somebody else. Someone who waves back with gratitude and promises postcards. Bill waits until the silhouette is obscured by behemoth guardian figures and daydreams about those postcards. His little pebbles of the world. I want to go to Spain, he tells me. And to France and Sweden and Norway. And Nepal and China. And Romania and Bulgaria! And... Sure, Bill, I say, and I smile indulgently. Let me get my shoes and I’ll come with you.

As I wait, in the wrong place as usual, I build up nervousness. I snap out of it for one brief moment, as long as it takes me to realize that I am waiting in the wrong place. I storm to the South Terminal, the function of my nervousness reaches a maximum and then glides downward as soon as I catch sight of a Starbucks. Finally I am in the right place savoring a ridiculously expensive drink in large gulps and I wait. A little girl ogles me and starts to follow me around. We play hide and seek around the conveyor belt where the parade of luggage unravels. We are at the zoo of suitcases. A set of Barbie’s luggage. A hobo’s bundle. A businessman’s briefcase. All are present. I sit down on the side, next to a flight attendant. She is wearing a red uniform and smells like clean. Her luggage is the first to be spit out by the machine. She takes off to lunch in Atlanta, or maybe to sleep, maybe to another flight. The flight attendant, a perpetual half-traveler who sightsees in microcosm.

I turn my head and there she is zooming towards me, radiant and tempestuous. She is wearing new clothes and I examine them critically, as I always do. Welcome statements. Then, the luggage belt. So, which one is yours? It has a broken handle. Maybe this one? Well, that was quick. Don’t worry, I’ll carry it. Her wrist is thin in my hand, thinner than mine I think. It surprises me and I look at my hand to make sure that it is really her wrist I am holding. You’ve lost weight, I say. You think? No, mother, you are obese. Let’s go already, I don’t want to pay these people for parking. But first, take five for a smoke in front of the airport. The puff-puff corner is trashy. It is true that cigarette smoke always goes toward non-smokers. It tries to entice them, to convert them. As I inhale without intention the life of the smoldering object I think of home, of barrooms and time-wasting artifices. Sure, we can sit here and drink our coffee and make small talk, but the repertoire is not complete without the smoke, now is it? You could not understand, I suppose.

There is a traffic jam, there always is on this godforsaken interstate. In the space between two cars that travel three miles an hour my thoughts lay down on the hot asphalt to be flattened and canceled. I talk, but it is not me who is saying things. It is the trivial creature inside me, the one I am loath to live with and am planning to have killed. So, how did you travel? Was the neighbor annoying? How many times did you get up to go to the bathroom? Do you know that once I flew from Brussels without going to the bathroom once! I step out of myself and marvel at my deftness with platitudes. Finally, we are speeding up. It seems like we traveled to the other side of the planet. Macon – next three exits! she reads out loud. Yes, Mother, we are here. She reads every sign out loud. There will be no time to think this week, I tell myself. I have to write things down. Chick-fil-a! is exclaimed from the passenger seat. What was I thinking. Self-scolding is in order, I suspect. I am already having second thoughts about this. Wal-mart! is proclaimed from next to me, with a German “w” like this, “Vaalmart.” Yes, Mother. That is where we are going later. After you sleep. Aren’t you tired? How can you not be? You are sure that you don’t want to sleep? I race to the third floor to take the elevator down so it can take us up. It’s complicated, Mother, you ask too many questions. As she takes over my space, invades my nest with her cosmetics that stain my sink and the clothes that will invariably become mine, I think, god, it’s great to be alone. To be a hermit in my hermitage, how simple and wonderful. How is it that we don’t know what little things are worth until we lose them?

Flotsam

2009-08-04T05:44:00.000-07:00

It must have been at the beginning of time that someone decided we are to amble during the day and sleep during the night. What an arbitrary decision this must have been. Night is as propitious a time for work as any other. Is it the darkness that thwarts us? Come on now. There is always infra-red. I have a flash light in my car, wake up. Wake up and let’s talk. Let’s tell scary stories. Night, devoid of stifling heats and gnawing sunburns, what a discarded gemstone. I wish the day capsized, like an overturned cockroach jiggling its legs in desperation. And I want the night exalted, redeemed like a reinstated queen.

I suppose that if night and day were inverted I would switch to being up all day instead of being up all night. I like to be awake when everyone is asleep. An owl watching the comatose, reading their minds, scribbling about them, stealing their souls. Night is the time to make things happen. A time for lonely hours in the dark room, smoke and mirrors under red lights. The trays sway with fragrant chemicals and I see myself in their spume. Or is it my ghost? Flat, monochrome people reach out for me. I lay them down and smooth them out and with my own hand kill them on dry land. I watch the life pressed out of them. The photos bleed in black and white.

The drugged light of sunrise blinds me and in this infinite space where there is only me and the security guard I bump into him and gasp with surprise. “Have you been in here all night,” he asks childishly. “Oh, no... Just came by to get something from my locker.” He looks at me, bloodshot-eyed and tortured me, and believes me. He sees nothing.

Tonight is for popsicles, Coke, cold rice and strawberry jam. My addictions are benign. I am not even eccentric. Impossibly banal, that is what I am. If I did not like to stay up nights I would not even have a blog. Tonight is for Fleetwood Mac. So many nights are. I watch your videos and sift these years that passed by us. They settle like white, light, high-gluten Canadian flour. Everything has to be sifted, doesn’t it? We want things sanitized. So we keep the pure stuff and throw away the husk. Say I were to sit in the sifter and tell you to shake. If nothing would seep through, would it mean that I am all husk? Would I get thrown away?

Such Great Heights

2009-07-30T08:08:00.001-07:00

Night of the insomniacs. I am flanked by two creatures who are snoring absurdly, one canine and the other human. It seems impossible to distinguish the two by audible clues. I am on Coke, the beverage not the drug, although it is atypical for me to consume either. The vile liquid that I usually avoid seems to do me good, however, since I am irretrievably lost in reverie instead of hopelessly numbed in dreamlessness. So deep into the hours of the night, I mean early into the hours of the morning, I put on my metaphorical glasses and begin. I am a geek avid for documentaries, that is what I am, and there is no point in me hiding this any longer. I emerge from the ideological closet and lock the door behind me.

A pleasant surprise I had in watching one of those marvelous documentaries that leave me positively drooling. Cold Fusion. Not a story, not an informative slap in the face. Devoid of anything political or outrageous. Unlikely to attract a substantial audience, I surmise. This is about people skiing, snowboarding and flying with Promethean passion. Scarlet-cheeked and wide-smiled zealots starved for snow, air and speed. Some people obsess about misplaced plates and unvacuumed carpets, others over “pitch” and “pipe” and “powder puff.” Microcosms versus macrocosms, both up for grabs and the choice is ours. To each his own.

Watching these gods committing suicide over and over in the most secluded places on the planet I muse over these borderline attempts by humans to tempt nature. A challenge that is either infantile or demented or terribly beautiful: kill me or embrace me. Kill me or embrace me, snow. Kill me or embrace me, gravity. Kill me or embrace me, bottomless pit. Parachute. Bungee cord. Dangerous precipice. Flysuit. Climbers cannot stay away from heights because they need – a peremptory need this is – to be closer to the heavens. And once arrived there they jump into white abyss looking right into the camera. It is not like in the movies, I suspect, where the jumper watches his life flashing before his eyes and, cowering at the last minute, makes grimaces of horror and howls like a rabid wolf. These people lay back and enjoy the ride, a 41-second fall, without gratuitous sentimental wrappers.

What is it that they are thinking? “This is it, I’m falling. Feels pretty cool. What if the parachute doesn’t open?” No, strike this last one – I am sure that they are free of such quandaries. This is what true passion is all about. Now they show a straw-haired, blue-eyed, bright-smiled prettyboy who says that he lives every day as if it were his last. A formulaic comment you offered, prettyboy, but in your case it is as true as it gets. What is more borderline than living on the very edge, the edge of your board, the edge of a cliff, the edge of the world, and to fall and glide from there, trickle down like meaningless matter until the very bottom, then climb back up and start again. I take my hat off before these birdmen who comb the Earth with their feet.

It dawned on me as I was watching this that the slopes are where people are truly honest. When they are mummified in those fluffy outfits, with shields across all their tender parts, they are more naked than ever. It is all about what you do over there, not about what you say, and all you can do is whatever comes to you in the moment, without preparation, like an impromptu speech. How truistic of me to say this. Well it is precisely because the slope inhibits organs that have worn out their welcome, like the treacherous tongue, and impel others that are primordial and more authentic, like instinct and courage, which lie behind the caution tape that society wraps around us to make us more tractable. When it is just you and the snow, all that matters is what you want and where your limits are. All the skills that society deems a well-rounded man should have are irrelevant on the slope. You could be a savage, a peasant, a king, a savant, it would not matter. The slope asks one to return to level one, when The Dream was to conquer the behemoths of nature and nothing more, to conquer not with spitefulness but with reverence. To tempt nature with such audacity is simply that – reverence.

This movie injected me a fresh dose of lust to wander. I only hope that I will not be too old by the time I learn how to do all these hallucinating snow things.

My Abandoned Worlds

2009-07-25T13:09:00.000-07:00

I am in the most beautiful place on Earth. A great silky mass of water lay before me. Flickering, winking, flirting with me. There is breeze in this great oven of summer. It picks up speed across the water and explodes in my face. Warm air, in a rush to get somewhere. But I am in no rush.

I am sitting here, as I say, on the edge of the water on a little stone bench. I am with the teacher. He is pointing his wise stony finger at me. He berates me for desecrating his oasis. His eyes, warm but shallow, want to teach me the word of the gospel. Hold on, he says, you haven’t heard what I have to say. I cut him off, the heretic that I am. Shut up, I am trying to write a blog.

My thoughts were full of poetry when I started this thing. But then something unsettling happened. The great blue heron appeared. He evaluated the situation from afar and then descended, the dinosaur, like a flying tent. The heron considered me and dismissed me quickly. I am of no interest to him, since I am neither a hunter nor am I a fish, which I suspect is his main preoccupation at the moment. He sat and waited, this creature of superhuman patience, but today is as slow for him as it is for me (unlike him, however, I just gorged myself on a gargantuan can of pineapple). Presently he is munching on algae, visibly frustrated. I seem to choose unusual places to write these entries, don’t I?

I remember starting my first blog, some six years ago when it occurred to me that I had too many things to say and knew too few people who would listen. It was on Yahoo 360, which was the coolest Beta thing around and I was mistaken for a tech pioneer for experimenting with such cutting-edge novelty. 360 never grew beyond Beta and I, the mercenary blogger that I am, moved on to Blogger.

I did not quit 360 cold-turkey, however. For a while I continued to write in Romanian on 360, where I had an established fan-base, and in English on Blogger, where I had no fan-base at all. But as it always happens when one tries to do a half-ass job in two different places, it turns out that two half-asses will never amount to more than an ass, which is to say that I was doing a mediocre job at both blogs. My jilted fan-base on 360 grew fed up with my infrequent and insubstantial posts and gradually lost interest. All was left was a pink and gray page where I announced “Nobody puts Baby in the corner.” So I put 360 in the corner, as it were.

On Blogger, however, where I wrote under my infamous sobriquet “Ceelvee,” I made some new acquaintances. Among these my future stalker, a promising young mind who eventually proved to be an absolute asshole. Jilted by yours truly according to the established formula, this miscreant took to hijacking my blog and writing (with much histrionic pathos) about his fabulous adventures with me, even though we had never met. It is difficult for me to summon any positive thoughts about this character, but I do hope that some room was found for him in a mental institution.

So here we are at blog number 3. This time I had to sever all ties with the pseudonym Ceelvee, lest the big bad wolf found me and started with his shenanigans again. Letting go of Ceelvee was much like self-sabotage, because of my imbecile propensity to become attached to things and especially to words. To relinquish “Ceelvee” was a lot like cutting a part of my finger and just leaving it there.

This new blog, which I endowed with the name of my favorite Romanian food that I knew the fool would never guess, was a travesty. I wrote it for all the wrong reasons. It is hard for me to admit to such egregious behavior, for I like to think of myself as the epitome of integrity. But I did, I sold my words for cheap artifices. The truth is, I had a 3500 word list to memorize for the SAT and I needed a place for practice. The betrayal, I realize now as I review those horrid posts, was consummate. I suffused those compositions with all the unusual words that I learned. Before I clicked “submit” I reveled in my feats. Every exotic-sounding word that I correctly placed in a sentence I considered an accomplishment. More than a collection of essays, that ersatz of a blog was like the primary school exercises that they gave us as homework when we were first learning English. Make sentences with the following words: table, chalk, cat, teacher.

Since I am very talented at digging a hole under myself, with that writing pantomime I succeeded to permanently convert my previously good writing into obscure (I wanted to write “recondite” and caught myself!) drivel. And this drivel still haunts me, still poisons me like a mindless parasite, even after two years of college in the States, where those fancy words are never used. At least I got what I wanted: I am here. I got an outrageous score in that damned SAT. But what was the price? Now I am grandiloquent, disgruntled, flabbergasted, and I find myself explaining words to American students. I think that if all I knew were “like” and “cool” I would have an easier life.

This whole reminiscence about old blogs was brought about by an e-mail I received from Yahoo saying that 360 will be closing its gates for ever, amin. They were advising me to save my crap because they are going to erase everything. So I went back, after a year of absence, to see what I had left behind. The cemetery of my inchoate writing is intact. Myriad comments from my former readers lay there as testimony of the popularity I once had and relinquished, voluntarily, in exchange for anonymousness in an adopted language. Any regrets? Decidedly, no. I cannot explain why yet.

One of my many theories is that people write blogs when they are missing something. To unhappiness there can be many rejoinders. Some people move, others kill themselves, others write blogs. All of these are portals of escape. With my blogs, each abandonment was a rupture, a schism, a new stage, a replacement of one missing thing with another. I was not one of those lucky ones who found what they were looking for and did away with their blogs leaving a reassuring message for their readers. I never did stop missing something. Hence the present attempt, the incipient blog number 4. Number 4, I wonder, out of how many?

Is that dog pee on the floor?

2009-07-24T19:15:00.000-07:00

We have a new roommate in the holiday house. You can hear his mellifluous voice from a few blocks away. With melancholy I remember my former life sitting silently with my coffee at this table in the mornings, thinking my quixotic thoughts. Few sounds disrupted my mellow existence then. After everybody went to work it was a peaceful time for me, when I could think and write and code like the versatile genius that I am.

But now we have a dog. A dog that meows. He is the equivalent of a clingy woman: the kind that repels men with her unreasonable demand for affection. Our dog demands to know where I am at any given time. He complains audibly in his language until he is allowed inside. His goal is to follow me himself and make sure that all my activities meet with his approval. When he is excluded from my bathroom activities he is outraged. How dare I banish him from observing the intricacies of the human ways? When I come out I discover he has left me a surprise on the floor. A common form of protest for his kind, I presume. Fortunately, he does not understand the verbal manifestation of my rage. My cussing would be much too colorful for someone his age.

Bill has illusions that the dog understands what he is saying. He looks at the dog and says “Stop!” The dog responds with a dumb stare. “See? It’s working,” Bill says with delight. The same confusion occurs when he says “Sit!” and the dog, after more staring and pausing and wondering, sits down on his hind legs and waits. This is going on in Bill’s head: “I told him to sit, he sat, therefore he obeys.” This is going on in the dog’s head: “These guys are going to gibber for a while here, so I might as well have a seat.” I suppose the dog is going to sit down eventually, whatever we do. I leave it up to my wishful thinking to connect the sitting dog with the instruction “Sit!” which I yelled at him an hour ago. Who knows? Maybe the dog has really good memory...

In any case, this creature has to have a name, and it has to be “Rebel” because it sounds cool. I call him Billy Idol. He could not care less about either of those. For the time being everybody calls him “Baby,” because he is a puppy, and he thinks that that is his name. Bill, of course, is oblivious to this.

I am beginning to understand why people say that dogs are good intermediaries for meeting people. Whenever I am out with the dog people seem to fall into mawkish mode. I am beset by an avalanche of “awww” and “ohhh” and brainless adjectives like “cute,” “sweet,” “little” and the ever-present “Pu-ppyyyyy!” This whole dog business has me a little disconcerted. I have never had an animal before. Not even a fish. Because of either terrible misfortune or – let’s face it – pathetic incompetence, I have succeeded to murder all the living things that I have come in contact with. Dutch tulips, Parma violets and a cactus are among my victims.

In light of my dark past, I am concerned for the livelihood of our new pet. Perhaps I had better tie my hands together and wear a muzzle. Stay away from the cage of the deadly beast! All parents, keep your children close! But this black fog of a dog still comes to me, wagging his tail in curlicues, and licks my feet with that warm sponge tongue of his. How ingenuous.

Adagio for Sunday Afternoons

2009-07-19T15:41:00.000-07:00

I need silence to write, I tell myself. I seek escape to a hermetic place, some haven in pristine forests. Or a piano room? Perhaps a piano room will do. The outlet, the outlet is too far away and so are my words. On the floor I lie, exasperated, all 6 feet of me, and stare at the ceiling and fall asleep with ennui. I dream of falling asleep in a piano room and being woken by the fingertips of placid suns.

I set my laptop on the piano and write away. For me the sound of keys is the sound of stories. For others it is the sound of Facebook. I like to hear loud typing because then I know that the story has passion. Or stupidity. Either of these makes interesting stories.

There is someone in the room next to me. It is unprecedented. She entered a moment ago and scared the hell out of me. I will admit that I was eating chocolate over the piano and I should not have. I realized my negligence as soon as this other being announced its presence. Out of surprise, or guilt rather, I ate the whole damn bar.

The newcomer is playing a sad song. This is half of my dream come true: to write on sunny afternoons while someone is playing piano. For the other half I would have to see the ocean out of my window. And it is Moonlight Sonata that should be played. To be honest, though, I am delighted to hear any one of those classics that are pregnant with nostalgia.

Now she is singing along to the tune. Her voice is soft and soothing, like cold water over a fresh wound. I am thinking about candy floss and evenings spent in the park, with dogs running around. There is no time frame to these memories. They are perennial. They belong to a time when I did not wear a watch. Who cares if it will be dark by the time we get home? They belong to a time when I did not care to look in the mirror. Who cares what I look like? They belong to a time when everything was beautiful.

This faceless piano player has made me gloomy with her sad songs and lovely voice. I ought to close the door. All the doors. And burn the bridges, too.

Best friends, for ever and never

2009-07-17T20:36:00.000-07:00

Lately I have been told that I ought to have more friends. So I pondered this advice in my quiet times, when I sit under an old tree and birds relieve themselves on my hair. Those are the times when I tell myself that it can always, always be worse. I ruminated, as I say, on my recluseness and what brought me to it. From this seemingly innocuous thought a torrent of mawkish effusions poured, for I remembered with much chagrin all my unfortunate experiences with friends and loyalty and this godforsaken can of worms that we call friendship.

Best friend number 1

There was a time in my tumultuous existence when I was open to the idea of having friends. In fact I sought them with open arms. But I was also very gullible and this attracted a lot of vermin to me because, I suppose, I was good to feed on. My first best friend was somewhat of a leech. But I found her absolutely wonderful. She possessed an epic cleavage, had an unfortunate case of acne and drove boys crazy. In one word: she had everything I did not. And I, apparently, had everything she wanted.

First my laser pointer went missing. It was one of those cool gizmos with ten different replaceable heads, each giving a different shape to the beam. At night I took it outside and projected a red Playboy bunny on the building in front. It was a new building with crisp white walls that had completely obscured my view of Bucharest. It fulfilled all the requirements to be desecrated. The laser had been a present from my aunt, who had brought it from Greece. No one I knew had something like it, so for a while I actually was the cool kid on the block. It did not last long, of course. When I could no longer find the laser I blamed my misfortune on my typically scatterbrained ways.

Then my electronic planner went missing. Scatterbrained, airhead, plus some other laudatory epithets from my father. I said good bye to that too. But the day came when my best friend came to pick me up for school and I could not find my deodorant. My deodorant! She helped me look for it, but to no avail. We had to leave for school. Circumstances made it so that the professor was late and I had a desperate case of running nose. I was desperate, mind you, otherwise I would not have taken the liberty to rummage through her backpack. Had I not, I would not have discovered, between the seedy objects that she had in there, my redolent deodorant along with my Titanic t-shirt, where Jack and Rose lay on their fatal boat in a final heartbreaking embrace. The latter was a present from my grandparents, who went to Turkey and knew my weakness for saccharine and completely improbable movies.

When my friend came back my mouth was still open. Confronted with the evidence, she denied that those things were mine. People had gathered round to watch the spectacle. In the meanwhile the professor had entered the classroom and was trying futilely to assert his authority by making discordant sounds against the black board, but no one paid attention to him. We had serious issues to discuss. Although everybody knew that the objects were mine my friend stuck to her story. During the whole commotion of people coming over she had actually come up with a fabulous story about a friend who knew a friend who knew a friend who gave her the t-shirt – who, coincidentally, the friend, went to Turkey! I was incredulous as I listened. I still am, as I remember.

Best friend number 2

After this delightful experience I allowed another prey animal to feast upon my soul. This time it was the chubby-and-funny kind of girl. I had the looks, she had the jokes and I was under the impression that we made a good team together. Until we started meeting guys on the Internet. We went to the meetings together, because we were only thirteen and despite all our aspirations to womanhood we were kind of cowardly. But after a few experiences where her “dates” told her that her physique was reminiscent of Frankenstein, she decided that it was all my fault and I had to be punished. The next guy I met was a rocker-type with long black hair who was twenty-four while I was thirteen, but ah, who is counting. He thought that I was seventeen: I had him persuaded of that.

My best friend knitted a systematic sabotage. First she insisted on coming along to all our dates. Then she started talking with him regularly on the phone. She assured me that these conversations of theirs would benefit me tremendously, because she would whisper mellifluously in his ear what a good girl I am and how lucky he is to have me. But instead she whispered that I was thirteen and I was a slut. And many more flattering things like that.

But I forgave her, because I am noble. Until she did it again. She did it with a friend that we both had, on a night when the fellow expressed interest in me and I decided that I was quite infatuated with him. But I did sense her covetous look, so I took her aside and asked her whether she had any interest in him. You see, I was going to back off, relinquish my first attempt at a boyfriend, if my best friend’s feelings were at stake. She assured me that she could not care less about him.

So we had a good run, he and I, and a gruesome break-up. But while we were living our teenage love affair, this best friend of mine was so infuriated with my insensate behavior that she wrote my name and my address on all the benches in our neighborhood park. How do I know? I got a call one day from a hobo who was looking for a good time. He thought that Silvia, hot and juicy whore, sounded pretty good. She told me that she was the one who did it, but was unapologetic about it.

Best friend number 3

Before high school I was the personification of a good girl. I studied, was erudite, did not smoke, had no social life and wore maiden-like braids. Everybody liked me because I knew things, shared them and had a droll sense of humor. I find it ironic how the droll humor I have kept, but my fans I have inexorably and irretrievably lost.

So in light of my good behavior one of our teachers decided that I would be the best company for the female badass of our class. She was ignorant, intractable and somewhat of a burgeoning vamp. My role was to tame her. I did not succeed in doing that, but instead gave myself permission to canoodle with her wayward ways: stealing green peaches from the neighbor’s tree, riding the bus without a ticket, wearing belly-button-exposing minimal shirts, thinking that school is claptrap. Stuff that I had not imagined myself doing in a million years.

With time I grew disinterested in school. But I still did my homework and knew things, because that I could not help. So my dearest friend copied the homework from me, passed it on to everybody else in the class, and declared herself a philanthropist. In the end there were only a handful of us who actually bothered to do that stinky homework. But the others were clever and would not share with the masses. I remained the only pillar supporting the poor low-lives floating in the stew of indolence.

Once I put my foot down and refused to share my homework as well, I was denounced as a traitor. The voice that was most virulent was hers, my best friend’s. So my heart melted and I did give her the homework, but I made her promise that she would not disseminate it. She did, of course, and once again I was the petty miser and she was the goddess of the people; I was in disgrace and she was in exaltation. She even made me, my beloved, whisper the answers to her whenever she was asked to stand up and recite the lesson. I hid behind some tall dude and whispered away and at the end she berated me for poor volume or no diction. I’d do it all for her. My best friend, what the hell!

Best friend number 4

As a result of all this trauma, upon entering high school I nursed myself by dying my hair platinum blond and acquiring not one friend but six, an entire female gang. When this too blew over, as it was bound to happen, I made a last attempt at a best friend. She was pretty and witty, smoked and had a penchant for long-haired rockers. She was my brunette counterpart. While at school we were inseparable. I was eighteen by this time, so one could say that I knew better. But I did not.

The boys who probably slept with inflatable dolls constantly snarled belittling jokes at us both. It’s because they are not getting any, she used to say. She was probably right. She stood up for me and I stood up for her and in the end we put up a wicked fight with clever low blows and barbarous sarcasm, and those miscreants were silenced for all their embryonic testosterone and their bitter frustration. But she did have a glitch, this friend of mine: she insisted on telling me that my boyfriend was an idiot. Not stopping at that, she insisted to demonstrate it whenever he was around and, in doing so, took advantage of his good-hearted nature which detained him from retaliating as she deserved. If this had been all, I suppose that I could have put up with her idiosyncrasy or perhaps tried to train her. But there was something more serious at play, which was that in my friend’s body lived the most unreliable person on the planet.

Whenever we made plans she canceled them. Any kind of plans, any kind of outing. Anything that did not involved school, which she was required to attend for objective reasons. We were friends for more than a year and I only managed to see her outside of school once, although plans, well, we must have made hundreds of those. Her pattern became so predictable that I had come to know exactly when the cancellation message would come and what kind of an excuse she was going to make. She is leaving town, she has the flu, the dog is sick, you name it. My father and I chuckled together about this procedure, for I lay my phone on the table and stared at it and one moment later her message arrived, so accurately foreseen, with some ridiculous excuse like “I don’t have a bus ticket to come and meet you!” Father would smile in amusement and I would smile, more with bitterness than anything else.

I confronted her once and inquired about her reasons, but – a defense that reminded me of the past – she denied that she had canceled Every. Single. Meeting. We. Ever. Had. Surely I was exaggerating. Strangely enough, she did go out with other people. I knew this for sure. She was shallow, but a nice friend to have when you have no one else, and I would have liked at least to understand what happened there. I suppose I never will.

Sadly we have come to the finale of the freak-show. It is time for me to draw the curtain over the junkyard of my friendship-fiascoes, the sepulchers of camaraderie. These are my friends, ladies and gentlemen. Hats off.

So I remain here, still a hermit, still writing my blog, alone and happy.

Wordy Ones

2009-07-01T20:43:00.000-07:00

It is my opinion that a writer reads in a different way than an ordinary reader. We – and I say "we" without dissimulated humility, since I consider myself a writer in spirit – drink the words, wound them on the spindles of our imagination. We taste them like one would taste a strong, flavorful liquor: in small sips, imbibing our tongues with their meaning, with their personality. We wonder if we could have said it as well. We wonder if we could have said it better. Sometimes we marvel at words well chosen. The verbal self becomes enamored with harmonious sequence, with unexpected juxtaposition. We are suckers for linguistic innovation. Reading is an experience of curiosity, covetousness and love. I have often heard people say that they are “in love” with an author, but the statement seems hyperbolized because how can you love someone you have never met? This kind of love, it is not love for a person but for words, for faceless and pregnant words. In fact it is more envy than love. It is for me, anyway. Is it not true that we seek partners that outsmart us in some way and give us the incentive to rise, a pinnacle to reach and surpass? In this sense, books are our truly permanent partners, the ones that never give us reason to fall “out of love” with.

I wrote this with something in mind, of course, and those who know me well must know that it is Steinbeck who brought the thoughts to fruition. Each time I finish a book I write down the parts that I know I will want to read again. It is usually only a couple of sentences and paragraphs. A Henry Miller is an exception, for I can never set down to select excerpts – I would be copying down the entire book. In “Travels with Charley” it came down to ten big fat paragraphs, although if I had indulged my rapacious literary appetite it would have been much more than that. This time there was no quandary about which one should go in this post, however. I knew it when I read it. As is often the case, it was as if Steinbeck had read my mind. It is frustrating how someone can give voice so simply to ideas that in your own mind are so arcane and convoluted that you are misled into thinking that they are not worth anything. It is frustrating, yes, and it fills me with envy and gremlinian spite. But it is also overpoweringly enticing.

“In Europe it is a popular sport to describe what the Americans are like. Everyone seems to know. And we are equally happy in this game. How many times have I not heard one of my fellow countrymen, after a three-week tour of Europe, describe with certainty the nature of the French, the British, the Italians, the Germans and above all the Russians? Traveling about, I early learned the difference between an American and the Americans. They are so far apart that they might be opposites. Often when a European has described the Americans with hostility and scorn he has turned to me and said ‘Of course, I don’t mean you. I am speaking of those others.’ It boils down to this: the Americans, the British, are that faceless clot you don’t know, but a Frenchman or an Italian is your acquaintance and your friend. He has none of the qualities your ignorance causes you to hate.”

John Steinbeck - Travels with Charley (p 210)

Mornings at Windermere

2009-06-30T08:19:00.000-07:00

So today I peeled myself from bed at 6 in the morning. The terrorizing alarm clock had been roaring for ten minutes, but I seem to have developed immunity to its chant. With anesthetized eyes I set off for my morning walk, me and my camera. In the summer it is only during the outrageous hours of the morning, when only the drunkards and the overachievers are awake, that you can be outside and feel like a human being. At all the other times you feel like a potato in the microwave, dying a slow death smothered in a paper towel.

Believe it or not, there is a 6 am “crowd” roaming these wide roads that are our walking routes. We know each other by now. Let us make a brief inventory. There are the two inseparable middle-aged ladies who carry these wide, gruesome smiles in their pockets and put them on as soon as they see me. As I catch sight of them, the white cotton shirts, I turn onto a side road whenever possible. There is also the Saturday Shirtless Guy, but he is only an occasional participant to the walking marathon. He lives under the impression that he is a Greek god and wants to make the fact known to everyone. There is something truly incongruous about a topless dude jogging on the side of a five-lane road. You expect to see the beach somewhere, but it is missing. Did I miss a meeting – is this Macon, or Malibu? My rejoinder is the same to women who jog outdoors wearing sports bras. I know that it is hot and everything, but PUT SOME CLOTHES ON, PEOPLE. One of these latter specimens is a morning walker, a woman, must be in her forties, who is excessively bony. All the parts of her body are somehow suspended unnaturally at a 45 degree angle. She keeps the jogger posture, you know, upper limbs rigid and gathered. I am sure that in a crowd her elbows can be used as a weapon of mass destruction.

There is also a ceremony of salutes involved in these cursory encounters, but I will not talk about that. Instead I will dwell on something which truly puzzles me, which at times makes me turn my head and stare at these people kicking dust with their heels. Jogging – why? So the idea is that we put on a costume consisting of polyester shirt and shorts (that is how they make these running outfits, 100% synthetic), we pull our hair back with one of those heinous bands that squeeze our skulls, we buy really expensive running shoes that look like spaceships, and we run. Actually it is not exactly running, because that kind of effort and speed is not sustainable on longer distances for regular people like us. So what takes place is more like hopping, running’s unrefined cousin. So we hop and we sweat. We hop and we sweat and damage our knees. You cannot possibly think that we make our joints happy when we hurl our entire weight onto them again and again. So after we make a milkshake out of our internal organs and return home drenched in sweat and with bad knees, do we feel good? I wonder whether these people jog for pleasure or because others are doing it. Better yet – maybe they do it because it feels good to overtake the slower participants, the walkers, who are not soaked in sweat and do not get bad knees, and who actually take the time to look to the right and to the left. Who is better off, I wonder, the walkers or the joggers? Since I am a photographer, I suppose, I will never be a jogger.

The most arcane mystery of the walking crowd comes with the heavyweights. Every now and then you see them: panting, groaning, sweating, nearly breathing their last but still going – jogging, I mean. Yet their presence is recurring throughout the year and each time they exhibit the same egg-shaped and rubicund features. Is there a universal conspiracy against the humpty-dumpties of Macon? Forgive me, I can never be delicate when the situation requires. I am genuinely concerned, though, about the futility of their efforts to lose weight. Or are these efforts merely simulacra, like occasional outings to maintain appearances, to shut the hecklers up. It is a gesture that seems to say “See? I am trying!” – much like me going to the theater, which also happens twice in a year. But what is the point, really? Instead of sequestering the rebellious flesh into sweat-inducing, weight-losing garments, exercising themselves pathetically on the side of the road to delirium and then swearing off physical activities for the next six months, why not put on normal clothes and go for a walk. Walking, you know? The thing that is not jogging. The kind of thing that you do for pleasure, not to lose weight or to keep up with the trends.

In any case, on the way back from the morning walk I meet everyone again. It seems that all of us travel to a certain point and then turn around and walk back. Only I do not like to turn around: it feels like regression. So I seek to make a loop and then it is as if I am walking a whole new road, a virgin path. I am an intrepid explorer. When I return I have come full circle. Windermere Circle. It is 7.30 and time for breakfast at the holiday house.

Like Atoms in A Fugue

2009-06-28T21:44:00.001-07:00

I had a friend from Vietnam once. She used to braid my hair and get bored halfway and leave it in a mess. I had the pleasure of hosting her recently when she came to Macon for the Cherry Blossom Festival. Of course she got the date wrong and arrived a week before the festival proper, so she left frustrated and infestive, as it were. Admittedly, it did not surprise me. She was never the organized, prescient kind. In fact she is the type who in America would be diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder and prescribed a fistful of pills. In Vietnam, I suppose, she is just a regular girl.

I am the first to admit that I do not have patience for everything. I remember a time when I did, however. Learning how to work my antediluvian Russian sewing machine was a superhuman effort and I, god knows, got to know all its whims. Now, however, I find myself hitting the imaginary CTRL + F just to find my keys in my room. Just find them, damn it, where are they! And I jitter my leg like a madwoman.

It ought to have been the other way around. It is children who are impulsive and instinctual. They do not care to know how things work but rather to ask and ask and ask and remember nothing, just so they can ask again. But as we grow up and ascertain the workings of the world – learn the settings of the microwave, train ourselves to check the oil in the car – we cultivate patience for details. At least in theory. The situation de facto is that people skim texts rather than read them. They buy half-cooked foods and cakes-in-a-box rather than cook for real. Holes in socks and missing buttons are a common occurrence, because who is familiar with the artful craft of sewing nowadays? My foreboding Media Studies prof would be eager to asseverate that people are becoming more and more mechanical, inattentive and essentially robotic.

I am skeptical about that thesis, however. It seems unlikely that the patience of the world has run down the drain with the dregs of technological development. Patience does not come in a limited amount, like natural gas. The popular theory is that patience has been eroded by convenience, like rocks yield their substance under the abrasive pressure of water. Since we have dishwashers and microwave ovens and vacuum cleaners, we can relax more around the house. Since we have Walmart our cooking is minimal. The cars that meow in our driveways render obsolete the uncivilized bustle of riding the bus, waiting for the damn thing, smelling the proximity of the other passengers. How primitive it was, back in the day. How far we have come. So if our patience is no longer being taxed by these nuisances, where does it all go?

Well I’ll be damned if here in the South people don’t spend 70 per cent of their existence smiling. Perhaps this is where our resources go: making small talk, stretching our faces, getting along with people. Does this amity come naturally? On the contrary, it is an effort. Unlike the detail-oriented efforts of the past that belonged to rustic living – a self-made dress, a home-made birthday cake – living in harmony with others is today an effort “en gros,” like a full work-out for our persona. I am convinced that the concept of “persona” is a recent addition to our vernacular, born from this fecund pressure of social protocol. We have to contrive to be a certain somebody and this full-on pantomime sucks in all our patience like a vacuum. Who is peeved every day when coming home from work, say Aye. Why, it is just about anyone who works in an office.

I recognize it here, in our holiday house. Being in the world is exhausting. When you kick off your shoes and collapse in a chair it feels like being released from prison. It is only “home” that you feel safe enough to relinquish the phony accoutrements that are requisite everywhere else. It can be disconcerting to know somebody in “home” mode after you have known him in “social” mode. Sentences without smiles, curt comments that betray ominously irate underlayers: these are things that are not acceptable in the work place. But they are inside, frothing, because we are human after all. So they have to find a crevice to seep out.

If you live with people who work in an office it may seem sometimes, because of the illusion of artificial habitude, that they are mad at you. They might let dishes pile up in the sink, let dust gather on furniture, do things that say “I don’t have patience for this.” But they are not angry or irritated – they are just being normal. Their reservoir of patience has been pilfered by a compulsory, sophisticated species of decorum that encourages people to be less human and more zombie. Patience is not extinct. It is still there but it has been derailed, like a hijacked train, toward objectives such as: must look good in society, must do a good job, must get along with everybody. With this mask of unnatural harmony draining our resources of patience, no wonder we need antidepressants for the natural, uncontrived side of life.

A Plague

2009-06-22T06:35:00.000-07:00

When I decided to take the SAT a new realm opened up before me. I had a new project, something to occupy my jilted mind with. This time the promise was of a fair trial. The rigidity of the testing process contrasted sharply with the examinations that I was used to. My calendar shone with highlighted dates, my stock of number 2 pencils was replenished. I was going to take a test and it was going to be honorable. For the first time there would be no cheating. Nothing had been that strict before. I thought it an auspicious beginning, like a yellow brick path that would take me, finally, somewhere.

The age of eighteen found me weary and flippant. An early age to be tired of life. If I had read Camus then, perhaps he would have managed to teach me how, on the whole, men are more good than bad. That precept, had I espoused it in earnest, would have obviated the bitterness I accrued with each passing day. Admittedly, it was not life I was fed up with but living itself, the active participation in everything that happened to me. By this time I had had my share of disappointments, the series of which reached the pinnacle with the sordid burlesque that was the Baccalaureate. The sudden realization that nepotism and favoritism overrode honest work sent me fuming, almost in hysterics. I returned home from each test in a daze.

As I waited for my turn to the oral examinations at the ramshackle school where I was assigned, the human pantomime unraveled before my eyes. Sloths I had taken classes with, who could not speak in full sentences, who did not know how to hold a book, gloated with triumph as they emerged from the building flaunting their grades. Their bought grades. Like everybody else I knew their worth, their worthlessness. The rest of us stood paralyzed before this revulsive satire. The world had been turned upside down. Brutes that were not good enough to kiss our feet were gods, and we were their groupies, their retinue. My peers shook hands with these harlequins obsequiously, as if the wheel of fortune had been somehow reversed and they were now the heavyweights, the masters. Even more than these thieves who were taking the stage, it was those timeserving Pharisees that especially nauseated me. It was like watching Beavis and Butthead, where everyone pretends not to notice how utterly stupid the situation is. Here we were pretending that it is natural for incompetence to conquer all. Why did we feign so well? Perhaps we are too familiar with the souls of mercenaries. We live among them. Sometimes we inhabit them. Whatever is required. In this instance it was required to dissimulate that it is natural for incompetence to prevail, so we delivered.

The performance was unbearable. I allowed myself to be incensed, to seethe with indignation. I even allowed myself the pleasure of contempt and pity for the fatuous opportunists who were now the center of attention. If you ever lived where I lived, you would know that one must get over these things quickly to keep on living sanely. But presently I could not reconcile myself with this particular situation, where success had been so shamelessly travestied.

It is hard to regain your composure in such situations, especially if you are the next one on the list. My name was called. So I played along in the charade, went through the door with apprehension like an innocent little schoolgirl. I knocked and was beckoned to enter. But when I came face to face with my examiners something went terribly wrong. My face was screaming. I was trying to tame my mutinous muscles but they would not relent. A battle was being fought under my skin, between propriety and visceral insurgence. What were you thinking! my face screamed at the pathetic duet before me. They were two women. One of them: your typical crone with aspirations of coquetry. The other: young and quite pretty, but severe and forbidding. Two anonymous shapes, two more pieces in the modular chess game of playing academics. Professors, they call them, these quacks who make a mockery of our merits. What were you thinking, I offered silently. They looked at me blankly. Maybe I smiled, I don’t know. The evaluation began.

I had my notes in my hand; my erudite vocabulary up my sleeve. As I spoke my palms sweated uncontrollably and I had to hide them. The older deviless, impressed, nodded along to encourage me. A smile insinuated itself on the lips smudged with flaming lipstick. She had probably expected nothing of value from me. But the young one, she was a tough cookie. A furrowed brow was all I got. What was truly unpleasant was that I knew why. I was the hireling of no one. I had no warrant, no star next to my name, no one of importance had put the approval stamp on my value. My bought value. As I mused on this my confidence waned and I became transparent. The damsel saw the battle under my skin and she knew what I was about, all conceit and contempt. Who are you to judge me, she seemed to say. Get used to it, kid: this is how it starts. You start all hopeful and starry-eyed and when you come out of the scholastic slaughter-house voila, the pedagogue-humanoid with his wires still sticking out of his head, freshly incinerated and recycled for future use. When you are 30, living with your parents and earning minimum wage you get laxer on quixotic affairs like correctitude and justice. If all this is a pile of crap, then we all partake of it in equal servings. And why should you be different? Come here, grab a spoon, dig in.

There was silence, suddenly. I had finished answering the questions. I quickly assessed my harvest: I had managed to impress an unsuspecting old hag, who gave me a 10 and continued to praise my vocabulary as she scribbled down her notes. I had also managed to secure the animosity of the young witch, who insisted on a 9 for a technicality. Apparently I had pronounced a word wrong, or something equally insubstantial. I should have felt it unfair on my skin, itching, like eczema. Instead my perception was all warped and I felt like they had made me a gift, been kind to me when they could have wronged me so much worse. An absurd debt weighed on me. For all the reading, the culture and the vocabulary I had behind me I felt shamed. I cannot explain it. My conscience told me that I owed these people something, perhaps the respect that I could not summon. My mind was plagued with too much contempt and I felt guilty for it. So I bowed respectfully and carried off my crippled grade. I played the angel until the last moment. I was an exemplary doormat.

The door made a horrible sound behind me, like a pendulum clock marking an inexorable, most regrettable moment in time. The corridor was dark, ominous. At the end of it there was the door. I was going to go through it, outside, where the crowd was waiting to applaud its soldiers of fortune and offer its contrived sanction. I felt lightheaded. I sat down against the wall. Reality came back to me in a cascade. I was trembling with anger again. I reviled my own weakness. How could I have been such a softie? How could I have not protested? I had compromised my pride in a detestable manner. There are few things more detestable than detesting yourself at any given time.

I sat calmly, matter-of-factly on the floor. I did not pull my hair out. I did not cry. I understood well. This was not a test: it was a compromise. The Baccalaureate in Romania is the empirical test of identifying the choking point. Let us ascertain, then, how much crap you can take. Come on, another spoonful. You can do it. Just swa-llow. Gooood. The doses increase, of course, as one proceeds through the thicket of instructional hierarchy. In college we use the ladle instead of the spoon. Later it is one whole cauldron at a time. There is an adjustment period for ingesting morally repulsive dishes. People can get used to anything. Even to murder, according to Meursault. Ah, Camus again.

Sure enough, the crowd is waiting outside with bated breath. I tell them. I don’t know what is wrong with me. I should keep silent and wait to assuage my demons in privacy. But Providence has other plans for me. As soon as I disclose my grade one of the fiends elbows his way out of the audience and confronts me. He and I shared a classroom for four years. I know that he does not know how to spell or how to multiply. He knows nothing about me except that I use words that he does not understand. This ignoramus has decided that he is better than me. It is like a scene from Beavis and Butthead, I swear. He throws me a cold supercilious look, the look of kings. I am a mendicant before him, a destitute literatus begging for alms. I look him up and down. He is wearing a football shirt colored in bright hues, like a talking parrot, and snow-white sneakers, a famous brand I am sure. His neck is adorned with a heavy gold chain. He has healthy-looking skin, amber-colored by the sun, like a peasant. He looks puffy on the inside and outside, like one who is well-fed and well-anchored.

It takes eons for his words to find their way into my skull. “What did you get? he asks, although he knows. He wants to hear it again, the confirmation of his grandeur. I should turn around and leave, I know it. Masochists they are called, if I am not mistaken, the ones who seek hurt and harm on purpose. So I remain and say: 9.5. Pfui! he dismisses me. I got a 10, girl. You’re lame. And then he tilts his head in such a way, like John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, like a thug. He has his hands in his pockets and he flicks me off, he just flicks me off, as if I were some kind of irksome insect. Satisfied with the information I just delivered he is bored with my existence and presently his gaze wanders off to the next person coming out through the door, the next possible victim of his disgusting braggadocio.

I have no recollection of how I arrived home. No one came with me, so I must have walked. I remember climbing the four flights of stairs under a spell. My father opened the door. That is when I transformed. I became another person, a shrieking, frolicking monster. I lacked the enzyme required to digest the baseness revealed to me today. I was incredulous about the whole thing. Maybe I dreamed it. I am not one of those who stop eating and sink into silence when depressed. No, I rationalize my way through everything. I have to talk, speculate, predict. But there was no logic to find in this rigmarole, no formula to weed my way out of the labyrinth.

Surely enough, the same thing happened the next day, like a charm. I was decorated with a 9.5, in English, ironically, the sanctum of my academic breakthroughs. I was nearly delirious. Day after day I watched how some students who were below me, in knowledge as in ambition, were exalted, while I was demoted. By the end of this Kafkaesque nightmare I was crazed. I was convinced that I had no real idea of my value. I was either a genius or a failure and I oscillated between these scenarios from one moment to the next. When I came to see the final results, posted on the windows for everybody to see, I could conjure no anger or rebellion. The fire had burned out and only cinders were left, smoldering quietly. My curiosity titivated me, so I perused the lists searching for the name of my nemesis of the other day. In all his glory there he was, decked out with 9s and 10s like a stolen Christmas tree. Behold, man, the underdog genius of thermodynamics. Of English. Of programming. Of literature. Of mathematics. By Xerxes, his encyclopedic mind has dwarfed us all. And how well he kept his treasure all these years, feigning ignorance, ridiculing himself to amuse us, to secure his secret, only to let it surface now, in this epiphanic conclusion of another scholastic stage. How misleading it all was!

The academic thief is a new breed of man, one that perfects itself with every generation that embarks upon the sacrilege that we call school. Romania is the place where anyone could buy the subject of the national Baccalaureate in advance for $25 on the street, like one would buy cigarettes from a street vendor. Americans take for granted the typed and framed Honor Code that they hang up in their classrooms, oblivious that this trivial icon stands for something grand, which in other countries is entirely nonexistent. I am talking about fairness, of course. In the room where I took the SAT there must have been thirty people, all of whom in another context would have yielded to the unethical practices of the formula that they were used to. But this was not a “Romanian” type of thing. As soon as we were given the subjects everyone was quiet. There was no one smuggling books under the desk, whispering answers across the room, covering his eyes while peeking into the neighbor’s test. No one punched me in the back urging me to pass a cheat-sheet to the front. It felt strange to the others, I could see it. They laughed at this unprecedented scrupulousness. I found it strange too, like a new shoe that pinches a little before you break it in. But it felt worthwhile.

Of Capricorns

2009-06-15T15:25:00.000-07:00

I had the misfortune to be nourished by the dreams and visions of great Americans – the poets and seers. Some other breed of man has won out. This world which is in the making fills me with dread. I have seen it germinate; I can read it like a blue-print. It is not a world I want to live in. It is a world suited for monomaniacs obsessed with the idea of progress – but a false progress, a progress which stinks. It is a world cluttered with useless objects which men and women, in order to be exploited and degraded, are taught to regard as useful. The dreamer whose dreams are non-utilitarian has no place in this world. Whatever does not lend itself to being bought and sold, whether in the realm of things, ideas, principles, dreams or hopes, is debarred. In this world the poet is anathema, the thinker a fool, the artist an escapist, the man of vision a criminal.
(Henry Miller - The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, page 24)

I discovered Henry Miller in a used book store in Brussels. Several of his books were on the promotional rack with other books that are slow to sell, where in America you would see the tag “Closeout.” Dog-eared Sandra Browns, Danielle Steeles and other pieces of would-be literature kept them company. It is interesting to see the value that Belgians attribute to Henry Miller. I found three of his novels: Quiet Days in Clichy, A Devil in Paradise and Plexus of The Rosy Crucifixion. Not what I would call, now that I am a connoisseur, his best samples, but arresting works nevertheless. I bought them all for 4 euros. The Belgian friend who was my cicerone for the day asked with bewilderment if I liked Henry Miller. It puzzled me that his question, not in the words but in the tone, seemed to accuse “Do you read porn?” I don’t know yet, I replied. Tell you what, he said, if he ends up on your favorites’ list I want credit for it. He paid for my books at the counter, despite all my punctilious objections. He also bought me a book of poetry by an unconventional Flemish author, Paul van Ostaijen, a sort of mountebank of words averse to punctuation. But this last gift was only because he liked me and thought that he could win me with a desultory, avant-garde breed of lyric. The book did not impress me and, to his disappointment, I had no comments to offer.

With Henry Miller, on the other hand, it was a different story. After years of intellectual solitude and cynical shame I felt that I finally had someone to talk to. A bridge to another soul’s dry agony and its convalescence. Panacea for my days of desolation. Henry Miller is still there when no one else is.

No Direction Home

2009-06-11T22:00:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking about you today.

I remember your garden, all slovenly and marred by weeds. There used to be roses in there and we made jam out of them, the nectar of gods. But the poor flowers were unhappy in disorder and eventually gave up and died. Why did you not care for them? You were brawny and callous, yet indolent and passive. You gulped your cheap beer while you watched time and rust and mold take over your treasures. Should I have condoned that indolence with kind words or should I have stayed on to watch you sink, in the name of camaraderie? I did neither.

Your house was quaint, if I remember well. You had hammocks and cots, a fireplace with wood. I still remember the smell of burned things, the crackling of the fire and our silence when we looked into it. There were evenings when we boiled wine with cinnamon and looked through steamy windows and sighed. We had cheese and tomatoes for dinner and watched television from wicker armchairs. So bucolic were we in our small quarters.

When was it that I began to sugarcoat the memories? Perhaps I have always done this. Perhaps everybody does. After some time, genteel impulses make me think ‘bucolic’ instead of negligent, ‘peaceful’ instead of careless. Euphemism is the bane of accuracy. I have not forgotten how you left your clothes lying haphazardly, how you forgot to take out the garbage and how you adamantly refused to recycle.

If it had been just you and me, I would have felt cozy in your house. But it was not. Your friends were loud and raucous. They mocked me, snapped at me, slammed the door in my face. Their gratuitous spite made me feel inadequate. I tried to blend in, but we were like water and oil. After a while I stopped trying to be friendly. I got in line. I was bitter. But it did not make me happy.

I used to complain a lot about you, but the truth is that I learned to overlook a lot. In that context I had a simple choice between tolerating and going insane. Sometimes it is easier to live with problems than without them. You are happier. Confrontation, insuccess, dissatisfaction kept us busy. Here, where those petty ideological obstacles are absent, I have too much time to ponder other things. Time to be depressed. Maybe Pascal was right when he said that people seek clash and controversy to escape thinking about themselves.

And how many sunsets did we see together? After all is said and done, that is the only thing that remains unsullied in my mind. The beach, the sunset, the white shirts puffed about us in the mild breeze and the hippie guys with their guitars. The Black Sea with its dark eye guarding us when we dance the night away on its shore. The anthem was Billy Idol’s ‘Rebel Yell.’ That smell of saltwater, fried anchovies and dirty sand is forever gone. I have not found it anywhere else, as I am sure I never will.

We had some good times, you and I. I wish that Americans made pills for nostalgia, especially for the irrational kind. I could use a fistful. I find that we engaged in a kind of mutual betrayal that left us both scarred. Alas. I am not here to assign blame, but to remember. Today I missed you, Roumanie.

An Uneventful Day

2009-06-09T22:03:00.000-07:00

Indeed, there is such a thing as caffeine rush. It starts with a cup of tea. Black, strong, fragrant, milky. It looks innocuous. But underneath its opaque veneer there is pure energy. Energy of the mind, not of the body. I sit here inert and slouched, like a folded person. But my mind is effervescent. It branches into myriad directions at once and I cannot keep up.
What was that movie we saw last night? They have a sale at Belk? What shall we have for dinner?
I’ll be damned if I know who is asking all these things, but it is not me.
Silvia, who is playing this song?
I am sitting here quietly, minding my own business.
It’s Cake, Cake is playing. They are light, kind of like Modest Mouse.
I am chaos on the inside, equanimity on the outside. Nobody knows.

Yesterday was the day when everybody cooked. I made two stir-fries, Dibya made mashed potatoes, Bill grilled chicken and Khushbu made fried rice. The day before, Khushbu awoke in the middle of the night with unshakable culinary impulses. Four in the morning found her busily whirling edibles in the kitchen, to Bill’s dismay, who saw the spectacle and crossed himself. The kitchen is becoming the most popular room in the holiday house. Presently Dibya is boiling water for what I surmise will become hot chocolate. And it is only little after midnight. The night is young; I hear the pots and pans shuddering in their cupboards with resigned panic. They will get no respite this summer. We eat perpetually, obsessively, excessively. Matters of food override matters of the soul, even though Southern cooking is dubbed “soul food.” We eat as if we are trying to stifle some other need, to smother other preoccupations. We eat as if to forget.

Dibya and I walked by Wesleyan today. We received exactly three honks and two vulgar howls from drivers. It was a slow day. Wesleyan looks forlorn and in denial, like a septuagenarian running on the side of the road. The lights are out in the library. The parking lots are deserted. The gates are locked. If there are any people left on campus they are secluded in the cores of these buildings like mummies under the balsamic effect of air conditioning. It is not that hot. In fact it is peachy, if I may. But Americans complain all the time about temperature. It is as if they are made from a different kind of dough than the rest of us.

We walk home facing the sunset. The sky has the color of my favorite smoothie. We arrive home by eight. So... what are we having for dinner?

The Windowshoppers

2009-06-07T06:23:00.000-07:00

It is morning. I am behind the wheel. Bill is jabbering away in the passenger seat. Soporific Shreeti is floating in the back seat, daydreaming. We are different species brought together by the abracadabra of evolution. So different, yet so compatible. Shreeti is responsible for laughing at my jokes. Bill is responsible for being interested in what I say. And I am responsible for talking when there is silence. My role is that of a radio.

Today we are going to shop like women. Look without buying, turn our nose up at merchandise, sneer at prices. We are looking for a new wheeled vehicle that will make Bill feel like Superman. I am amused by the sense of validation and masculinity that men seem to derive from engines, which they always address in the feminine. A car is not an object but a mistress, a sinewy Amazon. It is always “she” who is steady, rapid, furious, purring or ill. It seems to me that a man sees in a car the perfected version of his flawed female, whose workings he has not yet succeeded to comprehend. A car is a female under control, a subdued beast, an elegant servant. It amuses me how sometimes this simplified version suffices. But how could I possibly understand? I am one of the complicated ones.

Atlanta is one of the settings of my nightmares. Too many cars, too many lanes, too many exits. It is the only place where I find it compulsory to use all my mirrors at once, plus turn my head for certainty. Atlanta traffic is like a massacre in which one plunges voluntarily, headfirst. A bungee jump with a dubious cord. I consider myself lucky whenever I emerge alive and manage to save the crew. It makes me feel like a hero.

Don’t forget the emergency brake, I tell myself as we stop into the driveway. Finally, we are at the owner’s residence. I swiftly evaluate the situation. Shreeti has the unique ability to become a piece of luggage when she falls asleep. Presently her presence in the universe is reduced to an immobile lump of flesh in the back seat. We leave her in the car, lock her in, slam the doors. She does not even twitch.

His name is Fred. He has a Humpty Dumpty quality as he descends to meet us. The car sparkles with rain drops. It is definitely a “she.” Coquettish and chic, she invites us for a test drive. I take the passenger seat, Fred snakes into the back and Bill, Bill is king of the world. The car purrs, like a kitten. Or like a tigress? A few turns, a little speed, she feels heavy on the road and safe, like a cocoon. Because of the wide dashboard it feels as if we are taking up the entire road. The other cars retreat to the shoulder in deference. Bill – the lord of the road, I – the rookie copilot and Fred – the hopeful Cerberus. Bill has half a mind to kidnap the car and I am not entirely opposed to the idea.

When we return we find Shreeti in the same position we left her. She stumbles into consciousness as I bumpily put the car into first gear and blast off. It is morning for her, so we are all required to have lunch. We decide on an Awffle House where incidentally everyone is black. Our ethnic mixture notwithstanding, the three of us make an unlikely alliance, so we get a lot of stares. But we are too hungry to care. I have eggs, Shreeti has eggs, Bill has a burger. Shreeti steals Bill’s food, I steal Shreeti’s food and eat the pickles that Bill finds disgusting. When we are finished the plates are wiped clean. As we leave we get the same nonplussed looks. Everyone is pleased.

The next stop is the dealer’s. Diligent Bill receives directions over the phone from solicitous Cody. We are in fact dying to meet our new friend Cody, whom we expect to find prolix, antsy and blah, like a car salesman. He is everything that we expected, plus the proud displayer of a gigantic tasteless ring branded with his name, for posterity. He flirts with Shreeti and I, asks too many questions, tries to feign congeniality and fails, offers several “Oh, really!”, pathetically reports that he knows nothing about this car (“As a matter of fact this is the first time I see it!”). The conversation during the test drive, essentially a soliloquy, is painful. I roll my eyes until my brain goes numb. Bill reads my mind and makes a U-turn as soon as the possibility arises.

From Atlanta to Macon it is a “straight shot,” as Bill would say. We deliver Shreeti to the airport on the way. It is pouring rain and we are in a hurry, so the farewell is matter-of-fact and devoid of sentimental effusions. And then there it is, Interstate 75 seen in reverse. Like a book read from end to beginning. I jabber away as I drive. Bill pretends to listen. But I know that he is thinking about his car, his new Amazon. The car glides in fifth and I become calmer as we approach Macon. The traffic slows down, grows languid. My foot relaxes on the clutch. I caress the steering wheel with the tips of my fingers. The sunset flashes me a conspiratorial wink in the rearview mirror. I am going to close my eyes for a bit now. The car knows the way.

The Dell Guy

2009-06-06T08:18:00.000-07:00

There is something truly intimate about a conversation with the Dell guy. In the absence of other identification elements the voice of a person gains a colossal potential for exploration. The tone, the timbre, the amplitude of the pitch and the laughter – especially the laughter – are all factors that determine how we feel about people we have never met. Movies want to make us believe that a conversation on the phone can be conducive to an amorous relationship in much the same way as a bump-into-each-other encounter is in a supermarket. I remember a Seinfeld episode where Elaine develops an interest for the guy who delivers her wake-up call service. But it turns out that the match is not well made. A voice can be as deceiving as it is arousing, I suppose.

The Dell guy is concerned with making my computer work. He tries to strip my comments of artistic irrelevancies (“My screen looks like a clown with a running nose”) and match the symptoms to an entry in what I suspect is the Dell Tomes of Most Common Problems Version 528293892892.3 Abridged with Annotations. To reach a diagnostic, often times he needs more information than what I provide. So the Dell guy proceeds to instruct me about running a variety of tests. The duration of these tests is variable, so that it is possible to stay on the phone with the Dell guy for an hour or more. This buys me time for my own agenda.

I imagine that the Dell guy wears a headset. It would be cumbersome to have to hold a phone while shuffling through the Dell Tomes of Most Common Problems. As I sit waiting for the tests to complete I find myself switching the phone from one ear to another in search of a comfortable position. But if the Dell guy does indeed wear a headset then how come I cannot hear him breathe. I listen carefully for the sound of lung activity. There is nothing. Yet the microphone is close to his mouth. I hear the cadence of his voice in minutest details. Perhaps he does not have lungs. It could be a fish or a robot I am dealing with here. After all, this is somebody whom I have never seen in flesh.

The Dell guy must be the unhappiest man on earth. In our minutes of silence, when we wait like sycophant humans for the mighty computer to reach its verdict, I can hear the voices around him. At first I do not pay attention to the content of the voices. They are just soothing, like background noise, like static. I imagine the confluence of voices to be an intellectual discussion of some kind. It could be one of those polemics that colleagues carry at work to take their mind off official matters. My Dell guy is probably impatient for this call to be over so he can join in the conversation. Even though we have known each other so little, I desire the best for him. I wish that my computer were quicker, more responsive. I want to set him free. But then I listen more carefully. “Thank you for choosing Dell,” “Can I have your service tag number?”

They are all Dell guys in the line of duty, just like mine. And since I can hear them all so well, discern what they are saying, I gather that they are closely spaced. I picture hundreds of them in an office like a warehouse, segregated in small cubicles where they attend to their callers and meekly bear their crosses. My Dell guy lives under the supervision of a Big Brother who records calls and prohibits his workers from flirting or joking. He answers calls with his hands tied with the cord of a keyboard and his skull fettered into a headset. My Dell guy lives in Orwell’s 1984.

His name is David. Or so he is told to say. This is not an American story, so we do not meet after twenty years, recognize each other and live a sweet, mellow love story in our old age. He gives me his employee number, which is the closest he can get to asking me for my phone number. Big Brother is watching. “If you have any more problems” he says. I wish that I were the kind of person who can say something cute at the right time without messing up. But I am not and I know it. Our farewell is deadpan, professional, resigned. He would betray me, I know it. I can already feel the rats crawling under the mask, eating my face, like in the novel. “Do it to her, not to me! Do it to her!” How can a love affair with a Dell guy turn out? How does one love after the carnage of thoughts which are mutilated to fit into the Procrustean bed of the headset? Is this a man or an automaton? Is it David, or... Hal?

The post-it with his employee number is gone forever. David, the Dell guy, my Dell guy, took another call and went back to his 1984. And I, listless and sated, went back to mine.

A Walk to the Pharmacy

2009-06-04T13:34:00.000-07:00

Walking in Macon is an extreme sport. People do it seldom. When they do it, they are clearly identified by athletic gear. Walking is not recreation, it is a work-out with a clearly established code of attire. Shorts, running shoes, a white cotton shirt or a sports bra are often the components of the walking outfit. An individual who does not subscribe to this convention is instantly singled out. His deviance meets reactions that range from vulgar gestures to uncommon benevolence. Manifestations of surprise or concern from people are often frank and quite bewildering for the amateur walker. As a consequence, every walk to Walmart easily translates into an adventure story with many details.

I like to think of Wellington drive as a shortcut from Forsyth to Zebulon. But actually it is a long, winding route. I prefer it because it takes me away from the pandemonium of traffic and its profane smell. It is a residential area, an oasis of wealth and trimness. On each side of the road there are Barbie houses with long private driveways and freshly mown lawns where a sign cautions that the property is protected by “Bibb security systems.” It is quiet on Wellington drive, the realm of squirrels and birds. Next to the notice about security we are notified that a dog exists within the premises and he is contained by an invisible fence. In addition, the passer-by is advised to keep off the grass. I stroll by at a moderate pace and look at these exquisite houses that cannot be touched, like antique arabesques in a museum. A man is mowing his lawn, but he is wearing sunglasses and so am I, so neither of us can establish eye contact with certainty. Neither of us says hello.

Once on Zebulon road I am again in the real world. This world is loud and rapid, a sharp departure from the comatose euphoria of Wellington. The walk to Walmart has a pungent smell of green and death. Two tailed creatures lie flattened on the sidewalk and the air is fragrant with their disintegration. Farther ahead there is a squirrel struggling between life and death in the middle lane of the road. Its tail is rising and falling, its eyes are open. The scene is horrific and I wince. Then I pass a yard where there is a black curled something near a bush. I cannot identify it and am not persistent. I am averse to the very idea of snakes.

The road meanders into a depression before the intersection with Bass. On the left there is an idyllic orchard girded with barbed wire. On the right are bushes and carrions. From here I can see the road climbing ahead, fata morgana playing under the whirling tires of hurried cars. On top of the hill there is a large speedometer that shows, in turn, 38, 40, 35, then shuffles random numbers in the brief interval when no cars are passing.

It starts to rain right before I enter the Walmart palace. Inside there is havoc, as always. Americans shop sedately, unlike Europeans. Here the commercial frenzy comes from the abundance of merchandise, not that of people. Walmart is a cornucopia, a tree replete with commodities. It is for this reason that I find myself lost in its labyrinth, unable to find what I am looking for, even with more or less precise directions from the staff. Eventually I find my mangoes and a most needed red umbrella and stand in line at self checkout. Who are we, the people who prefer self checkout? The misanthropes and the old people. We are the ones who for some reason or another do not want to interact with another human being.

On the way back I have the sun behind me. I have my backpack, my camera hanging diagonally onto my body and headphones extending conspicuously from my pockets. I am also wearing The Matrix sunglasses. Perhaps I look helpless still. Out of the blue, a car pulls into the driveway in front of me and a woman asks me if I need a ride. Startled, I explain that I am walking for pleasure. I am clumsy. I thank her too many times. She leaves, as disconcerted as she leaves me. This time I take the other side of the road to avoid the macabre sights. Rebelliously, my eye still glides in the direction of the squirrel in the middle lane. I am a voyeur after all, hungry for the gruesome. The entire little body is now supine. The tail is sleeping.

With the pain in my feet, Wellington is more burdensome than mesmerizing. I am suddenly very aware of my bones. Steps no longer come naturally. They have to be crafted, supervised. I am no longer walking for pleasure but for necessity. Sometimes I feel a need to break away from convenience. Where is the excitement if I have my car at an arm’s length? We need strain to appreciate the easy life. I have known this ever since I came to the States. Every evaluation is the result of a comparison. The woman in the car, who could not understand that I was walking by choice, who was concerned for my safety, perhaps limits herself to an existence that is comfortable and protected. Why does she reject the other side of the story? Everything in life comes in pairs of opposites. White and black, tall and short, wealthy and poor, optimist and pessimist, philantropist and... misanthrope.