There was all lush of green grasses of every variety tickling away at my feet, you could feel the texture of each leaf of grass and the different hues did tickle you in a different way, more was the pleasure that I felt as the sole of my feet, crushing released the perfumed aroma of the grass and even made a sound rush for my ears that was admonished by the persistent repercussions of fresh grass underneath my feet; I wasn’t over one leaf of grass long enough to feel its pain just long enough to feel its pleasure.
The boys had thought I was crazy for taking off my military issued boots but me I have to feel things for it is very important to touch everything around me. My rank and name, Lieutenant Duvaye from the fifth infantry division, I was charged with a troop of thirty men, our task was to scout and destroy combatant positions behind enemy lines. There were now only 3 of us left and if you wanted to be optimistic and counted me as one of my men then there were four of us left.
Now we were walking, running, crawling, swimming, hurting, itching, scratching, hungry and hunting our way back to base through a mine field. Just a few minutes back Juan Rodriguez, to give a dead man a name, had found one of the land mines before him it had been William Redford White. Juanito was dead when we got to him there was only time to rip his name tags off or else his grim reaper would have yanked them from us as the only thing left to take back to the nether. William’s managed to send a message to his mom and five sisters, if we make it back I will find them and give them his last words; he loved them all and wanted them to take care of his 3 little girls and “…teach them right from wrong.” More or less he died saying, “right from wrong” feverishly so.
After Juanito bought it I decided I would take my boots off so as to better feel where I was stepping, don’t know why the boys thought themselves better off with boots for protection you cant feel a goddamn thing with all that army leather. I was pleasantly surprised by the wet grass, I could feel this land and its peoples they had beautiful grass. I had heard that they made lemon grass soup and other grass soups and I never had tried that stuff, grass just doesn’t seem that appetizing even in soup that can take many things but now I do feel that I have been missing something why just touching this grass between my toes feels genuinely delectable. After a while my palette was envious so I broke a grass leaf right to its roots, smelled the dirt, even the dirt had nice overtones but when I bit into the greenery, freshness everywhere the sky expanded a little, I think.
“Hey Lt how is that grass feeling under your feet?” Motioned Corporal Ralph Madden, he was our insensitive freak, he was still alive because he had thrown his dead buddy’s body on top of a grenade; during the act we all searched him with crazed eyes, his only reply, “Don’t fucking stare at me the asshole was dead already!” As he said that he sort of got wet around the eyes but we didn’t buy it, his voice dimming repetition, “Fucking asshole was dead already.” We all knew they were lovers and maybe he was just then making sure he was dead for in battle our ability to judge is severely hampered.
“Yeah isn’t that fufu grass cutting your pretty little feet sir?” Mustered Private First Class Robert Treble. Robert was always trying to fit in, he liked war or this war for sure and he wanted to be accepted, he took risks why he even saved a couple of our boys only so they could die later anyway, but his silver star for bravery was secured. Rescuing in war zones is just like fame always a temporary mission if you stay here long enough death finds you.
Robert could get all the medals he was heat seeking but none of them would ever sever his low self esteem and so he would always repeat anything anyone said to make sure that he was in line.
“Well you boys might not buy this but those boots are going to get you killed while my freshly wet toes are going to get my ass back home. You just better follow me or you aren’t going to make it out of here alive.”
Sailor, my second in command had some kind of a name we didn’t remember, he was just called Sailor because he had this love affair with boats we don’t know why this fine gunnery sergeant didn’t join the navy instead. Here he was in our filthy army where more men get and got killed, where everything goes rotten and dead wrong and while he was climbing mountains and crawling through marshes and barbed wire he kept this book of ships and their stats in his backpack. He would browse it again and again during cease fire actions or before a good night’s sleep; the navy was sure missing out on a fine and disciplined sergeant. He however was firmly with us and now noting, “Seems to me like our Lt is missing the boat upstairs.”
The other boys laughed while I stopped and turned around, “Missing the boat meaning? Meaning what Sergeant Sailor?”
“I don’t know as much as you Lieutenant Sir, I didn’t go to all those nice strategic command colleges but a man that takes his boots off in a full blown combat zone is getting too touchy feely for my nerves.”
The boys appeared to concur, PFC Treble inked on, “touchy feely.”
And Corporal Madden, “Sir, if you don’t mind I think we would all feel better if our commander were wearing his boots things are too fragile around these parts, how about it Lt Sir!” He finished that with a nice disciplined iced salute.
“Listen to me we have been losing man after man after man, the manual tells you how to dig out land mines but it doesn’t tell you where they are and the difference that metal and five thousand pellets make against my grass steeped feet as opposed to my bayonet which is metal against metal; hell I don’t expect you fools to understand all that just follow on my lead.”
Corporal Madden harked back, “It doesn’t seem right.”
Sailor loaded it up, “Sir on behalf of the men I propose that we split up, you go your way and we will go ours.”
I silently retraced my way back towards Sailor and I put my wet moist lips right to his ear, “On behalf of what men Sailor Sergeant? Haven’t you noticed you have managed to lose 27 men? haven’t you noticed that the troop has faded! So on behalf of what men do you speak? Corporal Madden is a fucking homo and PFC Treble is a fucking Star fighter or are you meaning to speak on behalf of yourself and using the lot to secure your own doubted beliefs?!”
Sergeant Sailor stood there solidly firm we were in the middle of a mine field, the landscape was flat and green where any enemy would be able to sniper pick us one by one from a mile away. The boys sort of got the message that I was still their leader but as I started to back out Sailor reiterated his stance. “Sir, with all due respect I think you could be suffering from malaria, jungle fever or just plain war but it may actually be better if you handed command of the troop to me.”
I snapped back, “Sergeant you want to relieve me of command because I took my boots off! Because I am trying something different instead of continuing to lose men to the same foolish tactic!”
At attention, sergeant Sailor held his position, “Sir I think we should put it to a vote besides right now as you say and as I see it we don’t have much of a troop so maybe we can put it to a vote.”
He didn’t want to call it a vote of confidence but that’s precisely what it was and frankly I didn’t care. “Alright then lets put it to a vote…” I Yelling, “Corporal Madden what is your vote me or Sergeant Sailor?!”
Madden sort of bowed his head looking at the grass and at my feet, “I think maybe it would be good if Sergeant Sailor were in charge for just a little while.”
I looked towards PFC Treble but I might have guessed his reply, “Yes sir it could be for just a little while, say a couple of hours and then you could have command back sir.”
I looked at Sailor, “So this is it, this is how it unfolds?…” swiftly taking out my revolver and pointing it at Sergeant’s temple, “You stupid idiots you are under military command you are not allowed to create your own hierarchy here, now put your military bodies on the ground now! On the ground now fuck-heads!”
“Lt. what are you doing put that weapon down.” Said Sergeant Sailor.
“I tell you what I am doing skipper I am offering to shoot you if what is left of the troop and you included doesn’t disarm immediately and hit the deck now!”
Corporal Madden jerked in, “Sir we cannot disarm in the middle of a fire zone.”
I fired a round that whisked past his right ear. “Me thinks that you can disarm fact is I frankly recommend that you disarm!”
PFC Robert Treble undoing his weapons belt, “I think you might be losing it Lt but I will listen to you I got no other choice.”
Lowering my tone, “Thank you private Treble, thank you.”
The three of them were there on the ground when a fighter jet formation flew overhead probably on a bombing mission. “You see those planes up there those are my planes and this is my war and you are my, my troop;…” (punctuating my chest) “…assigned to me by direct order of the commander and chief, the fucking president of our country and you cannot take that lightly men! You have to believe in the duty of command and the order of discipline, you will not turn to little nannies in the middle of a fire zone. You understand what I am saying men?!”
All three responded in alert unison. “Yes sir!”
“I cant hear you or maybe it is that you don’t mean it, louder please!”
Their voices belching into the sky. “Yes sir! yes sir!”
I took my helmet off, it was itching and it weighed too much some day they would make these helmets out of carbon fiber but only after a billion soldiers wore this fatiguing laughing metal thorns. “Well I don’t think you understand men because if you men understood the rule of command we wouldn’t be in this situation right now would we?!”
Their voices responded, “No sir we wouldn’t be in this situation now.”
I looked straight into the sun, I had seen napalm blowing up entire villages and peoples the sun was dimmed by comparison, my eyes were now sun trained. “Yeap boys this is how things start going wrong people don’t follow orders, people want to do their own thing, discipline, discipline is the order of the day and the only possible order of battle and you boys are tempted to violate that rule! Now I must make that right, you boys put me in a bad situation and I cannot allow a violation of our chain of command, I have to stop everything here and now so it doesn’t epidemically rise through the ranks.”
Corporal Madden showing a little fright, “Sir, we understand now let us just continue to march on!”
Treble reinforcing Madden, “Yes sir, lets just continue to march home, we are only a day or two away from home.”
Sailor Sergeant, “Sir we would all gladly take our boots off if that would put things right, right men?”
Resounding optimism from the men, “Yes sir” “Yes sir!” and with that they started to motion so as to take their boots off.
I aimed the gun barrel at Robert and yelled, “Not so fast private,” then I went with gun in hand towards Corporal Madden, “not so fast funny boy,” and then I pointed it straight at Sailor Sergeant. “You would take your boots off for me, I like that yeah I like that.” And with that I carelessly but willingly pulled the trigger and Sailor bought it on the forehead. The boys stiffened up as if they gave them selves for dead as well.
“Don’t worry boys you just take off those boots for we are going home, walking but we are going home.”
It was so much quieter now that the entire troop and I could feel the pretty green grass.
RC
Monday, May 16, 2005
Sunday, May 15, 2005
Monday, May 02, 2005
Aghan from Kifre
It was in a desert town but only desert from the lack of water and vegetation, peoples were everywhere, bringing fruits from far away places, eating scrub soup or munching on dry white breads that filled the stomach till food could be had. The mud houses rose from the sand as if meant to be there, perhaps like the sand they came and went with the desert winds, but they seemed still enough for most days to last long enough for a visitor to think them from far back. Next to the dwellings a plaza arose where the noisy traders sold their goods for pennies on the cheap enough to feed the camels on the trips back to the cities, where they would gather yet another load and do so six times per year with more reliability than the length of centuries.
The desert town hailed from another time, it was placed there built through a long banished oasis of water and vegetation, only now it was held together by custom, this custom was called Kifre. Some poets had written about Kifre but they remained largely unknown perhaps because of the subject matter, romantics didn’t travel this far, the traders were not given to repeating verse, they were more likely to drink vast quantities of tea and to watch the night retreat expecting tomorrow to happen simply because Kifre had happened. These nomads inhabited Kifre year around, for them the end of the world didn’t exist, they were after all at one of its outposts; there wasn’t much need for singing, small verbal gestures accompanied by comprised hand movements would settle any arguments or title deeds; exchanges were brief for, “the desert sand gets into the mouth that talks.”
I came upon Kifre because of a dark haired woman Aghan, that had her sixty something years on her and still she brought me here with more spirit than a camel; we walked, it took us eight days of walking through the night, during the day we would huddle under our garments or bury ourselves under an unusual rock formation, our water finely measured lasted only six days, we were able to make seven with our urine, but the eighth was only survived by the possibility of reaching Kifre.
Aghan had been young around the time that Kifre became a town of small renown because it would hide those that had made themselves an ill reputation in the city; in Kifre you could hide, you didn’t need documents, if you just sat there the sun would roll over you and no one would care. One day you could die, things would eat you up, things that could not be seen by the naked eye, you didn’t have time to rot, everything silently went into something, you didn’t even rot.
The nomads welcomed any new comer that brought little things they could amuse themselves with, matches were popular, a box of matches always a good gift; and then there was something else in Kifre, the Kifre women were renowned for their inability to feel, something that certain men in the city found fascinating. Aghan was one of those women that made trips to the city to display her unmovable emotions, she could do anything to herself and not feel it, she could do anything to you and not hurt, she was a show, a private and a public show, she didn’t really know what it all meant or where all the amusement was, some wealthy men paid her to insult them with grasping tools, others would ask her to do painful things to herself; Aghan from Kifre, didn’t care, she just did the things, it was like a camel carrying its load, it was a thing to do, you didn’t complain, you didn’t ask why, you did it, it didn’t matter who or what it was all for.
She recounted some rabid sex tales and spoke as one that had never known any earthly pleasures and her eyes were of stone; her hands were brittle from age, at one time she had been a handsome woman, strong features lingered in her corrugated wrinkles. She agreed to bring me to the town, I was your average curious student traveling abroad looking not so much for adventure but for something that would mark my life, perhaps I would write about the Kifre nomads, perhaps I would study their history and perform the first official translation of their muted language, a grant could be had for such things, I was finishing grad school and I knew I didn’t want to work a normal day, Kifre offered such possibility.
Aghan made the contrast even more interesting, a nomad desert dweller catering to the cruel insensitivity only possible in a city, where everything was fun and everything was doable and one had to keep an open mind enough to think everything and anything; nomads in Kifre thought of nothing in particular and only did a few things a day, and every month that went by they moved and did a little less and less until they too stood still like their desert habitat.
After quenching our thirst slowly, “the water is always to be drunk slow,” Aghan told, “drink the water fast and you don’t get its spirit” her hands gesturing throughout her throat and mouth, after quenching our thirst slowly we went to the plaza. The nomad enclave could have no more than 250 inhabitants, I asked for a specific number but Aghan didn’t offer facts, “many men, many women, no children.” Distressed I retorted, “No children?” her gentle but coarse reply, “They come from all around here, Kifre is fed by all those that need some time away,” while her eyes were looking around and to the sky, “those that need some time away come here.” I supposed that if I bunched those around the plaza into groupings of thirty, there were probably over 400 people around the place, I marveled a nomad dwelling constantly drawing its population from without, keeping them within because they needed to get away from something. I kept thinking how I could feed myself on such a lot with a grant.
We walked around it was obvious that I was seen as a stranger but in a different way, they put their heads down so as not to look at me, only to surreptitiously search me with cavernous eyes, and it was in all done in a way that noted that they knew I wasn’t getting away from anything; they were saying, “you are passing through here don’t touch us, we are not to be with you, you are not to be with us, let him pass, don’t touch him, let him pass.” Nomads don’t like to become attached to things that aren’t going to be around, the sand always has representatives, I didn’t, that is the way they saw me.
Aghan they saw differently, she was from here, when she walked by they wouldn’t look at her, they would simply show an ineptitude at getting out of her way, she could stumble into them and they very well acted as if no one had touched them; she was another one of them like the sand she was in their nostrils and in their ears, her essence stroke them with a gentleness, a rugged gentleness that even when she wasn’t here, when she bailed to the city, the sands remembered her and put her in their throats and ears.
I was amazed to see a plaza with nothing really much to sell, a plaza empty of fish or meats, a plaza where the only thing you saw was mostly men talking to men, something was being traded, a nut perhaps, or some frown, or a mental image of some place gone, or simply the whiff of the long unwashed fellow and his garments; the receptions were brief, they spent more time saying nothing, more time saying nothing.
At that lapsing moment I stumbled into something, a cart, a cart being pulled by a skinny bearded fellow, I stumbled into him, he begun muttering in a foreign tongue that I could not assimilate, perplexed I reached for Aghan and she explained, “you have broken his cart.” I briskly replied, “He bumped into me!” and then to be clear, “He bumped into me and how could I break anything in a wooden cart.”
Aghan translated, the skinny fellow pointed to a place right near where the handles used to pull the cart joined the major cargo area; there was a sort of box like structure, no more than twelve by twelve inches square, made of light colored wood, and it had six rows, yes I remember clearly six grooved rows and strangely water was flowing from all of them, except two that were smashed; the wood chippings made it obvious that water would not run through damaged grooves, and this fellow was touching the damage and looking at me as if I had killed his first born.
Aghan noted that there was indeed damage, “I don’t think you were watching where you were going, and he rightly says that you could change direction a lot easier than a two wheel cart and a skinny man.”
Aghan proceeded to demonstrate with her hands, “You rammed here like this, and the Hijon does not take pressure, smashed, you see you smashed it.” Her hands dangling off into the sand as if that explained fallen treasures of water.
Where I sternly replied, “The Hijon, what is a Hijon? What are you talking about?”
Both Aghan and the man pointed at the box, now I understood the box was the Hijon.
Aghan explained, “There are only three Hijons in the whole of Kifre and this one had the most fountains before you smashed it.”
“But I didn’t smash it!”
“A man is culpable of his deeds, when you walk on the sand you step on many creatures and you kill them, and that is you killing them or not?”
She said it so forcefully I was coerced into agreement, “Well yes I am the one that killed them but it is unwilling I don’t see them, I step on them and I cannot help it as I have to walk the desert, and when I do that has unwanted consequences.”
“Well maybe those creatures don’t call upon you but here in Kifre, the Hijons are the primary source of our water, we depend upon them, and you have smashed this one, and we must call upon you to pay attention to your deeds.”
“Your only source of water?”
“Yes, watch?”
And the skinny fellow begun to show how the whole thing created water out of thin air, the wooden square somehow melted the humidified water in the air, and it rained through and from the groves and wow, I could not believe them till I drank the drips of drops of fresh flowing water.
“Then you see now you must pay for the damages.”
Endearing myself to the travesty, “How can I do that?”
“You must buy it from this man, you have stolen his livelihood, you must buy it to make good of the wrong you’ve done.”
“How much does he want for it?” I was thinking that no amount would be too much.
“He wants 100 Pebbles of Gold, but I think that is too much offer him 30 and settle for forty.”
And this I did and then man and Aghan both raised their hands towards the sky and rendered these words, “Just is the man that pays for his deeds.”
Finishing her assistance with the transaction Aghan noted she had to return to her mud-hut, where then among the dunes she disappeared. I stayed with the Hijon, only it ceased pouring water; I am here two days going long, and still the smashed grooves nor the good ones dribble water from the air; I move it here and there, there were no instructions and again it is just a piece of wood with groves on it, and no water yet.
RC
The desert town hailed from another time, it was placed there built through a long banished oasis of water and vegetation, only now it was held together by custom, this custom was called Kifre. Some poets had written about Kifre but they remained largely unknown perhaps because of the subject matter, romantics didn’t travel this far, the traders were not given to repeating verse, they were more likely to drink vast quantities of tea and to watch the night retreat expecting tomorrow to happen simply because Kifre had happened. These nomads inhabited Kifre year around, for them the end of the world didn’t exist, they were after all at one of its outposts; there wasn’t much need for singing, small verbal gestures accompanied by comprised hand movements would settle any arguments or title deeds; exchanges were brief for, “the desert sand gets into the mouth that talks.”
I came upon Kifre because of a dark haired woman Aghan, that had her sixty something years on her and still she brought me here with more spirit than a camel; we walked, it took us eight days of walking through the night, during the day we would huddle under our garments or bury ourselves under an unusual rock formation, our water finely measured lasted only six days, we were able to make seven with our urine, but the eighth was only survived by the possibility of reaching Kifre.
Aghan had been young around the time that Kifre became a town of small renown because it would hide those that had made themselves an ill reputation in the city; in Kifre you could hide, you didn’t need documents, if you just sat there the sun would roll over you and no one would care. One day you could die, things would eat you up, things that could not be seen by the naked eye, you didn’t have time to rot, everything silently went into something, you didn’t even rot.
The nomads welcomed any new comer that brought little things they could amuse themselves with, matches were popular, a box of matches always a good gift; and then there was something else in Kifre, the Kifre women were renowned for their inability to feel, something that certain men in the city found fascinating. Aghan was one of those women that made trips to the city to display her unmovable emotions, she could do anything to herself and not feel it, she could do anything to you and not hurt, she was a show, a private and a public show, she didn’t really know what it all meant or where all the amusement was, some wealthy men paid her to insult them with grasping tools, others would ask her to do painful things to herself; Aghan from Kifre, didn’t care, she just did the things, it was like a camel carrying its load, it was a thing to do, you didn’t complain, you didn’t ask why, you did it, it didn’t matter who or what it was all for.
She recounted some rabid sex tales and spoke as one that had never known any earthly pleasures and her eyes were of stone; her hands were brittle from age, at one time she had been a handsome woman, strong features lingered in her corrugated wrinkles. She agreed to bring me to the town, I was your average curious student traveling abroad looking not so much for adventure but for something that would mark my life, perhaps I would write about the Kifre nomads, perhaps I would study their history and perform the first official translation of their muted language, a grant could be had for such things, I was finishing grad school and I knew I didn’t want to work a normal day, Kifre offered such possibility.
Aghan made the contrast even more interesting, a nomad desert dweller catering to the cruel insensitivity only possible in a city, where everything was fun and everything was doable and one had to keep an open mind enough to think everything and anything; nomads in Kifre thought of nothing in particular and only did a few things a day, and every month that went by they moved and did a little less and less until they too stood still like their desert habitat.
After quenching our thirst slowly, “the water is always to be drunk slow,” Aghan told, “drink the water fast and you don’t get its spirit” her hands gesturing throughout her throat and mouth, after quenching our thirst slowly we went to the plaza. The nomad enclave could have no more than 250 inhabitants, I asked for a specific number but Aghan didn’t offer facts, “many men, many women, no children.” Distressed I retorted, “No children?” her gentle but coarse reply, “They come from all around here, Kifre is fed by all those that need some time away,” while her eyes were looking around and to the sky, “those that need some time away come here.” I supposed that if I bunched those around the plaza into groupings of thirty, there were probably over 400 people around the place, I marveled a nomad dwelling constantly drawing its population from without, keeping them within because they needed to get away from something. I kept thinking how I could feed myself on such a lot with a grant.
We walked around it was obvious that I was seen as a stranger but in a different way, they put their heads down so as not to look at me, only to surreptitiously search me with cavernous eyes, and it was in all done in a way that noted that they knew I wasn’t getting away from anything; they were saying, “you are passing through here don’t touch us, we are not to be with you, you are not to be with us, let him pass, don’t touch him, let him pass.” Nomads don’t like to become attached to things that aren’t going to be around, the sand always has representatives, I didn’t, that is the way they saw me.
Aghan they saw differently, she was from here, when she walked by they wouldn’t look at her, they would simply show an ineptitude at getting out of her way, she could stumble into them and they very well acted as if no one had touched them; she was another one of them like the sand she was in their nostrils and in their ears, her essence stroke them with a gentleness, a rugged gentleness that even when she wasn’t here, when she bailed to the city, the sands remembered her and put her in their throats and ears.
I was amazed to see a plaza with nothing really much to sell, a plaza empty of fish or meats, a plaza where the only thing you saw was mostly men talking to men, something was being traded, a nut perhaps, or some frown, or a mental image of some place gone, or simply the whiff of the long unwashed fellow and his garments; the receptions were brief, they spent more time saying nothing, more time saying nothing.
At that lapsing moment I stumbled into something, a cart, a cart being pulled by a skinny bearded fellow, I stumbled into him, he begun muttering in a foreign tongue that I could not assimilate, perplexed I reached for Aghan and she explained, “you have broken his cart.” I briskly replied, “He bumped into me!” and then to be clear, “He bumped into me and how could I break anything in a wooden cart.”
Aghan translated, the skinny fellow pointed to a place right near where the handles used to pull the cart joined the major cargo area; there was a sort of box like structure, no more than twelve by twelve inches square, made of light colored wood, and it had six rows, yes I remember clearly six grooved rows and strangely water was flowing from all of them, except two that were smashed; the wood chippings made it obvious that water would not run through damaged grooves, and this fellow was touching the damage and looking at me as if I had killed his first born.
Aghan noted that there was indeed damage, “I don’t think you were watching where you were going, and he rightly says that you could change direction a lot easier than a two wheel cart and a skinny man.”
Aghan proceeded to demonstrate with her hands, “You rammed here like this, and the Hijon does not take pressure, smashed, you see you smashed it.” Her hands dangling off into the sand as if that explained fallen treasures of water.
Where I sternly replied, “The Hijon, what is a Hijon? What are you talking about?”
Both Aghan and the man pointed at the box, now I understood the box was the Hijon.
Aghan explained, “There are only three Hijons in the whole of Kifre and this one had the most fountains before you smashed it.”
“But I didn’t smash it!”
“A man is culpable of his deeds, when you walk on the sand you step on many creatures and you kill them, and that is you killing them or not?”
She said it so forcefully I was coerced into agreement, “Well yes I am the one that killed them but it is unwilling I don’t see them, I step on them and I cannot help it as I have to walk the desert, and when I do that has unwanted consequences.”
“Well maybe those creatures don’t call upon you but here in Kifre, the Hijons are the primary source of our water, we depend upon them, and you have smashed this one, and we must call upon you to pay attention to your deeds.”
“Your only source of water?”
“Yes, watch?”
And the skinny fellow begun to show how the whole thing created water out of thin air, the wooden square somehow melted the humidified water in the air, and it rained through and from the groves and wow, I could not believe them till I drank the drips of drops of fresh flowing water.
“Then you see now you must pay for the damages.”
Endearing myself to the travesty, “How can I do that?”
“You must buy it from this man, you have stolen his livelihood, you must buy it to make good of the wrong you’ve done.”
“How much does he want for it?” I was thinking that no amount would be too much.
“He wants 100 Pebbles of Gold, but I think that is too much offer him 30 and settle for forty.”
And this I did and then man and Aghan both raised their hands towards the sky and rendered these words, “Just is the man that pays for his deeds.”
Finishing her assistance with the transaction Aghan noted she had to return to her mud-hut, where then among the dunes she disappeared. I stayed with the Hijon, only it ceased pouring water; I am here two days going long, and still the smashed grooves nor the good ones dribble water from the air; I move it here and there, there were no instructions and again it is just a piece of wood with groves on it, and no water yet.
RC
Tuesday, March 08, 2005
The Betrayals
I used to buy large doses of Marijuana from my dear friend Sergio. Sergio was this big dark Mexican with a jolly personality, very charming, whenever he was asked: “Do you know where I can get some pot?” He would respond: “I don’t know, every one always asks me that, but I don’t do that stuff, and I don’t know where to get it.” That was that. He was my dealer for four or five deals in a row. I would walk to his house, we would sit and chat about petty laughable things, always wondering when we would both move back to our home countries, to eat the good grub our mothers had raised us with. Papas chorreadas for me, Chile Reñeno for him, hay dios mio, Lengua lo mejor para mi. We talked about the pretty girls, and about our jobs, and there were things that we would never talk about, such as horoscopes, tortillas yes, carnitas more, horoscopes never.
Sergio came over to my apartment on the day that I got a new puppy. I call it an apartment because I want to give it a sense of home, a multidimensional cuddling space, but it was a studio with no kitchen, ok man, it was a room. A white but dirty bed-sheet covered the paint stained window, the bed-sheet poorly sustained by two nails, you could not pull it to the sides, if I wanted sun, I had to tie it in a centering knot, effectively splitting sunlight, a trick that is both fun and easy to reproduce, you can try it if you want, splitting sunlight. The room was white too, my mattress cover was white, there was a pee yellow covering all that whiteness, my dingy closet had all the clothes hanging on the floor, clean clothes chaotically tangling with my dirty clothes. Everything about me smelled like it was almost clean, I took a shower everyday, I don’t remember where, the room did not have a shower, there must have been a public bathroom for my pee.
Puppy was light brown, short fat, promising to grow into one big hunk of shit producing affection. His favorite thing was to pee on me, every time he jumped on me it was flying golden showers. I always manifested my distaste for his proclivity, but the urine would fade to the point where I could never really smell it, I knew it was all over my clothes because I had seen his ejection but not because I could discern the smell. Urine doesn’t spot dark clothes, I always wear dark clothes because bright colors dish out too much energy, they act too happy, they attract attention from the wrong kinds of people, I don’t like energetic beings, I like quiet beings, beings that drift through the human condition without being too happy and without being to obvious. I mean my character was made to have a puppy that had bladder control problems.
When I was a boy of seven I was still peeing my pants, wetting my bed, it was a terribly embarrassing situation, but I was afraid to ask where the restroom was, I was very shy, the fear of asking was insurmountable it was easier to pee my pants. When I was in bed it was not fear, it was laziness, I did not want to get up; I felt my bladder gloating about its disposition, urging me release, and I never bothered to restrain it; it seemed so wrong, animals in the wild pee anywhere, I was in bed, warming myself up with my pee.
My parents saw it as a problem specially because my very nice bed was one of those that had clothes drawers underneath, the mattress became a sort of filtering system which would strain my urine to its highest contaminant purity right into our clothes drawer. I never had children perhaps because I was afraid of having to deal with a child that would just pee anywhere, it is not an easy thing to have such a child. I presume that I would have been less prone to it if I had been more aware of the world around me, but I was a hermit child, I had invisible play friends all over the house, I was always kept busy by them, so I never had time for the humans.
Later in life my parents told me that I used to love to play with my shit, that I would dig my hands into it and cover my face with feces and even eat the stuff, creative baby was me, mierda on canvas, seen that many times but I was just more accurate in detail than most artists. I don’t remember those eschatological love sessions, today I mostly don’t like shit, I don’t get a thrill out of going to the restroom, and I don’t like the fact that we are held hostage by our waste disposal system. I suffer a phobia for diarrhea, something I am afflicted with every time that I return to Colombia. The last time I peed my pants was at a movie with Audrey, it was a sort of tangled date, I did not want to go to the restroom, finally I had to let it go, she wanted to touch my leg, I was coldly distant, I was fourteen.
Sergio sat on the head of the bed and I at the other end, playing with puppy while my bag of pot laid next to my plant Cassandra, a semi suicidal hypochondriac that I fed water regularly, we talked about everything, and the different women in my life would affect her in different ways, Some would sicken her, dry her, cause her to go dormant on me, a few others would make her feel well but never too well. Cassandra liked my general indifferences, we were both indifferent to each other, we were the married couple that slept in separate rooms, never talked much, or if so only about our liquids coffee and water, no toast, neither one of us liked breakfasts, and she was so indifferent that she only ate once a week, I liked that about her, I was so indifferent that sometimes I would not feed her for weeks, then she would launch herself into one of those incessantly bothersome sessions “oh no I am dying, my green leaves now pale yellow, my stems suffocated so much that even water can not be absorbed, I am shutting down, I am going to die, you can not keep me alive, I never asked you for anything, I never used that much of the house, I stayed with you through all your drinking, I never accused you of being abusive or an alcoholic like all the others, and still you never cared about me, you know I love classical music and yet you never play it for me anymore, and ever since you been seeing that black bitch, who refuses to water me, you don’t care if I die!” Cassandra, who could believe her, but she just went on like that, and I would ignore her until she had managed to yellow herself dead pale, much of her stem turning a hideously dark brownish color, and then her guilt driven campaign would get to me, I would talk to her a little, play some salsa music to try to lighten her morbid composition, I take her many dead leafs off and then feed them to her, she did not seem to object to the perverse cannibalism of self, every leaf I placed in her soil disappeared, I never asked her about it, it was a subject that neither of us wanted to address; we respected each other that much, and so slowly she would come back to life, and be green as green, again.
There was a bang at the door, bang, “police open up! This is the police open up!” I froze, the door busted itself open, three pigs, I hate cops, always have, I could never be a woman that loves men in uniform, they sicken me. This buffalo smelling insensitive monster in boots, stands in front of me, my sitting face dead smack centered on his penile personality, musk mustache, I am smelling the primordial history of the universe, this guy was a find, frozen in the primordial urine of cells that would eventually make up donkeys, pigs, some would make it to cattle, this guy had made it to buffalo, there was a lot of hair all over his body, bushes full, and the smell of stampede was all over him. Such a virgin thinker, pristine raw emotions what a treasure.
I was dead frozen, fear freezes me, my little brother once got hit by a school bus, I froze, rather than rush to help him, I froze in the moment. He gets hit by that bus many times through my life. I don’t believe is symbolism because if I did the torture would be more immense. The buffalo pig grabs my bag of pot and puts it to my face and talks in a broken language which I discern as an interrogation to ascertain his certainty, “is this yours!” Let me see we are in my studio apartment home, I don’t get a community rate on my rent, I decide not to answer, maybe I am still frozen but it seems to be a decision that I have made, not to answer. His boots hold him steady, he grabs me by the shoulders and turns me around, fuck, something feels gross about this, I know he is fucking me, but I would never be able to prove it, around these parts only physical evidence counts, judges are buffalo too.
Then Sergio, who has been silent up to this moment speaks: “I told you I don’t do that shit and I don’t sell that shit, but everyone is always asking me if I know where they can get it or if I sell it just because I am a dark Mexican, but I don’t do that shit.” Sergio had turned me in to the cops, he was a good guy, he did not do that shit. He sold me some shit, he sold me to the cops to clear himself for good. He dint’s do that shit.
I had to leave my puppy in the apartment all by himself, with Cassandra, she will not feed him, she doesn’t care, with any luck he might shower her.
ricardo
Sergio came over to my apartment on the day that I got a new puppy. I call it an apartment because I want to give it a sense of home, a multidimensional cuddling space, but it was a studio with no kitchen, ok man, it was a room. A white but dirty bed-sheet covered the paint stained window, the bed-sheet poorly sustained by two nails, you could not pull it to the sides, if I wanted sun, I had to tie it in a centering knot, effectively splitting sunlight, a trick that is both fun and easy to reproduce, you can try it if you want, splitting sunlight. The room was white too, my mattress cover was white, there was a pee yellow covering all that whiteness, my dingy closet had all the clothes hanging on the floor, clean clothes chaotically tangling with my dirty clothes. Everything about me smelled like it was almost clean, I took a shower everyday, I don’t remember where, the room did not have a shower, there must have been a public bathroom for my pee.
Puppy was light brown, short fat, promising to grow into one big hunk of shit producing affection. His favorite thing was to pee on me, every time he jumped on me it was flying golden showers. I always manifested my distaste for his proclivity, but the urine would fade to the point where I could never really smell it, I knew it was all over my clothes because I had seen his ejection but not because I could discern the smell. Urine doesn’t spot dark clothes, I always wear dark clothes because bright colors dish out too much energy, they act too happy, they attract attention from the wrong kinds of people, I don’t like energetic beings, I like quiet beings, beings that drift through the human condition without being too happy and without being to obvious. I mean my character was made to have a puppy that had bladder control problems.
When I was a boy of seven I was still peeing my pants, wetting my bed, it was a terribly embarrassing situation, but I was afraid to ask where the restroom was, I was very shy, the fear of asking was insurmountable it was easier to pee my pants. When I was in bed it was not fear, it was laziness, I did not want to get up; I felt my bladder gloating about its disposition, urging me release, and I never bothered to restrain it; it seemed so wrong, animals in the wild pee anywhere, I was in bed, warming myself up with my pee.
My parents saw it as a problem specially because my very nice bed was one of those that had clothes drawers underneath, the mattress became a sort of filtering system which would strain my urine to its highest contaminant purity right into our clothes drawer. I never had children perhaps because I was afraid of having to deal with a child that would just pee anywhere, it is not an easy thing to have such a child. I presume that I would have been less prone to it if I had been more aware of the world around me, but I was a hermit child, I had invisible play friends all over the house, I was always kept busy by them, so I never had time for the humans.
Later in life my parents told me that I used to love to play with my shit, that I would dig my hands into it and cover my face with feces and even eat the stuff, creative baby was me, mierda on canvas, seen that many times but I was just more accurate in detail than most artists. I don’t remember those eschatological love sessions, today I mostly don’t like shit, I don’t get a thrill out of going to the restroom, and I don’t like the fact that we are held hostage by our waste disposal system. I suffer a phobia for diarrhea, something I am afflicted with every time that I return to Colombia. The last time I peed my pants was at a movie with Audrey, it was a sort of tangled date, I did not want to go to the restroom, finally I had to let it go, she wanted to touch my leg, I was coldly distant, I was fourteen.
Sergio sat on the head of the bed and I at the other end, playing with puppy while my bag of pot laid next to my plant Cassandra, a semi suicidal hypochondriac that I fed water regularly, we talked about everything, and the different women in my life would affect her in different ways, Some would sicken her, dry her, cause her to go dormant on me, a few others would make her feel well but never too well. Cassandra liked my general indifferences, we were both indifferent to each other, we were the married couple that slept in separate rooms, never talked much, or if so only about our liquids coffee and water, no toast, neither one of us liked breakfasts, and she was so indifferent that she only ate once a week, I liked that about her, I was so indifferent that sometimes I would not feed her for weeks, then she would launch herself into one of those incessantly bothersome sessions “oh no I am dying, my green leaves now pale yellow, my stems suffocated so much that even water can not be absorbed, I am shutting down, I am going to die, you can not keep me alive, I never asked you for anything, I never used that much of the house, I stayed with you through all your drinking, I never accused you of being abusive or an alcoholic like all the others, and still you never cared about me, you know I love classical music and yet you never play it for me anymore, and ever since you been seeing that black bitch, who refuses to water me, you don’t care if I die!” Cassandra, who could believe her, but she just went on like that, and I would ignore her until she had managed to yellow herself dead pale, much of her stem turning a hideously dark brownish color, and then her guilt driven campaign would get to me, I would talk to her a little, play some salsa music to try to lighten her morbid composition, I take her many dead leafs off and then feed them to her, she did not seem to object to the perverse cannibalism of self, every leaf I placed in her soil disappeared, I never asked her about it, it was a subject that neither of us wanted to address; we respected each other that much, and so slowly she would come back to life, and be green as green, again.
There was a bang at the door, bang, “police open up! This is the police open up!” I froze, the door busted itself open, three pigs, I hate cops, always have, I could never be a woman that loves men in uniform, they sicken me. This buffalo smelling insensitive monster in boots, stands in front of me, my sitting face dead smack centered on his penile personality, musk mustache, I am smelling the primordial history of the universe, this guy was a find, frozen in the primordial urine of cells that would eventually make up donkeys, pigs, some would make it to cattle, this guy had made it to buffalo, there was a lot of hair all over his body, bushes full, and the smell of stampede was all over him. Such a virgin thinker, pristine raw emotions what a treasure.
I was dead frozen, fear freezes me, my little brother once got hit by a school bus, I froze, rather than rush to help him, I froze in the moment. He gets hit by that bus many times through my life. I don’t believe is symbolism because if I did the torture would be more immense. The buffalo pig grabs my bag of pot and puts it to my face and talks in a broken language which I discern as an interrogation to ascertain his certainty, “is this yours!” Let me see we are in my studio apartment home, I don’t get a community rate on my rent, I decide not to answer, maybe I am still frozen but it seems to be a decision that I have made, not to answer. His boots hold him steady, he grabs me by the shoulders and turns me around, fuck, something feels gross about this, I know he is fucking me, but I would never be able to prove it, around these parts only physical evidence counts, judges are buffalo too.
Then Sergio, who has been silent up to this moment speaks: “I told you I don’t do that shit and I don’t sell that shit, but everyone is always asking me if I know where they can get it or if I sell it just because I am a dark Mexican, but I don’t do that shit.” Sergio had turned me in to the cops, he was a good guy, he did not do that shit. He sold me some shit, he sold me to the cops to clear himself for good. He dint’s do that shit.
I had to leave my puppy in the apartment all by himself, with Cassandra, she will not feed him, she doesn’t care, with any luck he might shower her.
ricardo
Fingers In The Right Top Drawer
After some time in the penitentiary, I went back to my studio home but it was gone, a guy wearing a real T-shirt, the type with no sleeves, never understood why they went out of style, anyway he answered the door, displaying his armpit’s generous head of hair, he was probably Italian, skinny but manly, Italians are the only men in the world that manage to look macho even when they are short and skinny, Napoleon was actually Italian, he was from Corsica, but don’t tell that to the French, anyway it is not like the French admit to anything that doesn’t serve their pride. Anyway Mr. Italian armpits just opened the door, stared at me with dark deep socketed eyes, did not say a word, I looked at him, imagined that puppy dog must have been bludgeoned to death in some kind of human dog wrestling match, I did not bother to ask about Cassandra, she was a survivor, I didn’t ask about her, but my heart would miss her always.
After doing some time in the local bars, performing a sort of liver cleansing ritual, I managed to get accepted to Medical school in Caracas Venezuela. I would miss America somewhat, but I did not want to have to lie in my employment applications: “Have you ever committed a felony?” “No.” Its hard to lie even when you are liar, people do not seem to understand that liars like me don’t do so because we like it, we do it because we are afraid, afraid of the truth. Anyway Caracas was to me a far off land, new and fresh, and accompanied by some cash that I had managed to acquire by innocent credit card fraud, I was admitted to the fine Medical School of the Americas. MSA, was sort of the great Latin hope for producing enough doctors to abort Catholics while they were still in the womb. Their graduates were all over the third world, some were as far as Italy and Spain. Their credentials were respected as long as they did not try to get into a specialty outside of their general practice: prescriptions and abortions. I was trying to get into prescriptions, the lofty end of it.
My counselor, forty seven year old Consuelo, a woman of means when it came to legs and ass, had a thing for doctors, and while many of us were not yet doctors, she pre-qualified us, I don’t think anyone graduated without her approval, but again it wasn’t that Consuelo was saying “You don’t have what it takes to be a doctor of the Americas.” It was that between her, laid the archers to the Americas.
It was with Consuelo that I learnt how to Salsa dance, music full of ripe fruits, papayas, mangos, bananas, and pineapples, Salsa is not so much a dance as a fruit feast of delicious succulent admirations. Pelvic compliance was one of the first lessons, which can be safely done during nocturnal awakenings to the memory of the music. The best Salsa dancers are always lusting lusciousness, there is no legal way to measure that in a person, no way to add it, you either have it in you or you don’t, I almost had it in me, but my overly active mind always got in the way of my lascivious lusciousness. I guess if you have lost the animal in you, if you don’t have the savage green jungle inside of you, if you can’t swing through the trees like one big ass monkey, if you can’t snake your way through the foliage, if you don’t have it in you to scare the existence pale out of a few giants, then you don’t have the rhythm, you don’t have the unhinged ass that Salsa demands and worships.
Some people feel, that if you don’t have the monster jungle in you that you can just feed it inside of yourself through avocados. Avocados are the creamy butter of the jungle lust, pregnant nippled bellies of the lush green lust, and greener still. They even rot with wanton, you have never seen anything leave existence with such perfect disregard for hygiene as an avocado does, when it throws itself into the dirt and just rots loudly proclaiming a kind of massive escalating vomiting of self dance that darkens and grows the night until the entire jungle is simmering in its darkness. The Indians always call it avocado darkness, it is considered the night in which the children are born, where bellies grow voluminous, where avocado darkness hides parenthood, where the night is not slept, where the night is not slept.
No one really knows if this is really true, though I personally believe it is; but there is one interesting fact, that many have been found dead from over stuffing themselves with avocados. The authorities sometimes dare to question the authenticity of the practice, wondering if it is possible that some involuntary assistance is given during avocado night feasting, but it would be difficult to prove that, there are certainly much easier methods of putting away your enemies, for instance, snake bites are popular and exceed chance encounters.
Anyway the villagers always keep an almost religious silence about avocado nights, they quietly condone the stuffing of one’s lover with avocados as a way to get Salsa in them, equal to a large ass monkey.
I have marveled at the life in this place, even my nights in the slammer there were muddy joys, there is something dirty about the place, dirty about the peoples, dirty about being there, dirt filled auras as wide as the planet, but the dirt is soil, pure life affirming soil, you are one with the cockroaches that chance in size with bullfrogs, the beer spits at you, the water is dirty, you have to drink the beer, the beef is tasted by the flies first, then by their vermin, the church bell rings but there are no saints here, everyone is into incest and rape and stealing from their neighbor; and wives are just as treasonous as husbands, and they all beat each other up, and they forget about it over hot chocolate and sweets, and dirty cock fights and even pigs laugh at the fun.
I was afraid of blood, demonios, I was afraid feces, of urine, of everything unsanitary, so I was glad to find that our medical school had suffered severe budgets cuts seven years back and so there was only one cadaver, and only one dead corpse of rotting flesh that was fresh enough in blood not to fall apart encountering living human contact. Still we were mostly kept away from the bodies. But for one so as not to shame our education. There were plenty of drugs to instruct those of us reaching for the pharmaceutical industry, while there was an arrangement for our fellow medical practitioners to test their talents on the local women who volunteered for free abortions. Everyone was a winner here, even sometimes the abortions would turn into frantic tube tying sessions.
But let me not skip the one corpse that was still good enough to eat, still clinging to a semblance of its past self. Some said that he was Consuelo’s failed love, a passionate romantic that got strangled by her thighs or maybe merely a metaphor for his having failed medical training, he looked German in origin, which fits the romantic part nicely and he was trying to be a doctor, which again fits the German theory nicely, but who knows, he could be anybody, he could even be a local, he was preserved in pure alcohol or formaldehyde or something like that which us doctors used to retain a certain scalable freshness in things, all the while killing other things that were trying to be borne off of them.
Anyway, obviously our school could not afford a full body suit or a decent refrigerator so they had hacked the guy up, into portions of himself, and placed him in these drawers on a sort of large aqua dilapidated table desk; legs and arms, each in separate drawers, even fingers got their own little drawers, toes too, it wasn’t quite a neat operation, and his head was in a pickle jar, kept behind the largest cover door. Pointless for me to tell you that this table desk was the center of attention. Somehow we were all connected to him, in order to graduate we would have to get to know him, personally I could have graduated myself without him, but you know modern medicine is not to be taken lightly.
His head was really only used during exams, it was a treasure, lightly handled, we were all very bright anyway, a shortage of medical schools in the United States had sent us abroad, some of us were here to please our parents, which is more evidence that we did indeed know where the frontal lobe was, the Petunias, and the Amygdala, an old time favorite of mine. Consuelo liked it too, we use to pay little boys to dig the Amygdala out of the head of dead bodies that had been abandoned in cemeteries, and then we would fry them over a fire and toast their crispy mush down our throats. Then, well, you know what then.
It was during these long humid nights that I would tell Consuelo that she could save her earlobe from my piranha teeth if she were to tell me about Aqua man. Yeah, that is what we called him. Oh Jesus, I am already telling you too much, why my doctor’s license might be at risk, say I more. Consuelo would say nothing, not a word, her fingers would glide to remove her long dark hair away from her earlobe, and motion closing her big dark eyes as if she was going into some kind of a voodoo trance, where all pain was equaled to ecstasy. I limped my way to her lips, held her cheeks with my palms, and kissed away the sands of all of Latina America.
I don’t think anyone slept at night, around these parts people wanted to be too tired to work and too tired to study, besides the dark underpinnings of the culture just called for us to accomplish our deeds at night, we sobered our days away, the heat was too much, we memorized body parts, and practiced listening to our hearts with stethoscopes, and when no one was looking we really enjoyed pricking each other with those long, silvery, pump glowing, seventy-five dollar syringes, I don’t think I can translate how exhilarating it is to prick a friend with a needle. It kept us awake even as we were sleep.
But the oddest of things, was the body of that young man in our main study room, the center of attention, was a truly fantastic affair; we loved him, everyone loved him, we never wanted to hurt him, we wanted to be near him, even Consuelo, that showed a severe indifference to him, had a certain way of coming into the room to see him. She would make a sort of dancing entrance, twirl herself 360 degrees and back right into the table, arching back, leaning her marvelous spine, which was as highly defined as her ribs, backwards, and then she would lift herself up with both hands, as if he were lifting her, only it wasn’t so, then she would lay her humid bulging ass cheeks on the table top, her hands would release her, and she realized a smile to our group; asking away our doings, as if she had just finished pleasuring her own. We were moved, twitching from the heat and from her, and from what was going on, the flies would land upon us and use the privilege of our humid stupor to nest on our pores.
When Consuelo wasn’t dancing with Aqua man, we were, that was the oddest thing about it, he made us want to dance, appropriately Salsa music, covered by tuition, was piped through the old and dysfunctional speaker system, and as soon as the music would start to dance, we would all stare at each other’s smiles and move to dance or flirt with one another into exhaustion. We would chat, we would laugh, we would joke with Aqua man, some of us, the sicker of us doctors, would toss his fingers around, and others would try to prevent it, and that was the whole dance, and the music blearing from the speaker would squabble, and pierce our ears, and our incessant laughter would inundate all. We finally ended by putting back all of Aqua man in the drawers, though not always in the right drawers, and often then a power failure and faulty generators would cause the music to cease poking at us, and so we drifted to the local bar, where we were considered rich because of our hasty cadence towards alcoholism. Many of us never made it to our home rooms, many of us were mud ditch dwellers, many of us would not graduate or make it out of there alive; one of us would be the next Aqua man, you see there had been some budget cuts seven years back, alumni contribution to our alma mater.
Consuelo, the name means consolation, the consoled one, she had been cured of all her suffering, appropriately by the medical school, not because she could forget whatever pains torture a woman with as many beautiful scars as she, but rather because she had Aqua man.
You probably want to know if I graduated, how simplistic might you be, would the answer make any more of a difference on big ass monkey salsa and dark avocado rotting nights?
ricardo
After doing some time in the local bars, performing a sort of liver cleansing ritual, I managed to get accepted to Medical school in Caracas Venezuela. I would miss America somewhat, but I did not want to have to lie in my employment applications: “Have you ever committed a felony?” “No.” Its hard to lie even when you are liar, people do not seem to understand that liars like me don’t do so because we like it, we do it because we are afraid, afraid of the truth. Anyway Caracas was to me a far off land, new and fresh, and accompanied by some cash that I had managed to acquire by innocent credit card fraud, I was admitted to the fine Medical School of the Americas. MSA, was sort of the great Latin hope for producing enough doctors to abort Catholics while they were still in the womb. Their graduates were all over the third world, some were as far as Italy and Spain. Their credentials were respected as long as they did not try to get into a specialty outside of their general practice: prescriptions and abortions. I was trying to get into prescriptions, the lofty end of it.
My counselor, forty seven year old Consuelo, a woman of means when it came to legs and ass, had a thing for doctors, and while many of us were not yet doctors, she pre-qualified us, I don’t think anyone graduated without her approval, but again it wasn’t that Consuelo was saying “You don’t have what it takes to be a doctor of the Americas.” It was that between her, laid the archers to the Americas.
It was with Consuelo that I learnt how to Salsa dance, music full of ripe fruits, papayas, mangos, bananas, and pineapples, Salsa is not so much a dance as a fruit feast of delicious succulent admirations. Pelvic compliance was one of the first lessons, which can be safely done during nocturnal awakenings to the memory of the music. The best Salsa dancers are always lusting lusciousness, there is no legal way to measure that in a person, no way to add it, you either have it in you or you don’t, I almost had it in me, but my overly active mind always got in the way of my lascivious lusciousness. I guess if you have lost the animal in you, if you don’t have the savage green jungle inside of you, if you can’t swing through the trees like one big ass monkey, if you can’t snake your way through the foliage, if you don’t have it in you to scare the existence pale out of a few giants, then you don’t have the rhythm, you don’t have the unhinged ass that Salsa demands and worships.
Some people feel, that if you don’t have the monster jungle in you that you can just feed it inside of yourself through avocados. Avocados are the creamy butter of the jungle lust, pregnant nippled bellies of the lush green lust, and greener still. They even rot with wanton, you have never seen anything leave existence with such perfect disregard for hygiene as an avocado does, when it throws itself into the dirt and just rots loudly proclaiming a kind of massive escalating vomiting of self dance that darkens and grows the night until the entire jungle is simmering in its darkness. The Indians always call it avocado darkness, it is considered the night in which the children are born, where bellies grow voluminous, where avocado darkness hides parenthood, where the night is not slept, where the night is not slept.
No one really knows if this is really true, though I personally believe it is; but there is one interesting fact, that many have been found dead from over stuffing themselves with avocados. The authorities sometimes dare to question the authenticity of the practice, wondering if it is possible that some involuntary assistance is given during avocado night feasting, but it would be difficult to prove that, there are certainly much easier methods of putting away your enemies, for instance, snake bites are popular and exceed chance encounters.
Anyway the villagers always keep an almost religious silence about avocado nights, they quietly condone the stuffing of one’s lover with avocados as a way to get Salsa in them, equal to a large ass monkey.
I have marveled at the life in this place, even my nights in the slammer there were muddy joys, there is something dirty about the place, dirty about the peoples, dirty about being there, dirt filled auras as wide as the planet, but the dirt is soil, pure life affirming soil, you are one with the cockroaches that chance in size with bullfrogs, the beer spits at you, the water is dirty, you have to drink the beer, the beef is tasted by the flies first, then by their vermin, the church bell rings but there are no saints here, everyone is into incest and rape and stealing from their neighbor; and wives are just as treasonous as husbands, and they all beat each other up, and they forget about it over hot chocolate and sweets, and dirty cock fights and even pigs laugh at the fun.
I was afraid of blood, demonios, I was afraid feces, of urine, of everything unsanitary, so I was glad to find that our medical school had suffered severe budgets cuts seven years back and so there was only one cadaver, and only one dead corpse of rotting flesh that was fresh enough in blood not to fall apart encountering living human contact. Still we were mostly kept away from the bodies. But for one so as not to shame our education. There were plenty of drugs to instruct those of us reaching for the pharmaceutical industry, while there was an arrangement for our fellow medical practitioners to test their talents on the local women who volunteered for free abortions. Everyone was a winner here, even sometimes the abortions would turn into frantic tube tying sessions.
But let me not skip the one corpse that was still good enough to eat, still clinging to a semblance of its past self. Some said that he was Consuelo’s failed love, a passionate romantic that got strangled by her thighs or maybe merely a metaphor for his having failed medical training, he looked German in origin, which fits the romantic part nicely and he was trying to be a doctor, which again fits the German theory nicely, but who knows, he could be anybody, he could even be a local, he was preserved in pure alcohol or formaldehyde or something like that which us doctors used to retain a certain scalable freshness in things, all the while killing other things that were trying to be borne off of them.
Anyway, obviously our school could not afford a full body suit or a decent refrigerator so they had hacked the guy up, into portions of himself, and placed him in these drawers on a sort of large aqua dilapidated table desk; legs and arms, each in separate drawers, even fingers got their own little drawers, toes too, it wasn’t quite a neat operation, and his head was in a pickle jar, kept behind the largest cover door. Pointless for me to tell you that this table desk was the center of attention. Somehow we were all connected to him, in order to graduate we would have to get to know him, personally I could have graduated myself without him, but you know modern medicine is not to be taken lightly.
His head was really only used during exams, it was a treasure, lightly handled, we were all very bright anyway, a shortage of medical schools in the United States had sent us abroad, some of us were here to please our parents, which is more evidence that we did indeed know where the frontal lobe was, the Petunias, and the Amygdala, an old time favorite of mine. Consuelo liked it too, we use to pay little boys to dig the Amygdala out of the head of dead bodies that had been abandoned in cemeteries, and then we would fry them over a fire and toast their crispy mush down our throats. Then, well, you know what then.
It was during these long humid nights that I would tell Consuelo that she could save her earlobe from my piranha teeth if she were to tell me about Aqua man. Yeah, that is what we called him. Oh Jesus, I am already telling you too much, why my doctor’s license might be at risk, say I more. Consuelo would say nothing, not a word, her fingers would glide to remove her long dark hair away from her earlobe, and motion closing her big dark eyes as if she was going into some kind of a voodoo trance, where all pain was equaled to ecstasy. I limped my way to her lips, held her cheeks with my palms, and kissed away the sands of all of Latina America.
I don’t think anyone slept at night, around these parts people wanted to be too tired to work and too tired to study, besides the dark underpinnings of the culture just called for us to accomplish our deeds at night, we sobered our days away, the heat was too much, we memorized body parts, and practiced listening to our hearts with stethoscopes, and when no one was looking we really enjoyed pricking each other with those long, silvery, pump glowing, seventy-five dollar syringes, I don’t think I can translate how exhilarating it is to prick a friend with a needle. It kept us awake even as we were sleep.
But the oddest of things, was the body of that young man in our main study room, the center of attention, was a truly fantastic affair; we loved him, everyone loved him, we never wanted to hurt him, we wanted to be near him, even Consuelo, that showed a severe indifference to him, had a certain way of coming into the room to see him. She would make a sort of dancing entrance, twirl herself 360 degrees and back right into the table, arching back, leaning her marvelous spine, which was as highly defined as her ribs, backwards, and then she would lift herself up with both hands, as if he were lifting her, only it wasn’t so, then she would lay her humid bulging ass cheeks on the table top, her hands would release her, and she realized a smile to our group; asking away our doings, as if she had just finished pleasuring her own. We were moved, twitching from the heat and from her, and from what was going on, the flies would land upon us and use the privilege of our humid stupor to nest on our pores.
When Consuelo wasn’t dancing with Aqua man, we were, that was the oddest thing about it, he made us want to dance, appropriately Salsa music, covered by tuition, was piped through the old and dysfunctional speaker system, and as soon as the music would start to dance, we would all stare at each other’s smiles and move to dance or flirt with one another into exhaustion. We would chat, we would laugh, we would joke with Aqua man, some of us, the sicker of us doctors, would toss his fingers around, and others would try to prevent it, and that was the whole dance, and the music blearing from the speaker would squabble, and pierce our ears, and our incessant laughter would inundate all. We finally ended by putting back all of Aqua man in the drawers, though not always in the right drawers, and often then a power failure and faulty generators would cause the music to cease poking at us, and so we drifted to the local bar, where we were considered rich because of our hasty cadence towards alcoholism. Many of us never made it to our home rooms, many of us were mud ditch dwellers, many of us would not graduate or make it out of there alive; one of us would be the next Aqua man, you see there had been some budget cuts seven years back, alumni contribution to our alma mater.
Consuelo, the name means consolation, the consoled one, she had been cured of all her suffering, appropriately by the medical school, not because she could forget whatever pains torture a woman with as many beautiful scars as she, but rather because she had Aqua man.
You probably want to know if I graduated, how simplistic might you be, would the answer make any more of a difference on big ass monkey salsa and dark avocado rotting nights?
ricardo
Sunday, February 20, 2005
Rapid Fire Love
I opened the refrigerator door, old plastic containers brewing mean waste, a pizza box that was weeks old, bottles of mustard, ketchup, chiu chili oil, all filled only to the base of their bottom, all awaiting that day when either Lola or I would throw them away. We were a messy couple, the dirty clothes were awaiting the same thing though dirty clothes have a limit to how long they will wait to be washed, eventually they nest pincer bugs and worms to eat them away. Amidst all of the cryogenically maintained foods from our gastronomical history on the main shelf lay a Dead Goose, a dead Goose. A Starch White Goose!
I yelled at Lola who was in the other room, wasting away in anger, we had yet brewed another argument, they were getting easier to repeat by the day, “What is this feathered Goose doing in our refrigerator?” Lola scurrile yelled back rancorously scratching her voice as she did, “I am going to cook Goose on Saturday, Victoria and Robert are coming over for dinner I don’t care if you are there!” She really did not need to add that last comment, I would be there, we had not called off our irritating relationship, we were still a couple, and she was still a terrible cook, which made me more curious about Goose and Saturday. Victoria and Robert were two of our funkiest friends, Opera buffs, connoisseurs of expensive wines, dinner at their house was always an exquisite perfection, it was dangerous to cook for them, it was dangerous to go out to dinner with them, Victoria was known to make Chefs and Waiters squirm, male emasculation was her liberal practice. Robert was a nice guy, how he ended up with such a bitch is unknown, and now as a couple they are incubators for everyone else’s bad luck.
Seeing Goose in the refrigerator made me forget my anger and instead remember why I had fallen in love with Lola, she was an enervating nerve ending at the bottom of her own sole, walking around disguised as a woman, every second dying to explode. Such reckless passion was a formidable attraction for a man, such as I that spends most of his life planning and never executing the infinite number of master plans that were always on the verge of being perfected. Lola had but only one plan, to have a nervous break down, to be dangerous, to be sick, to have a massive illness nasty down on her depressions, it was like cohabiting with The Cold War, at any second the world would explode, you were her hostage, but most wonderfully amazing it was that, while Lola was Neutron Bomb Lola, it was me that was the Atomic trigger. Lola was set to go off, yes, but it would be my fault if she went off. And I don’t need to tell you how insensitive we men are, we are very insensitive. The cold war got colder, no intimacy.
There were many times that I avoided going home just to shelter my emotions, exoskeleton building activities, my hands to my head, a Martini calling my name, an olive distastefully asking me to eat it, I was in love with Bombay Gin, I took the olive out and threw it at a man that must have thought I was crazy like Lola and not crazy because of Lola. I don’t know if you can love your captor, there had been many cases of male prisoners falling in love with their guard-women, but you don’t have to swim too far to figure out why a prisoner might find a guard attractive, love is an escape, but Lola had me hostage to her roller coaster, and then too it was all my fault. Lola was The Scream in my life, I never had to yell at anyone, Lola was able to tell everyone off in any furious direction so that we would all repel each other. Now Lola was not a phenomenally attractive woman, she was pretty in her own way but not pretty. Still I held it to be true that an applied force creates an equal and opposite force, Lola, by fatally repelling the world was causing an equally fatal attraction towards herself. I did not know why I was still with her it had to be this force thing or maybe Goose on Saturday sounded good.
I went to work, I was managing a restaurant, it was a temporary job until I perfected one of my master plans, everyone could see that I did not belong there, true they all thought that they did not belong there either, but there was something special about me, I had a master plan. Restaurant work is the best, everyone in restaurants knows they are losers, you will not catch then telling you “Yes this is what I have always wanted to be.” Bankers, brokers, doctors, lawyers they all act like they are doing what they want to be doing, but restaurant workers never. And there is something humbling about working for tips in an obvious manner, brokers work for tips too, so do politicians and salesmen, technically everyone does, but restaurant workers beg for their tips. “Can I take your order please.” Translates to, “Can I take your insults please.” Or “Let me feel you superior while you chow down our grub." I was the restaurant manager, which means that I was the most overworked and underpaid of all the employees.
But being the manager had its privileges, I could account for most of the money at the end of the day, I could fuck with peoples schedules so as to make them love me or hate me, I could give away free dinners to all of my friends, though Victoria and Robert would never be seen at my restaurant. And there were terrible sides to it too, missing cooks had to be replaced by me, I was a terrible cook, I would swash and scramble things around to make them look sophisticated and different and customers never complained about my cooking because it looked so different, that they did not know if they were suppose to like it or not. The worst thing about restaurant work is cleaning restrooms and doing the freezer inventory. If there is any evidence of how backward our civilization is, it is in the fact that we have to clean restrooms, humans originally roamed in the wild and did their shit wherever they might happen to be, so it is difficult for these roaming assholes to get their shit and urine right into toilets and urinals, they miss all the time; it is amazing how inaccurate they can be even as they try; and then there are those that do not want to get it right, instead they want to send a DNA message through every other asshole that sits on that particular toilet. One day you walk into the restroom and before you is a sculpture that someone has managed to erupt, magnificent in its repugnance, and you have to clean it up, and you have to clean it up, that is the horror! And then there is freezer inventory. You have to go inside of this huge freezer, which has an axe inside, just in case you get locked in, not very encouraging, and then you have to count all the roast beef, all the pork, all the ham, all the sausages, all the prime rib, and you know when meat is frozen like that it looks scary, blotchy red and fat and purple cold and it hurts you so much to touch it that you want to take an axe to it, only it is so damn solid it is only going to hurt you more, so you don’t, and you can see your frustrated breath, belching out of you to keep you warm but it is really making you much colder, and then there are the sauces and salads and dairy products, and by the time you finish your freezer and cooler inventory the last thing you want to do is be around food and well, there you are.
On this day however there was no freezer inventory, no big bosses coming around to prove their existence, no ordering to be done, and it was a slow traffic day, few customers all very nice and quiet. I sat at the bar, our most profitable center and chatted with Geoff our most intellectual bartender. Geoff was not just an intellectual he was also a superb athletic masterpiece. He participated in He Man events like triathlons, bike races, that sort of thing. One day while lighting the restaurant’s glass fireplace, an action that required one to lean forward, bend the knees, and twist one’s torso while searching upwards with one’s head, Geoff almost fell into the blaze that he had started, fortunately he managed to recover himself instead turning into a back injury. But it was not all just back pain, there was pride to be had from the incident, Geoff, explaining to me the complexities of a highly tuned muscular body, paraphrasing words spoken by his doctor. An average torso under the same situation would have collapsed and suffered little injury, but because Geoff’s torso was a highly tune muscular action machine, his muscles, sensing perilous disaster, exerted reflexive reactions to recover him, which they did nicely, only that caused a differential straining disengagement from the left side of his lower back to the right side, which tore some ligaments. In other words his body was too sophisticated, geared to respond to severe situations, such as daunting mountain climbing, it overreacted and ripped itself apart in the recovery process. The distance one places between averageness and one’s self is not without its dangers. Or how about the time when someone was stealing money from our cash register and Geoff argued that the management could be sued for making it too easy to access the cash register. Yes, Geoff believed that to cause temptation was a crime. That is how we chatted away the infamies and consulted each other on how to best handle this or that piece of gossip, person or situation. Geoff’s final advice was always good and equally predictable, He would lean into me whispering, “Well if he bugs you so much I tell you what we can do, tonight you and I follow him home and kill him.” While I never took him up on the offer the truth was that there had been many managers and many servers that had come and gone, but Geoff had been here for eons.
So while drinking my Martini along comes these two women, both a bit average in their own very different way, and we sort of make conversation with them and for some strange reason I find myself unusually attracted to the uglier one of the two. Maybe I wasn’t feeling lucky, maybe I just want it a sure shot, maybe we were soul mates, I doubt all of those reasons, all I know is that for some strange reason I really liked her, her name was Carrie.
Carrie and I walked outside, a stroll through a dark night, lots of tourists everywhere, but we went to a balcony that was unseen by most, and talked about petty things, Carrie had a child but she was not dating anyone, and to be truthful I don’t know if I was dating Lola, we were abstinent lovers, twirling knifes at each other and not as members of a circus, one of us ought end dead; I did not molest myself with explaining my relationship with Lola to Carrie, she did not ask about it, it wasn’t like Carrie and I were really sexually attracted towards each other, I sensed that we were just feeling like the emptiness was ours to share, so Carrie and I ended up kissing each other but only once. Again it wasn’t like we were dying to do that, it just happened that way and it tasted like a perfect pot sticker. Then we parted company. We did not even exchange phone numbers but we both wanted to get together again, neither of us knew how.
I get back home late, past midnight, and Lola is, naked, sitting on the bed crying, she has been nurturing into existence many tears, she was a marathon weeping body, a bath of tears was not unusual, I was into spiritual crying myself, occasionally once every six months I would just cry for no reason at all, hey that is good for you, you don’t have to know why, I don’t have to know why. I asked her if she was OK, holding back possible guilt while wondering if someone had seen me with Carrie and called her. “Lola, what’s wrong honey?” She began to cry more ambitiously, and holding her hands to her face spoke: “I can’t cook the Goose…” her breaking voice, “…I can’t cook the Goose.” I said is there something wrong with the Goose?” but she was to busy crying to tell me so I went to the refrigerator opened the door, the light from within flooded the darkness outside, and I looked at Goose and while he was dead, he looked ok to me. I went back into the bedroom thinking maybe Lola was put off because of her very unrealistic cooking talents, or maybe Victoria had wanted to avoid the entire evening and had called to cancel as was her usual manner. “Honey what is wrong?” She got a little quiet, intermittently sobbing, and responded “I can’t cook Goose he’s an Aries.” My eyes dashed to the ceiling to see what I was missing, oh dear me and she repeated herself “Our Goose is an Aries I can’t cook a Goose that is the same sign as you are.” Well there you go, she did love me, the damn Goose was an Aries, I was an Aries… “But honey that does not matter…” She interrupts me… “You’re so insensitive sure it matters, I don’t want to eat a dead Goose that is the same sign as you are that is like killing and eating you… but I bet that if the Goose was a Libra like me that you wouldn’t care and you would eat it anyway…” “But Lola honey please, how do you know it is an Aries maybe it is something else?” “No, no, I know, I called the Goose Man who sold it to me he knows a lot about Astrology and we counted back to Goose’s hatching days and he is definitely an Aries.” So come to find out that this guy is so fanatic about horoscopes that he has a preference for Geese that are born Taurus and Aries and Leo’s and the one he sold us is an Aries and he won’t take it back, he can’t exchange meat, so we can’t get a Goose that is at least a Leo which neither of us are.
At some point in the night, not as concerned with Goose as Lola was, I was able to sleep while she stayed awake staring at my abominable insensitivity. The next morning Lola went to work and I took Goose out of the refrigerator just so that I could look at a fellow Aries that was now dead. He was a good looking Goose, oh you just have to imagine how many places he visited, how many fishes he ate, how many little Gooses were running around with his DNA, but then all imagination fades when you find out he was raised in captivity. Hard to keep us Rams in captivity sooner better dead. I talked to Goose thinking maybe we could change his sign somehow, I even called the Goose Man to see if he would cooperate but he was too ethical to try to deceive Lola and recalculate the birth date of my fellow Goose.
I went to work counting that we ought cancel Saturday’s dinner, counting that maybe we ought substitute Goose for Chicken Salad or Pasta Primavera, and I drank away wishing that Carrie the woman that I kissed once, would show up and drive away with me. This was Wednesday. The same thing happened on Thursday and Friday and Goose was still dead in our refrigerator, and Carrie had not been seen.
Saturday morning, Lola was sleeping late I went for coffee and to read the headlines, revolutions and murders were priming themselves everywhere, I tossed the paper aside and just tasted my coffee, don’t ask me why but coffee started to taste like a kiss, and I begun to suck kiss my coffee and the heat was moisturizing my lips, and it just felt better than that pot sticker kiss from Carrie but remembering Carrie I just wanted to kiss her again, maybe to accentuate the difference between coffee and pot sticker kisses. While trying to perform that imaginative trick, kissing away every sip of my tongue licking coffee so as to ascertaining why pot stickers could taste like a kiss and a kiss like a pot sticker, mushy, semi indifferent, you are going to eat me, you are going to kiss me, I don’t really mind if you want to kiss me, I sort of want you to kiss me too, and I shall well follow the perfunctory actions that are required here, move my lips, my tongue, attempt to feel sensual about the moment when in reality, I just really like you and don’t really need to kiss you. Am there thinking all this out, still preferring a kiss from my coffee when a voice at another table interrupts me. “Hey, hey aren’t you the guy that was with Carrie the other night?” I turn and act as surprised as I was, which was a lot, “Yeah, how are you?” And without responding she rushes to my table, grabs herself a seat and wobbled on it as if she could not sit still, “Did you hear what happened to Carrie? did you hear?” I frowned creating a labyrinth of doubtful looks, “No, what is it, is she ok?” “Well after she left you that night she was driving, a bit drunk as you know, going home and lost control of the car, off into a ravine, they did not spot the car till morning; she bled to death.” She follows that with, “I am sorry, I have to get going now, bye.” I went home, despondently wishing the whole earth to end my kiss of death.
When I got home, Goose was already in the oven, baking at 380 degrees, its hotter in the center of the Sun, colder in the North Pole, Lola came to welcome me at the door, looked like she had been cleaning for Queen Victoria’s arrival, I hugged her, she embraced me, gave me a big smile, “its going to be a great dinner you will see.” I kissed her and went into the room to shower and change. Aries Goose was smelling up the place. Lola was playing some lively tunes, and had drawn aside all the curtains so Sun could shine on our happiness. Coming out of the shower Lola greeted me with a towel in hand, helped me to dry my back, and said “You know I think with the leftovers from Goose I am going to be able to make you a wonderful Goose soup too.” I thought at that point of asking how she had resolved baking my fellow Aries but I did not want to deal with the possible outbreak, I anointed the soup idea.
Both Victoria and Robert were their usually properly boring selves, we discussed all the latest movies, Victoria listing in detail which directors had done what and noting their individual styles and backgrounds, she was the equivalent of a Baseball fan. Oh but she hated sports, they were so stupid; baseball card collectors were not as sophisticated as movie buffs. Robert had a butterfly collection, he talked about that, there is a name for butterfly collectors, I don’t remember it, same as stamp collectors. I had always been fascinated by butterflies that did not have to eat their entire life, to fly and then to die, no Goose meals in-between. Robert did not seem to know which particular butterfly I was talking about, maybe it didn’t exist, we talked instead how lots of these butterflies only live a few days, hours, whatever. How long do you really need to live to watch the same old Sun and the same old Moon avoid each other? I do admit to being enamored with Monarch butterflies that fly from Mexico to California, welcome migrants that flourish the tourist trade, there is even a Monarch butterfly parade. Interrupt, Lola got a little upset when I told her that I could not eat any Goose, my stomach was upset, I wasn’t lying.
Both Robert and Victoria praised the Goose, praised the soup idea, praised Lola; she was ecstatic with joy, and once gone, Lola plummeted into the couch into a ravine sleep. I called Peter our Chef, it was 11pm, “What are you doing calling me at this hour?” “I was just wondering what you would think if we added pot stickers to the menu?” “Pot stickers to the menu? what are you crazy there is nothing in our cuisine that compliments pot stickers, we are not Chinese you idiot, we are a blackened, or mostly not, steak and potato house, all of our customers are over the age of fifty, they don’t like pot stickers, they don’t eat pot stickers, they don’t even know what pot stickers are.” Peter didn’t like me, he earned a higher salary than I did, he was the Chef. All chefs think of themselves as kings, and they are really miniature kings, rulers of Serfdom Land, every restaurant their castle. Peter the cook ordered me around; he had created an award winning potato dish with a special sauce, someday in the future people would be eating his stupid potato dish out of an instant carton meal box, today he was the only one that knew how to prepare it; it tasted like hollandaise sauce to me, but I don’t know about those things.
Having used up all of my influence with Peter I went to the library and searched pot sticker recipes, a pot sticker is not that complicated of a thing, you wouldn’t imagine it but there are more recipes for these things than there are for hamburgers. I wanted to perfect pot sticker making but I wasn’t a great cook. I decided to wander the Chinese joints in search of pot stickers. One week later my boss asked me into his office, bottles of expensive wine everywhere, he fancied himself Bacchus, he was appropriately fat and more a roaring pig than Bacchus may have been. My boss questions me “Peter tells me that you want to add pot stickers to the menu is that true?” I peevishly respond “Yes…but..” Boss interference “…and what is this that you have been leaving early to go into china town? What business do we have in china town? Is your heart in your job? Are things alright at home?” I was forced to resign, that bastard Peter, he never liked me, and the wait staff did not like me either, mostly because I did not do anything, nor did I tell them what to do, which people really need, they had complained, to human resources, that I provided no direction; I don’t know how much direction a restaurant requires, specially a steak house, not much you can do with that.
Lola could not believe that I had resigned, I told her that I was working on my master plan, whatever that was, instead I spent my days hunting down the perfect pot sticker. A couple of people directed me to places that they were certain had the perfect pot sticker, but neither place tasted like that kiss of death. Reaching nothing but dead end after dead end, I felt that I was cornered into learning how to make the perfect pot sticker myself. Much to Lola’s consternation I got a job at a Chinese restaurant. There I would spy the methods of the masters, I was the only one that was not Chinese, I was the only one that spoke English, I never tried to correct the spellings on the menu, I always used numbers when ordering and I bowed my head a lot, those simple acts won me their acceptance.
I did the soups, not much to do there, you just add noodles, cabbage, peapods, ginger, celery, onions, etc… …add this add that, boil, add salt, add pepper, boil, and reboil and you never stop boiling, it is steam room ten hour facial; one after the other cauldron after cauldron, doing my time so that I could get to the perfect pot sticker, one amongst these people must have admission to the divine pot sticker kiss.
A very old woman, called by some Tzu Hsi a name that meant nothing to me, was, to me, the nicest of the group, all the rest really did not want me there, stood by me with mindful assistance; offering extra spices and extra herbs, occasionally gently urging me with grouchy menace, she would not say anything, she just gave me this very quiet push, her teeth all gone her lips curling inwardly could not much manifest more than that. I was happy that she sort of took me under her crabby care, and I expressed it by occasionally caressing her shoulder all so marvelously without words or meanings.
One day I was moved to the crab boiling pot, I had boiled all the herbs, vegetables and roots that the land and sea had produced, even done in a lot of shrimp. All boiled in my endless boiling pots. Shrimp are ugly, very ugly, I used to eat them all the time sautéed in garlic buttered cilantro, but once you see them alive and walking, forget it, you become aware of their inedibleness; Geoff used to call them “The cockroaches of the sea.” But my experience qualified me for the higher crustaceans species, Crabs. Those creatures that have one tentacle claw longer than the other, lack of symmetry problems, a formidable right tendency; I don’t know much about crabs, I did not eat crab meat, too much work, and while the whole world seems enamoured with crab cakes every recipe I ever saw for those things, and crab salads too, used imitation crab. In Spain, home of my most favorite dish, Paella, they serve it with a Crab that serves as garnish. The Crab sits with you throughout your dinner, sitting there on your plate, that is wrong, that is why we South Americans had to break with Spain. Anyway them crabs are just too much work. Boiling them was now my new job. I left the toothless Chinese lady all by herself boiling noodles away.
A very diligent, skinny and energetic fellow took over my charge. He said his name was Fong, I don’t know if that was his first name or his last name, or where in China he was from, he never tried to laugh with me, he never sparked an emotional connection to my being, I was just someone there to help him with the Crabs so he could smoke more cigarettes. My first lesson was tying the Crab’s very menacing Claw. You get these Crabs, they don’t look deadly, but Fong explains with gestures, sort of saying, “very, very dangerous these claws, you be very but very careful with Crab you hear; …grab here, like this, and then clamp claw shut, like this, and then toss the Crab back on top of all the others, so they can be uncomfortable and fully miserable right up until we boil them, ok, ok.” Life is hard even for crabs. It was for me difficult to make sense out of gestures, specially for a fellow as verbal as myself, but I managed, if only through intuition to get the idea, clamp the claw, let the thing live as long as possible before eating, then boil it alive just like a vegetable.
I had heard that Lobsters make a shrieking sound when they are discharged into boiling water, butter, lots of butter eliminates shrieking echoes; but I wasn’t expecting the same from exoskeleton armored Crabs, but I tell you true that those Crabs, all of the one’s I tossed into the boiling pots, substantiated a hideous piercing shrieking that brought many an army of Crab nightmares to my dreams. You can’t kill them fast enough but you just have to keep on killing them as fast as you can, but you really can’t expect beady eyed crabs to love you, and you can’t expect to out survive them. I don’t care where you are, who you are, or what you are, the concrete is that there are more Crabs than there are people like you, you and I will die before we boil all the Crabs. It was with this weary knowledge that I followed safety standards and made sure to keep the Crabs at a fair distance while clamping their menacing claw. They would stand on the wet ground, I would bend over and while they were looking intently into my eyes I would grab them from behind and snap the clamp on. Its not like those things can fly, still there were stories of clampers that had fallen victim to the Crabbing menaces before reaching their retirement plan. Jostling his finger at me Fong, threading similarly black beady eyes himself, would motion, “You just better be careful, they are swift and shifty creatures of the sea.” I had never seen any Crabs running, maybe on the bottom of the sea they could clock a decent kilometer, but here on concrete that exoskeleton could not possibly help them any; I smirked a little at Fong, but he did not move his beady eyes.
Lola was on the verge of leaving me, she wanted me to get a real job, she did not believe Crab Executioner Maximums, at minimum wage per hour, had much of a future, so she wasted much effort on trying to get me to quit but I was after a recipe here, so I stuck it out and Lola was boiling to get out of our relationship. Well one day, I managed to sit during a break next to my dear old Chinese lady, and so I ventured to ask her if she knew a really good recipe for pot stickers. Oh her eyes lit up like a diamond dragon, pot stickers! She knew pot stickers! She was just doing time in this joint because at her age she could not get a job anywhere else, but it was obvious that her vegetable boiling was only a side job, her true and secret talents were her magical pot stickers. I asked her for the recipe but her revolt was absolute, more or less gesturing, “oh no mister, no mister, won’t give my recipe to no one, go to my grave with it, this world isn’t good enough for my pot stickers.” Wow, I had stumbled upon the divine pot sticker Chef and she was not willing to share her secrets because she thought this world not good enough, and where else might they make pot stickers? Still I understood her, there are things one ought never give away, so I nurtured our relationship very carefully easing here the idea that I needed to have just one of these pot stickers. And then one day, she, so again gesturing, “ok, ok I make for you, but you no tell nobody, you no try to make, you just taste, taste one, one only.” Her cursive finger raised “one, only one.” One kiss. I fervently agreed.
Not three days later, she came to me while I was clamping crabs, not three days later, she halted me and handed me a foil paper wrap holding no more than just one, one, singular pot sticker. Then she went away, ushering her hands and making frowning faces in such away as if saying “now go away, leave me alone, leave me alone!” I held the moist and tender beauty in my hands, forgetting the unclamped crabs on the wet concrete floor, I stepped aside and took the daring bite, oh what a gentle kiss my lips did felt dash deeply through them, a moist tender moment, I don’t know the taste, I don’t know what condiments adorned this succulent delight, what ingredients composed such an edifice of joy, I just wished to slosh pot sticker flesh in my mouth, and not to let it wander down my deep esophagus ravine; ecstasy! Look me, to sky above and heaven I could touch, and then, all the foil paper in my hand but only empty.
Fong, seeing me not cooking gestured me to get back to my work, I nodded my head many times, “yes, yes, yes,” back to work it was; there laid a big crab below me, I, quite dazed, went carelessly to lift Crab from the wet concrete cement but beady-eye Crab swiftly reached for my neck before I could grab and clamp his enduring claw, Crab’s claw rapaciously around my Adams-apple, smack front of my neck, clamping hard down on my neck, seeking to extract divine pot sticker, while I fought and struggled to jerk Crab off of me, but it was not to be, asphyxiated, dangling from this Crab, I crashed into the wettest ground.
If everything is attacking you, you are in enemy territory.
ricardo
I yelled at Lola who was in the other room, wasting away in anger, we had yet brewed another argument, they were getting easier to repeat by the day, “What is this feathered Goose doing in our refrigerator?” Lola scurrile yelled back rancorously scratching her voice as she did, “I am going to cook Goose on Saturday, Victoria and Robert are coming over for dinner I don’t care if you are there!” She really did not need to add that last comment, I would be there, we had not called off our irritating relationship, we were still a couple, and she was still a terrible cook, which made me more curious about Goose and Saturday. Victoria and Robert were two of our funkiest friends, Opera buffs, connoisseurs of expensive wines, dinner at their house was always an exquisite perfection, it was dangerous to cook for them, it was dangerous to go out to dinner with them, Victoria was known to make Chefs and Waiters squirm, male emasculation was her liberal practice. Robert was a nice guy, how he ended up with such a bitch is unknown, and now as a couple they are incubators for everyone else’s bad luck.
Seeing Goose in the refrigerator made me forget my anger and instead remember why I had fallen in love with Lola, she was an enervating nerve ending at the bottom of her own sole, walking around disguised as a woman, every second dying to explode. Such reckless passion was a formidable attraction for a man, such as I that spends most of his life planning and never executing the infinite number of master plans that were always on the verge of being perfected. Lola had but only one plan, to have a nervous break down, to be dangerous, to be sick, to have a massive illness nasty down on her depressions, it was like cohabiting with The Cold War, at any second the world would explode, you were her hostage, but most wonderfully amazing it was that, while Lola was Neutron Bomb Lola, it was me that was the Atomic trigger. Lola was set to go off, yes, but it would be my fault if she went off. And I don’t need to tell you how insensitive we men are, we are very insensitive. The cold war got colder, no intimacy.
There were many times that I avoided going home just to shelter my emotions, exoskeleton building activities, my hands to my head, a Martini calling my name, an olive distastefully asking me to eat it, I was in love with Bombay Gin, I took the olive out and threw it at a man that must have thought I was crazy like Lola and not crazy because of Lola. I don’t know if you can love your captor, there had been many cases of male prisoners falling in love with their guard-women, but you don’t have to swim too far to figure out why a prisoner might find a guard attractive, love is an escape, but Lola had me hostage to her roller coaster, and then too it was all my fault. Lola was The Scream in my life, I never had to yell at anyone, Lola was able to tell everyone off in any furious direction so that we would all repel each other. Now Lola was not a phenomenally attractive woman, she was pretty in her own way but not pretty. Still I held it to be true that an applied force creates an equal and opposite force, Lola, by fatally repelling the world was causing an equally fatal attraction towards herself. I did not know why I was still with her it had to be this force thing or maybe Goose on Saturday sounded good.
I went to work, I was managing a restaurant, it was a temporary job until I perfected one of my master plans, everyone could see that I did not belong there, true they all thought that they did not belong there either, but there was something special about me, I had a master plan. Restaurant work is the best, everyone in restaurants knows they are losers, you will not catch then telling you “Yes this is what I have always wanted to be.” Bankers, brokers, doctors, lawyers they all act like they are doing what they want to be doing, but restaurant workers never. And there is something humbling about working for tips in an obvious manner, brokers work for tips too, so do politicians and salesmen, technically everyone does, but restaurant workers beg for their tips. “Can I take your order please.” Translates to, “Can I take your insults please.” Or “Let me feel you superior while you chow down our grub." I was the restaurant manager, which means that I was the most overworked and underpaid of all the employees.
But being the manager had its privileges, I could account for most of the money at the end of the day, I could fuck with peoples schedules so as to make them love me or hate me, I could give away free dinners to all of my friends, though Victoria and Robert would never be seen at my restaurant. And there were terrible sides to it too, missing cooks had to be replaced by me, I was a terrible cook, I would swash and scramble things around to make them look sophisticated and different and customers never complained about my cooking because it looked so different, that they did not know if they were suppose to like it or not. The worst thing about restaurant work is cleaning restrooms and doing the freezer inventory. If there is any evidence of how backward our civilization is, it is in the fact that we have to clean restrooms, humans originally roamed in the wild and did their shit wherever they might happen to be, so it is difficult for these roaming assholes to get their shit and urine right into toilets and urinals, they miss all the time; it is amazing how inaccurate they can be even as they try; and then there are those that do not want to get it right, instead they want to send a DNA message through every other asshole that sits on that particular toilet. One day you walk into the restroom and before you is a sculpture that someone has managed to erupt, magnificent in its repugnance, and you have to clean it up, and you have to clean it up, that is the horror! And then there is freezer inventory. You have to go inside of this huge freezer, which has an axe inside, just in case you get locked in, not very encouraging, and then you have to count all the roast beef, all the pork, all the ham, all the sausages, all the prime rib, and you know when meat is frozen like that it looks scary, blotchy red and fat and purple cold and it hurts you so much to touch it that you want to take an axe to it, only it is so damn solid it is only going to hurt you more, so you don’t, and you can see your frustrated breath, belching out of you to keep you warm but it is really making you much colder, and then there are the sauces and salads and dairy products, and by the time you finish your freezer and cooler inventory the last thing you want to do is be around food and well, there you are.
On this day however there was no freezer inventory, no big bosses coming around to prove their existence, no ordering to be done, and it was a slow traffic day, few customers all very nice and quiet. I sat at the bar, our most profitable center and chatted with Geoff our most intellectual bartender. Geoff was not just an intellectual he was also a superb athletic masterpiece. He participated in He Man events like triathlons, bike races, that sort of thing. One day while lighting the restaurant’s glass fireplace, an action that required one to lean forward, bend the knees, and twist one’s torso while searching upwards with one’s head, Geoff almost fell into the blaze that he had started, fortunately he managed to recover himself instead turning into a back injury. But it was not all just back pain, there was pride to be had from the incident, Geoff, explaining to me the complexities of a highly tuned muscular body, paraphrasing words spoken by his doctor. An average torso under the same situation would have collapsed and suffered little injury, but because Geoff’s torso was a highly tune muscular action machine, his muscles, sensing perilous disaster, exerted reflexive reactions to recover him, which they did nicely, only that caused a differential straining disengagement from the left side of his lower back to the right side, which tore some ligaments. In other words his body was too sophisticated, geared to respond to severe situations, such as daunting mountain climbing, it overreacted and ripped itself apart in the recovery process. The distance one places between averageness and one’s self is not without its dangers. Or how about the time when someone was stealing money from our cash register and Geoff argued that the management could be sued for making it too easy to access the cash register. Yes, Geoff believed that to cause temptation was a crime. That is how we chatted away the infamies and consulted each other on how to best handle this or that piece of gossip, person or situation. Geoff’s final advice was always good and equally predictable, He would lean into me whispering, “Well if he bugs you so much I tell you what we can do, tonight you and I follow him home and kill him.” While I never took him up on the offer the truth was that there had been many managers and many servers that had come and gone, but Geoff had been here for eons.
So while drinking my Martini along comes these two women, both a bit average in their own very different way, and we sort of make conversation with them and for some strange reason I find myself unusually attracted to the uglier one of the two. Maybe I wasn’t feeling lucky, maybe I just want it a sure shot, maybe we were soul mates, I doubt all of those reasons, all I know is that for some strange reason I really liked her, her name was Carrie.
Carrie and I walked outside, a stroll through a dark night, lots of tourists everywhere, but we went to a balcony that was unseen by most, and talked about petty things, Carrie had a child but she was not dating anyone, and to be truthful I don’t know if I was dating Lola, we were abstinent lovers, twirling knifes at each other and not as members of a circus, one of us ought end dead; I did not molest myself with explaining my relationship with Lola to Carrie, she did not ask about it, it wasn’t like Carrie and I were really sexually attracted towards each other, I sensed that we were just feeling like the emptiness was ours to share, so Carrie and I ended up kissing each other but only once. Again it wasn’t like we were dying to do that, it just happened that way and it tasted like a perfect pot sticker. Then we parted company. We did not even exchange phone numbers but we both wanted to get together again, neither of us knew how.
I get back home late, past midnight, and Lola is, naked, sitting on the bed crying, she has been nurturing into existence many tears, she was a marathon weeping body, a bath of tears was not unusual, I was into spiritual crying myself, occasionally once every six months I would just cry for no reason at all, hey that is good for you, you don’t have to know why, I don’t have to know why. I asked her if she was OK, holding back possible guilt while wondering if someone had seen me with Carrie and called her. “Lola, what’s wrong honey?” She began to cry more ambitiously, and holding her hands to her face spoke: “I can’t cook the Goose…” her breaking voice, “…I can’t cook the Goose.” I said is there something wrong with the Goose?” but she was to busy crying to tell me so I went to the refrigerator opened the door, the light from within flooded the darkness outside, and I looked at Goose and while he was dead, he looked ok to me. I went back into the bedroom thinking maybe Lola was put off because of her very unrealistic cooking talents, or maybe Victoria had wanted to avoid the entire evening and had called to cancel as was her usual manner. “Honey what is wrong?” She got a little quiet, intermittently sobbing, and responded “I can’t cook Goose he’s an Aries.” My eyes dashed to the ceiling to see what I was missing, oh dear me and she repeated herself “Our Goose is an Aries I can’t cook a Goose that is the same sign as you are.” Well there you go, she did love me, the damn Goose was an Aries, I was an Aries… “But honey that does not matter…” She interrupts me… “You’re so insensitive sure it matters, I don’t want to eat a dead Goose that is the same sign as you are that is like killing and eating you… but I bet that if the Goose was a Libra like me that you wouldn’t care and you would eat it anyway…” “But Lola honey please, how do you know it is an Aries maybe it is something else?” “No, no, I know, I called the Goose Man who sold it to me he knows a lot about Astrology and we counted back to Goose’s hatching days and he is definitely an Aries.” So come to find out that this guy is so fanatic about horoscopes that he has a preference for Geese that are born Taurus and Aries and Leo’s and the one he sold us is an Aries and he won’t take it back, he can’t exchange meat, so we can’t get a Goose that is at least a Leo which neither of us are.
At some point in the night, not as concerned with Goose as Lola was, I was able to sleep while she stayed awake staring at my abominable insensitivity. The next morning Lola went to work and I took Goose out of the refrigerator just so that I could look at a fellow Aries that was now dead. He was a good looking Goose, oh you just have to imagine how many places he visited, how many fishes he ate, how many little Gooses were running around with his DNA, but then all imagination fades when you find out he was raised in captivity. Hard to keep us Rams in captivity sooner better dead. I talked to Goose thinking maybe we could change his sign somehow, I even called the Goose Man to see if he would cooperate but he was too ethical to try to deceive Lola and recalculate the birth date of my fellow Goose.
I went to work counting that we ought cancel Saturday’s dinner, counting that maybe we ought substitute Goose for Chicken Salad or Pasta Primavera, and I drank away wishing that Carrie the woman that I kissed once, would show up and drive away with me. This was Wednesday. The same thing happened on Thursday and Friday and Goose was still dead in our refrigerator, and Carrie had not been seen.
Saturday morning, Lola was sleeping late I went for coffee and to read the headlines, revolutions and murders were priming themselves everywhere, I tossed the paper aside and just tasted my coffee, don’t ask me why but coffee started to taste like a kiss, and I begun to suck kiss my coffee and the heat was moisturizing my lips, and it just felt better than that pot sticker kiss from Carrie but remembering Carrie I just wanted to kiss her again, maybe to accentuate the difference between coffee and pot sticker kisses. While trying to perform that imaginative trick, kissing away every sip of my tongue licking coffee so as to ascertaining why pot stickers could taste like a kiss and a kiss like a pot sticker, mushy, semi indifferent, you are going to eat me, you are going to kiss me, I don’t really mind if you want to kiss me, I sort of want you to kiss me too, and I shall well follow the perfunctory actions that are required here, move my lips, my tongue, attempt to feel sensual about the moment when in reality, I just really like you and don’t really need to kiss you. Am there thinking all this out, still preferring a kiss from my coffee when a voice at another table interrupts me. “Hey, hey aren’t you the guy that was with Carrie the other night?” I turn and act as surprised as I was, which was a lot, “Yeah, how are you?” And without responding she rushes to my table, grabs herself a seat and wobbled on it as if she could not sit still, “Did you hear what happened to Carrie? did you hear?” I frowned creating a labyrinth of doubtful looks, “No, what is it, is she ok?” “Well after she left you that night she was driving, a bit drunk as you know, going home and lost control of the car, off into a ravine, they did not spot the car till morning; she bled to death.” She follows that with, “I am sorry, I have to get going now, bye.” I went home, despondently wishing the whole earth to end my kiss of death.
When I got home, Goose was already in the oven, baking at 380 degrees, its hotter in the center of the Sun, colder in the North Pole, Lola came to welcome me at the door, looked like she had been cleaning for Queen Victoria’s arrival, I hugged her, she embraced me, gave me a big smile, “its going to be a great dinner you will see.” I kissed her and went into the room to shower and change. Aries Goose was smelling up the place. Lola was playing some lively tunes, and had drawn aside all the curtains so Sun could shine on our happiness. Coming out of the shower Lola greeted me with a towel in hand, helped me to dry my back, and said “You know I think with the leftovers from Goose I am going to be able to make you a wonderful Goose soup too.” I thought at that point of asking how she had resolved baking my fellow Aries but I did not want to deal with the possible outbreak, I anointed the soup idea.
Both Victoria and Robert were their usually properly boring selves, we discussed all the latest movies, Victoria listing in detail which directors had done what and noting their individual styles and backgrounds, she was the equivalent of a Baseball fan. Oh but she hated sports, they were so stupid; baseball card collectors were not as sophisticated as movie buffs. Robert had a butterfly collection, he talked about that, there is a name for butterfly collectors, I don’t remember it, same as stamp collectors. I had always been fascinated by butterflies that did not have to eat their entire life, to fly and then to die, no Goose meals in-between. Robert did not seem to know which particular butterfly I was talking about, maybe it didn’t exist, we talked instead how lots of these butterflies only live a few days, hours, whatever. How long do you really need to live to watch the same old Sun and the same old Moon avoid each other? I do admit to being enamored with Monarch butterflies that fly from Mexico to California, welcome migrants that flourish the tourist trade, there is even a Monarch butterfly parade. Interrupt, Lola got a little upset when I told her that I could not eat any Goose, my stomach was upset, I wasn’t lying.
Both Robert and Victoria praised the Goose, praised the soup idea, praised Lola; she was ecstatic with joy, and once gone, Lola plummeted into the couch into a ravine sleep. I called Peter our Chef, it was 11pm, “What are you doing calling me at this hour?” “I was just wondering what you would think if we added pot stickers to the menu?” “Pot stickers to the menu? what are you crazy there is nothing in our cuisine that compliments pot stickers, we are not Chinese you idiot, we are a blackened, or mostly not, steak and potato house, all of our customers are over the age of fifty, they don’t like pot stickers, they don’t eat pot stickers, they don’t even know what pot stickers are.” Peter didn’t like me, he earned a higher salary than I did, he was the Chef. All chefs think of themselves as kings, and they are really miniature kings, rulers of Serfdom Land, every restaurant their castle. Peter the cook ordered me around; he had created an award winning potato dish with a special sauce, someday in the future people would be eating his stupid potato dish out of an instant carton meal box, today he was the only one that knew how to prepare it; it tasted like hollandaise sauce to me, but I don’t know about those things.
Having used up all of my influence with Peter I went to the library and searched pot sticker recipes, a pot sticker is not that complicated of a thing, you wouldn’t imagine it but there are more recipes for these things than there are for hamburgers. I wanted to perfect pot sticker making but I wasn’t a great cook. I decided to wander the Chinese joints in search of pot stickers. One week later my boss asked me into his office, bottles of expensive wine everywhere, he fancied himself Bacchus, he was appropriately fat and more a roaring pig than Bacchus may have been. My boss questions me “Peter tells me that you want to add pot stickers to the menu is that true?” I peevishly respond “Yes…but..” Boss interference “…and what is this that you have been leaving early to go into china town? What business do we have in china town? Is your heart in your job? Are things alright at home?” I was forced to resign, that bastard Peter, he never liked me, and the wait staff did not like me either, mostly because I did not do anything, nor did I tell them what to do, which people really need, they had complained, to human resources, that I provided no direction; I don’t know how much direction a restaurant requires, specially a steak house, not much you can do with that.
Lola could not believe that I had resigned, I told her that I was working on my master plan, whatever that was, instead I spent my days hunting down the perfect pot sticker. A couple of people directed me to places that they were certain had the perfect pot sticker, but neither place tasted like that kiss of death. Reaching nothing but dead end after dead end, I felt that I was cornered into learning how to make the perfect pot sticker myself. Much to Lola’s consternation I got a job at a Chinese restaurant. There I would spy the methods of the masters, I was the only one that was not Chinese, I was the only one that spoke English, I never tried to correct the spellings on the menu, I always used numbers when ordering and I bowed my head a lot, those simple acts won me their acceptance.
I did the soups, not much to do there, you just add noodles, cabbage, peapods, ginger, celery, onions, etc… …add this add that, boil, add salt, add pepper, boil, and reboil and you never stop boiling, it is steam room ten hour facial; one after the other cauldron after cauldron, doing my time so that I could get to the perfect pot sticker, one amongst these people must have admission to the divine pot sticker kiss.
A very old woman, called by some Tzu Hsi a name that meant nothing to me, was, to me, the nicest of the group, all the rest really did not want me there, stood by me with mindful assistance; offering extra spices and extra herbs, occasionally gently urging me with grouchy menace, she would not say anything, she just gave me this very quiet push, her teeth all gone her lips curling inwardly could not much manifest more than that. I was happy that she sort of took me under her crabby care, and I expressed it by occasionally caressing her shoulder all so marvelously without words or meanings.
One day I was moved to the crab boiling pot, I had boiled all the herbs, vegetables and roots that the land and sea had produced, even done in a lot of shrimp. All boiled in my endless boiling pots. Shrimp are ugly, very ugly, I used to eat them all the time sautéed in garlic buttered cilantro, but once you see them alive and walking, forget it, you become aware of their inedibleness; Geoff used to call them “The cockroaches of the sea.” But my experience qualified me for the higher crustaceans species, Crabs. Those creatures that have one tentacle claw longer than the other, lack of symmetry problems, a formidable right tendency; I don’t know much about crabs, I did not eat crab meat, too much work, and while the whole world seems enamoured with crab cakes every recipe I ever saw for those things, and crab salads too, used imitation crab. In Spain, home of my most favorite dish, Paella, they serve it with a Crab that serves as garnish. The Crab sits with you throughout your dinner, sitting there on your plate, that is wrong, that is why we South Americans had to break with Spain. Anyway them crabs are just too much work. Boiling them was now my new job. I left the toothless Chinese lady all by herself boiling noodles away.
A very diligent, skinny and energetic fellow took over my charge. He said his name was Fong, I don’t know if that was his first name or his last name, or where in China he was from, he never tried to laugh with me, he never sparked an emotional connection to my being, I was just someone there to help him with the Crabs so he could smoke more cigarettes. My first lesson was tying the Crab’s very menacing Claw. You get these Crabs, they don’t look deadly, but Fong explains with gestures, sort of saying, “very, very dangerous these claws, you be very but very careful with Crab you hear; …grab here, like this, and then clamp claw shut, like this, and then toss the Crab back on top of all the others, so they can be uncomfortable and fully miserable right up until we boil them, ok, ok.” Life is hard even for crabs. It was for me difficult to make sense out of gestures, specially for a fellow as verbal as myself, but I managed, if only through intuition to get the idea, clamp the claw, let the thing live as long as possible before eating, then boil it alive just like a vegetable.
I had heard that Lobsters make a shrieking sound when they are discharged into boiling water, butter, lots of butter eliminates shrieking echoes; but I wasn’t expecting the same from exoskeleton armored Crabs, but I tell you true that those Crabs, all of the one’s I tossed into the boiling pots, substantiated a hideous piercing shrieking that brought many an army of Crab nightmares to my dreams. You can’t kill them fast enough but you just have to keep on killing them as fast as you can, but you really can’t expect beady eyed crabs to love you, and you can’t expect to out survive them. I don’t care where you are, who you are, or what you are, the concrete is that there are more Crabs than there are people like you, you and I will die before we boil all the Crabs. It was with this weary knowledge that I followed safety standards and made sure to keep the Crabs at a fair distance while clamping their menacing claw. They would stand on the wet ground, I would bend over and while they were looking intently into my eyes I would grab them from behind and snap the clamp on. Its not like those things can fly, still there were stories of clampers that had fallen victim to the Crabbing menaces before reaching their retirement plan. Jostling his finger at me Fong, threading similarly black beady eyes himself, would motion, “You just better be careful, they are swift and shifty creatures of the sea.” I had never seen any Crabs running, maybe on the bottom of the sea they could clock a decent kilometer, but here on concrete that exoskeleton could not possibly help them any; I smirked a little at Fong, but he did not move his beady eyes.
Lola was on the verge of leaving me, she wanted me to get a real job, she did not believe Crab Executioner Maximums, at minimum wage per hour, had much of a future, so she wasted much effort on trying to get me to quit but I was after a recipe here, so I stuck it out and Lola was boiling to get out of our relationship. Well one day, I managed to sit during a break next to my dear old Chinese lady, and so I ventured to ask her if she knew a really good recipe for pot stickers. Oh her eyes lit up like a diamond dragon, pot stickers! She knew pot stickers! She was just doing time in this joint because at her age she could not get a job anywhere else, but it was obvious that her vegetable boiling was only a side job, her true and secret talents were her magical pot stickers. I asked her for the recipe but her revolt was absolute, more or less gesturing, “oh no mister, no mister, won’t give my recipe to no one, go to my grave with it, this world isn’t good enough for my pot stickers.” Wow, I had stumbled upon the divine pot sticker Chef and she was not willing to share her secrets because she thought this world not good enough, and where else might they make pot stickers? Still I understood her, there are things one ought never give away, so I nurtured our relationship very carefully easing here the idea that I needed to have just one of these pot stickers. And then one day, she, so again gesturing, “ok, ok I make for you, but you no tell nobody, you no try to make, you just taste, taste one, one only.” Her cursive finger raised “one, only one.” One kiss. I fervently agreed.
Not three days later, she came to me while I was clamping crabs, not three days later, she halted me and handed me a foil paper wrap holding no more than just one, one, singular pot sticker. Then she went away, ushering her hands and making frowning faces in such away as if saying “now go away, leave me alone, leave me alone!” I held the moist and tender beauty in my hands, forgetting the unclamped crabs on the wet concrete floor, I stepped aside and took the daring bite, oh what a gentle kiss my lips did felt dash deeply through them, a moist tender moment, I don’t know the taste, I don’t know what condiments adorned this succulent delight, what ingredients composed such an edifice of joy, I just wished to slosh pot sticker flesh in my mouth, and not to let it wander down my deep esophagus ravine; ecstasy! Look me, to sky above and heaven I could touch, and then, all the foil paper in my hand but only empty.
Fong, seeing me not cooking gestured me to get back to my work, I nodded my head many times, “yes, yes, yes,” back to work it was; there laid a big crab below me, I, quite dazed, went carelessly to lift Crab from the wet concrete cement but beady-eye Crab swiftly reached for my neck before I could grab and clamp his enduring claw, Crab’s claw rapaciously around my Adams-apple, smack front of my neck, clamping hard down on my neck, seeking to extract divine pot sticker, while I fought and struggled to jerk Crab off of me, but it was not to be, asphyxiated, dangling from this Crab, I crashed into the wettest ground.
If everything is attacking you, you are in enemy territory.
ricardo
Friday, February 04, 2005
we have four cats
We have four cats
We have a cat, his name is Loki Cat, we have four cats and Loki is one of those cats, of all my cats Loki is the most cat like, he consumes all of his life manifestations in this manner of representation and one would not think him a very sensitive fellow, certainly the other cats know that Loki is going to do things his way and everyone else better watch out.
Our other male cat is Pacho, Pacho is the backdrop by which Loki demonstrates his maleness, Pacho is aware that his role in our household is to be fragile so that Loki can be strong, Loki attacks Pacho, Pacho never attacks Loki Cat, he is our timid cat and as such the one that we have to spend the most time protecting from Loki claws.
There are two female cats, Sarah and Lolita, Sarah is the matriarch of the family and as such the greater of all characters and she is very tender and loving while maintaining a strong sense of dignity. When I found her at the pet shop it was because she was screaming: “take me out of this cage, you have to rescue me from this hell hole, there is brutality in this world take me away from here!”
Sarah was older than I had wanted, I didn’t know anything about cat ages then so I didn’t realize it but she must have been six months old, which I think in cat years is more; anyways the thing was that something inside of Sarah told her, “there is your owner, that is the guy, scream now, scream louder, louder or he is going to escape…” and she was meowing: “these peoples are brutes, this cage is feces wridden, the food sucks here, I don’t like all these animals, get me out of here.” Of course all I could hear was “meow, MEOW, MEOW!”
One day my wife Domaine said to me, “I want a cat, I WANT A CAT, I WANT A CAT!” and I said, “I don’t like cats, I like dogs.” Cats seemed sissy like, they appear the dandies of the animal kingdom, or at least to me they appeared cold and arrogant, I once heard them described in a comic strip as “the perfect Human Resources director is a cat because they give the impression that they like people when they really don’t.” that made sense to me. One day Domaine came home with Loki, I didn’t pay attention to him for the next year, it was something that was growing and eating in my house, lots of spiders and insects and fungi did that too, so I just ignored him.
But one day I thought to myself I don’t want to have to take care of this cat thing so I must get him a companion, all things in life come in pairs, if I don’t get him another cat this guy is going to demand more attention from me and that isn’t going to happen. So I went to the pet store convinced that I would get another boy cat so as to eliminate the possibility of more cats being born; only Sarah started to scream “you will take me with you,” i.e. “MEOW” and I lost control and rescued her from the hell that is a pet store. On the way home the taxi driver asked me if she was female or male, I fumbled around trying to find her balls and she didn’t have any.
One day Domaine was working on her notebook laying on the couch with Sarah on her legs when she started to feel something else moving down there and as she motioned to look over her notebook screen there was a little mothball of hair, orange and black hues leather with eyes, and thus was born Lolita. Her mother never uttered a cry of pain a lesson and fine example of probity to all would be mothers.
We appropriately named Loki the mischievous cat of Nordic mythology, and Sarah one day just called herself Sarah and we sort of accepted it. Pacho came into the house after Domaine too found him somewhere saying “take me home” and she just could not resists, I hope those are not the same parameters by which Domaine decided to marry me. We didn’t name Lolita right away, we didn’t know what to call her, I think it was because her mother rejected her at first. Sarah was kind of not there next to her little baby girl, she kept a distance and we panicked and called the veterinarian; a very nice man that has been around cats and dogs and snakes long enough not to panic, and he said: “Sarah doesn’t yet connect the fact that she is a mother, she doesn’t know what that thing is and is still trying to identify with it. In time she will come to realize that it is her baby.” And doc was right, in a matter of a week or two Sarah accepted her lot in life and she never left the side of her baby unless it was to eat so as to replenish. She was such a good mother that one day we thought they would like an electric blanket and placed it underneath, and Sarah feeling the heat thought it was a fire and grabbed her little kitty by the neck and took off for safer ground.
It was at about this point, the entrance of Lolita into the world, that Loki Cat and Pacho started their territorial war, it seemed that they both wanted to secure sexual pleasures from both the daughter and the mother, and thus begun the hellish territorial war that has divided our household hitherto. More interesting is the fact that Loki doesn’t know that even though he is Sarah’s husband it was indeed Pacho, the passive fear stricken cat, that fathered the girl. We know this because Loki had been neutered and we were just about to neuter Pacho too when suddenly we were a day or two too late. And this is how the aggressor cat thinks that he is passing on his DNA while in reality the meek one has inherited the earth, his wife and daughter.
As I was saying we waited and waited to name Lolita waiting for her to tell us too what to call her, as she dallied around the house it became evident that Lolita didn’t care about anyone but herself, she was all, “don’t touch me, don’t love me, I don’t need you to love me, what is there to eat in this house? I am comfortable for now but stay put in case I need something.” And the whole time there was absolutely an attitude of “I don’t know if I like it here yet, I might leave at any time, I will develop an illness if I have to die to leave this rat hole;" or "...am just getting used to this place, don’t get used to me.” Appearance wise she was a Lolita cute in every way, appearing harmless but her attitude was all Lola, she was out to have fun on her own terms, one day sitting at the table, I said, “her name is Lolita” and sure it was.
RC
We have a cat, his name is Loki Cat, we have four cats and Loki is one of those cats, of all my cats Loki is the most cat like, he consumes all of his life manifestations in this manner of representation and one would not think him a very sensitive fellow, certainly the other cats know that Loki is going to do things his way and everyone else better watch out.
Our other male cat is Pacho, Pacho is the backdrop by which Loki demonstrates his maleness, Pacho is aware that his role in our household is to be fragile so that Loki can be strong, Loki attacks Pacho, Pacho never attacks Loki Cat, he is our timid cat and as such the one that we have to spend the most time protecting from Loki claws.
There are two female cats, Sarah and Lolita, Sarah is the matriarch of the family and as such the greater of all characters and she is very tender and loving while maintaining a strong sense of dignity. When I found her at the pet shop it was because she was screaming: “take me out of this cage, you have to rescue me from this hell hole, there is brutality in this world take me away from here!”
Sarah was older than I had wanted, I didn’t know anything about cat ages then so I didn’t realize it but she must have been six months old, which I think in cat years is more; anyways the thing was that something inside of Sarah told her, “there is your owner, that is the guy, scream now, scream louder, louder or he is going to escape…” and she was meowing: “these peoples are brutes, this cage is feces wridden, the food sucks here, I don’t like all these animals, get me out of here.” Of course all I could hear was “meow, MEOW, MEOW!”
One day my wife Domaine said to me, “I want a cat, I WANT A CAT, I WANT A CAT!” and I said, “I don’t like cats, I like dogs.” Cats seemed sissy like, they appear the dandies of the animal kingdom, or at least to me they appeared cold and arrogant, I once heard them described in a comic strip as “the perfect Human Resources director is a cat because they give the impression that they like people when they really don’t.” that made sense to me. One day Domaine came home with Loki, I didn’t pay attention to him for the next year, it was something that was growing and eating in my house, lots of spiders and insects and fungi did that too, so I just ignored him.
But one day I thought to myself I don’t want to have to take care of this cat thing so I must get him a companion, all things in life come in pairs, if I don’t get him another cat this guy is going to demand more attention from me and that isn’t going to happen. So I went to the pet store convinced that I would get another boy cat so as to eliminate the possibility of more cats being born; only Sarah started to scream “you will take me with you,” i.e. “MEOW” and I lost control and rescued her from the hell that is a pet store. On the way home the taxi driver asked me if she was female or male, I fumbled around trying to find her balls and she didn’t have any.
One day Domaine was working on her notebook laying on the couch with Sarah on her legs when she started to feel something else moving down there and as she motioned to look over her notebook screen there was a little mothball of hair, orange and black hues leather with eyes, and thus was born Lolita. Her mother never uttered a cry of pain a lesson and fine example of probity to all would be mothers.
We appropriately named Loki the mischievous cat of Nordic mythology, and Sarah one day just called herself Sarah and we sort of accepted it. Pacho came into the house after Domaine too found him somewhere saying “take me home” and she just could not resists, I hope those are not the same parameters by which Domaine decided to marry me. We didn’t name Lolita right away, we didn’t know what to call her, I think it was because her mother rejected her at first. Sarah was kind of not there next to her little baby girl, she kept a distance and we panicked and called the veterinarian; a very nice man that has been around cats and dogs and snakes long enough not to panic, and he said: “Sarah doesn’t yet connect the fact that she is a mother, she doesn’t know what that thing is and is still trying to identify with it. In time she will come to realize that it is her baby.” And doc was right, in a matter of a week or two Sarah accepted her lot in life and she never left the side of her baby unless it was to eat so as to replenish. She was such a good mother that one day we thought they would like an electric blanket and placed it underneath, and Sarah feeling the heat thought it was a fire and grabbed her little kitty by the neck and took off for safer ground.
It was at about this point, the entrance of Lolita into the world, that Loki Cat and Pacho started their territorial war, it seemed that they both wanted to secure sexual pleasures from both the daughter and the mother, and thus begun the hellish territorial war that has divided our household hitherto. More interesting is the fact that Loki doesn’t know that even though he is Sarah’s husband it was indeed Pacho, the passive fear stricken cat, that fathered the girl. We know this because Loki had been neutered and we were just about to neuter Pacho too when suddenly we were a day or two too late. And this is how the aggressor cat thinks that he is passing on his DNA while in reality the meek one has inherited the earth, his wife and daughter.
As I was saying we waited and waited to name Lolita waiting for her to tell us too what to call her, as she dallied around the house it became evident that Lolita didn’t care about anyone but herself, she was all, “don’t touch me, don’t love me, I don’t need you to love me, what is there to eat in this house? I am comfortable for now but stay put in case I need something.” And the whole time there was absolutely an attitude of “I don’t know if I like it here yet, I might leave at any time, I will develop an illness if I have to die to leave this rat hole;" or "...am just getting used to this place, don’t get used to me.” Appearance wise she was a Lolita cute in every way, appearing harmless but her attitude was all Lola, she was out to have fun on her own terms, one day sitting at the table, I said, “her name is Lolita” and sure it was.
RC
Thursday, January 27, 2005
Recommended Reading
Well to be very blunt I know nothing about Colombian society, culture, literature or peoples. Fact is I don’t know if I remain ignorant so as to keep an open mind but it must help to annoy the stereotypes. I am currently reading The Penguin History of Latin America but I think it has a very pragmatic approach to the matter and I believe we are a metaphysical people so I wouldn’t recommend it.
I think to comprehend Latin American character it is better to read the following:
Miguel de Unamuno: A must read The Tragic Sense of Life, it is the bible rewritten by a Spanish Catholic heart that never had the faith. Unamuno does a wonderful depiction of the impossibility of our people, why we are not rational and why being rational is anti life. Thus from there it becomes easy to understand why we will never be productive and consumers regardless of material enticements.
Sense I believe that we Latinos have a vivid intent in defeating life, Jorge Luis Borgess is another fantastic fellow, and certainly a must read, particularly his collection Labyrinths. There you will find what is perhaps the best short story ever written: The Immortal. It is a masterly depiction of our metaphysics and why Latinos are generally unable to pickup after themselves and why they wont lift a finger to help anyone else. It sort of doesn’t matter in the grand scope of things, hence the reason why we would never write a book like say “Being in Time” we are never on time because we don’t tick to a calendar.
To read another one of our finest philosophers you must enter into the realm of Jose Ortega y Gasset, he wrote a book that I thought particularly illuminating, “The Revolt of the Masses” a fine elitist point of view, you will find it absolutely hilarious; more important it depicts what our Latin founding fathers believed, that they know what is best for us all.
I don’t want to sound a classicist but if you have plenty of time in your hands Don Quixote de La Mancha is the fictionalization of Unamuno’s philosophy though ironically Cervantes came first, but as Unamuno correctly pointed out he died and Don Quixote lives on.
As you might take notice I don’t stay within the continent to define the literature of our character. This is because I have a globalized ability to stereotype, our people start in Spain, trip over Portugal and flow from Mexico down the throat of the Yucatan Peninsula strait throughout the Amazon until hitting bottom at Tierra del Fuego. The fact is that there aren’t as many peoples as there are countries.
ricardo
I think to comprehend Latin American character it is better to read the following:
Miguel de Unamuno: A must read The Tragic Sense of Life, it is the bible rewritten by a Spanish Catholic heart that never had the faith. Unamuno does a wonderful depiction of the impossibility of our people, why we are not rational and why being rational is anti life. Thus from there it becomes easy to understand why we will never be productive and consumers regardless of material enticements.
Sense I believe that we Latinos have a vivid intent in defeating life, Jorge Luis Borgess is another fantastic fellow, and certainly a must read, particularly his collection Labyrinths. There you will find what is perhaps the best short story ever written: The Immortal. It is a masterly depiction of our metaphysics and why Latinos are generally unable to pickup after themselves and why they wont lift a finger to help anyone else. It sort of doesn’t matter in the grand scope of things, hence the reason why we would never write a book like say “Being in Time” we are never on time because we don’t tick to a calendar.
To read another one of our finest philosophers you must enter into the realm of Jose Ortega y Gasset, he wrote a book that I thought particularly illuminating, “The Revolt of the Masses” a fine elitist point of view, you will find it absolutely hilarious; more important it depicts what our Latin founding fathers believed, that they know what is best for us all.
I don’t want to sound a classicist but if you have plenty of time in your hands Don Quixote de La Mancha is the fictionalization of Unamuno’s philosophy though ironically Cervantes came first, but as Unamuno correctly pointed out he died and Don Quixote lives on.
As you might take notice I don’t stay within the continent to define the literature of our character. This is because I have a globalized ability to stereotype, our people start in Spain, trip over Portugal and flow from Mexico down the throat of the Yucatan Peninsula strait throughout the Amazon until hitting bottom at Tierra del Fuego. The fact is that there aren’t as many peoples as there are countries.
ricardo
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
JAKE AS THE MONSTER
Jake, well Happy Birthday man.
By the way you will not know it that my favorite video game, “Hunter Hunted” has a main character called Jake. Hahahaha! My wife and I used to play it often during our courtship years. It was a silly game but we loved it and I hope that playing it doesn’t imply that we are stupid or silly or that we don’t read The Nation. Occasionally Jake would encounter a terrible monster, (read hard to kill,) and the monster would very condescendly say, “you cannot win, put down your weapons you cannot win.” I always found those instructions hilarious, they really got your optimism down, whenever the stupid monster came out he would make all kinds of voided of syllables noises and you knew, you just knew things were going to get ugly.
Of course after a while as with all games, the Virtual Intelligence repeats its logic errors or reaches its rationalizing limits and an average human being learns that if he ducks or jumps at just the right split second the monster will react differently and give the human a chance at victory. Through repetition and error correction and of course the ability to restart the game, the eventual victim becomes the monster. The game becomes such an obvious little plot that the human being becomes bored and ignores the game and the monster, and both game and monster fade into obscurity.
You know Jake that I am going to give you a “moral to the story”. The puppet masters, in this case the game makers are aware that if the game is too complicated the majority of the people will feel dissatisfied with the game-play and abandon the product. And the disillusioned will tell their friends the game is too difficult and this in turn will lower sales expectations; and so the game has to be just right, just hard enough, just fun enough to satisfy the greatest number so that the sales figures are properly aimed at a mass market. Which is also why the cheats are available online so as to help those of us that are not gamers by nature to enjoy at least a simulated victory.
In your worldview the game creators are manipulating the gamers so as to get their money, in my world view both parties are manipulating each other and one cannot exist without the other. Your assumption that the elite and the masses are two separate entities is the equivalent of imagining that a tiger and the jungle have different priorities as far as the rainforest is concerned. They don’t!
Why would I take issue with your world view? Because it is condescending; you remind me of the monster that thought I was doomed without knowing that indeed I had more power over his existence and my own happiness. You see without me playing the game monster would be truly dead. In fact the objective of monster was to keep me alive, more than wanting to kill me the people at Hunted Hunter incorporated, which I think was Interplay, were working hard day and night to keep my attention, without that they too would be dead.
You can rightly imagine all the game designers working hard to comprehend the dynamics of my game play and mindset; “what does Ricardo like about the game? What does Ricardo dislike? When does he play more? What will give him greater satisfaction so that he buys the sequel?” But more important the game designers, undoubtedly fanatic gamers themselves, were also sacrificing their purity of game design so as to meet my less than exemplar gaming aspirations. The game designers were busy dumbing down the game so that I could be a part of their universe, so that I would play in their world, but obviously not at their Creator level of game-play.
Of course the CEO of Interplay was involved with a bunch of futurologist asking them to please guess what I was going to like next. While the Marketing group would call my house and offer me a 50% discount on any future game if I just answered a few questions so that they could best meet my expectations. Meanwhile the Sales Staff was dully working to meet sales quotas by trying to shove the game down my throat through every outlet possible.
You see Jake, perhaps because I am a common man, getting my attention is lot of work. And I must admit that getting my money is a little harder still, in part because I have limited resources, (read poor,) and in part because I am really not a consumer. And to be more honest still I don’t believe in intellectual property rights, so I didn’t even pay for the game, I got it for free and because I liked it so much I gave copies to my friends.
I don’t know how much money Interplay lost in Hunter Hunted but rumor has it that it wasn’t a very successful title, it was discontinued as sales figures did not warrant a sequel. My wife and I lost our copy and we are still trying to find one so as to recollect that period of our romance where we didn’t fight.
I think what I am saying is that the problem your Elite/Common Folk aspect ratio has is that the boundary cannot be clearly drawn. You fault the masses for not reading The Nation or Foreign Policy Review but you fail to administer the fact that it is, for instance, The Nation and what it values that has failed to capture the average imagination. I have read Foreign Policy Review and The Nation and frankly The Nation sounds like a forever in angst teenager, feeling cheated at every angle. Alexander Cockburn is surely a master of the verb and more a master at the ability to insult others at every turn. The Nation of course does have a way with words, it is purely an intellectual diatribe where the ability to toss superlatives around is only outstripped by the cult of character absolutism. Frankly I am not surprise people don’t want to read it, it is an intellectuals child’s den.
I use to read The Nation when they were still in that old newspaper print magazine format, and I seem to remember that they trashed Mother Jones for going to a colorful magazine format, it wasn’t for intellectual papers to be flashy and colorful, they must be serious and cold and sterile.
Mother Jones itself is another interesting case, I call them “the good earth people” I mean this people still think that the Indians were nice to nature, that they were one with the universe. You know I know that the American Indian wasn’t that nice, the Incas and the Chibchas and the Aztecs were even less nice, but according to Mother Jones only the white man is brutal and insensitive. One has to be blind to history to not realize that the entire evolution of humanity has been a savage adventure; and that it is only through squatter-incorporation of territory and DNA-mergers that we have grown this thing that we call a civilization.
The Nation, I don’t know how many subscribers they have, last time I checked I think it was around 170k, that is probably an accurate representation of 10% of the 3% of peoples in America that are wholly dead to their emotions and live purely in Intellectual hubris. At least The New Republic, another lover of things intellectual, has it in their sights to cater to popular opinion by expressing a liberal conservatism that tells us all that they are one of us even though they feel elitists and in fact are comfortable being elitists! The New Republic is not saying we are with the masses as The Nation likes to clamor, rather it is saying we are elitists, join us and you can be elitists too. As my favorite economist once said, “the masses more than wanting to overthrow the rich more want to be like them.”
As for Foreign Policy Review, why would you expect a publication that is a feeler for prospective policy with political insiders to be popular with the general public? I don’t read Trains and Caboose Review and don’t get me started on Slate. But to my point is that you are faulting the masses for not paying attention to obscure values and ideas. You are being just like The Nation, that is, condescending by assuming that you know more than the masses what is better for the masses; and that they are being controlled by an elitists clan and that they don’t know it because they don’t have the attention span that apparently you do.
First it must make you feel smarter to do that and if it does good for you. But allow me to pose an alternative view, that in a world of common people lucky are those that learn to be common quickly. When ever I feel special I am amazed to find my favorite rare sauces at the supermarket; throughout the years I have learnt that much of what I considered original about my philosophy was based largely on my own ignorance.
A common person has a world that caters to common people, if you are then satisfied by common undertakings this is a perfect world. How fun it must be to enjoy the Super Bowl, a sport that is glorified all over the place and that allows you to have something immediately in common with a lot of people. I myself despise violent sport so I don’t like watching those men smashing conviviality into each other, but certainly those that enjoy it are indeed in synch with each other, and that builds both family and community and nation. The fact is that the masses are tuning to each other every time they watch a basketball game or a game of golf or tennis, or dance and listen to a popular song, this is how they sync with one another, from there it is easier to be with anyone that has shared similar experiences. Under such terms you might well argue that the Elite synch with each other by going to Film Festivals, the Opera or reading droll Shakespearian witticism.
The massification of thought, ideas and interests has positively unifying aspects, uniqueness after all, even the cry for individualism has been dimmed by the commonness of such an aspiration. It is sort of the same with the ego, we all have one and it stands in the way of unification but it is equally one more thing we all have in common. Further one should always worry more for those that think they have the formulae for liberating the masses from themselves; after all they have a huge misunderstanding of the scope of the problem, for before we can liberate the masses we must be sure that the world is not a pragmatist dream come true. The masses by an large don’t try to change the world because they are generally ok with it, and more they realize that as often as the world has changed it largely has remained the same.
Personally I wished I liked McDonalds and Disneyland because I would then have more in common with Americans and the world masses, and besides that my lunches would be cheaper. The masses dominate modern society, they are the ones that are leading the world consumer order; public opinion is the marching order of the day. I don’t think that you should worry about the masses more worry about your won uniqueness which makes you a rare and endangered species.
I am limited in my beer drinking but a can never resist a Guinness Irish Stout.
Cheers.
Ricardo
A sophist
By the way you will not know it that my favorite video game, “Hunter Hunted” has a main character called Jake. Hahahaha! My wife and I used to play it often during our courtship years. It was a silly game but we loved it and I hope that playing it doesn’t imply that we are stupid or silly or that we don’t read The Nation. Occasionally Jake would encounter a terrible monster, (read hard to kill,) and the monster would very condescendly say, “you cannot win, put down your weapons you cannot win.” I always found those instructions hilarious, they really got your optimism down, whenever the stupid monster came out he would make all kinds of voided of syllables noises and you knew, you just knew things were going to get ugly.
Of course after a while as with all games, the Virtual Intelligence repeats its logic errors or reaches its rationalizing limits and an average human being learns that if he ducks or jumps at just the right split second the monster will react differently and give the human a chance at victory. Through repetition and error correction and of course the ability to restart the game, the eventual victim becomes the monster. The game becomes such an obvious little plot that the human being becomes bored and ignores the game and the monster, and both game and monster fade into obscurity.
You know Jake that I am going to give you a “moral to the story”. The puppet masters, in this case the game makers are aware that if the game is too complicated the majority of the people will feel dissatisfied with the game-play and abandon the product. And the disillusioned will tell their friends the game is too difficult and this in turn will lower sales expectations; and so the game has to be just right, just hard enough, just fun enough to satisfy the greatest number so that the sales figures are properly aimed at a mass market. Which is also why the cheats are available online so as to help those of us that are not gamers by nature to enjoy at least a simulated victory.
In your worldview the game creators are manipulating the gamers so as to get their money, in my world view both parties are manipulating each other and one cannot exist without the other. Your assumption that the elite and the masses are two separate entities is the equivalent of imagining that a tiger and the jungle have different priorities as far as the rainforest is concerned. They don’t!
Why would I take issue with your world view? Because it is condescending; you remind me of the monster that thought I was doomed without knowing that indeed I had more power over his existence and my own happiness. You see without me playing the game monster would be truly dead. In fact the objective of monster was to keep me alive, more than wanting to kill me the people at Hunted Hunter incorporated, which I think was Interplay, were working hard day and night to keep my attention, without that they too would be dead.
You can rightly imagine all the game designers working hard to comprehend the dynamics of my game play and mindset; “what does Ricardo like about the game? What does Ricardo dislike? When does he play more? What will give him greater satisfaction so that he buys the sequel?” But more important the game designers, undoubtedly fanatic gamers themselves, were also sacrificing their purity of game design so as to meet my less than exemplar gaming aspirations. The game designers were busy dumbing down the game so that I could be a part of their universe, so that I would play in their world, but obviously not at their Creator level of game-play.
Of course the CEO of Interplay was involved with a bunch of futurologist asking them to please guess what I was going to like next. While the Marketing group would call my house and offer me a 50% discount on any future game if I just answered a few questions so that they could best meet my expectations. Meanwhile the Sales Staff was dully working to meet sales quotas by trying to shove the game down my throat through every outlet possible.
You see Jake, perhaps because I am a common man, getting my attention is lot of work. And I must admit that getting my money is a little harder still, in part because I have limited resources, (read poor,) and in part because I am really not a consumer. And to be more honest still I don’t believe in intellectual property rights, so I didn’t even pay for the game, I got it for free and because I liked it so much I gave copies to my friends.
I don’t know how much money Interplay lost in Hunter Hunted but rumor has it that it wasn’t a very successful title, it was discontinued as sales figures did not warrant a sequel. My wife and I lost our copy and we are still trying to find one so as to recollect that period of our romance where we didn’t fight.
I think what I am saying is that the problem your Elite/Common Folk aspect ratio has is that the boundary cannot be clearly drawn. You fault the masses for not reading The Nation or Foreign Policy Review but you fail to administer the fact that it is, for instance, The Nation and what it values that has failed to capture the average imagination. I have read Foreign Policy Review and The Nation and frankly The Nation sounds like a forever in angst teenager, feeling cheated at every angle. Alexander Cockburn is surely a master of the verb and more a master at the ability to insult others at every turn. The Nation of course does have a way with words, it is purely an intellectual diatribe where the ability to toss superlatives around is only outstripped by the cult of character absolutism. Frankly I am not surprise people don’t want to read it, it is an intellectuals child’s den.
I use to read The Nation when they were still in that old newspaper print magazine format, and I seem to remember that they trashed Mother Jones for going to a colorful magazine format, it wasn’t for intellectual papers to be flashy and colorful, they must be serious and cold and sterile.
Mother Jones itself is another interesting case, I call them “the good earth people” I mean this people still think that the Indians were nice to nature, that they were one with the universe. You know I know that the American Indian wasn’t that nice, the Incas and the Chibchas and the Aztecs were even less nice, but according to Mother Jones only the white man is brutal and insensitive. One has to be blind to history to not realize that the entire evolution of humanity has been a savage adventure; and that it is only through squatter-incorporation of territory and DNA-mergers that we have grown this thing that we call a civilization.
The Nation, I don’t know how many subscribers they have, last time I checked I think it was around 170k, that is probably an accurate representation of 10% of the 3% of peoples in America that are wholly dead to their emotions and live purely in Intellectual hubris. At least The New Republic, another lover of things intellectual, has it in their sights to cater to popular opinion by expressing a liberal conservatism that tells us all that they are one of us even though they feel elitists and in fact are comfortable being elitists! The New Republic is not saying we are with the masses as The Nation likes to clamor, rather it is saying we are elitists, join us and you can be elitists too. As my favorite economist once said, “the masses more than wanting to overthrow the rich more want to be like them.”
As for Foreign Policy Review, why would you expect a publication that is a feeler for prospective policy with political insiders to be popular with the general public? I don’t read Trains and Caboose Review and don’t get me started on Slate. But to my point is that you are faulting the masses for not paying attention to obscure values and ideas. You are being just like The Nation, that is, condescending by assuming that you know more than the masses what is better for the masses; and that they are being controlled by an elitists clan and that they don’t know it because they don’t have the attention span that apparently you do.
First it must make you feel smarter to do that and if it does good for you. But allow me to pose an alternative view, that in a world of common people lucky are those that learn to be common quickly. When ever I feel special I am amazed to find my favorite rare sauces at the supermarket; throughout the years I have learnt that much of what I considered original about my philosophy was based largely on my own ignorance.
A common person has a world that caters to common people, if you are then satisfied by common undertakings this is a perfect world. How fun it must be to enjoy the Super Bowl, a sport that is glorified all over the place and that allows you to have something immediately in common with a lot of people. I myself despise violent sport so I don’t like watching those men smashing conviviality into each other, but certainly those that enjoy it are indeed in synch with each other, and that builds both family and community and nation. The fact is that the masses are tuning to each other every time they watch a basketball game or a game of golf or tennis, or dance and listen to a popular song, this is how they sync with one another, from there it is easier to be with anyone that has shared similar experiences. Under such terms you might well argue that the Elite synch with each other by going to Film Festivals, the Opera or reading droll Shakespearian witticism.
The massification of thought, ideas and interests has positively unifying aspects, uniqueness after all, even the cry for individualism has been dimmed by the commonness of such an aspiration. It is sort of the same with the ego, we all have one and it stands in the way of unification but it is equally one more thing we all have in common. Further one should always worry more for those that think they have the formulae for liberating the masses from themselves; after all they have a huge misunderstanding of the scope of the problem, for before we can liberate the masses we must be sure that the world is not a pragmatist dream come true. The masses by an large don’t try to change the world because they are generally ok with it, and more they realize that as often as the world has changed it largely has remained the same.
Personally I wished I liked McDonalds and Disneyland because I would then have more in common with Americans and the world masses, and besides that my lunches would be cheaper. The masses dominate modern society, they are the ones that are leading the world consumer order; public opinion is the marching order of the day. I don’t think that you should worry about the masses more worry about your won uniqueness which makes you a rare and endangered species.
I am limited in my beer drinking but a can never resist a Guinness Irish Stout.
Cheers.
Ricardo
A sophist
Sunday, January 23, 2005
I respond to Jake on “American Innocence”
His argument, well posed as it is, makes the assumption that there is an intelligence base, an elite core that manipulates the cogs and pulleys of society so as to control the masses and keep them ignorant of what is truly happening in the world.
The assumption that there are controlling interests is not wholly wrong, certain lobbying groups and class structures permit a certain degree of control so as to maintain existing social and economic structures. The conservatives and the liberals act as true manipulators of the infinite degrees that a society can hope to move up or down, left or right. But none too much in the extreme is Nationally or Globally permitted because this would dissolve the consistency which adds social order; and more important a sort of economic and social autopilot so that we don’t have to think our lives away. I mean that all successful systems are by nature conservative.
It is not uncommon for our ancestors to believe that the Illuminati, the Jews, Skulls and Bones, Order of the Bull’s Blood, etc administer civilization. This is an important concept among the majority of the populace because at once it gives them a reason to feel good about themselves, as they are helplessly not responsible for the world that they have to live and act in everyday. Two, it gives them the comfort that at least someone is really planning everything and that there is some kind of an elite mastermind behind everything.
The counter idea, that no one is really in control of the world and that it mostly aimlessly moves through a sort of silent agreement between all parties, as ideas, thoughts and actions combined to make a sort of obtuse compromised reality, is not acceptable nor comfortable.
However I propose just such a truth. While I cannot claim to have access to central bankers and Chief Executive Officers psyches, I do believe that they are mostly reacting to events as oppose to thinking forward their master plans. In fact most of anything that happens at the political or corporate level is a reaction and usually a helpless reaction which when executed is not optimize but rather a consequence of “even the circumstances” which impose themselves as yet another option for action.
We are deterred from the view that the world is a happenstance because we are control freaks. And we believe that others, the elites, the corporations, the supra-entities are in control because we know for a fact that we are not. Obviously we cannot circumvent our knowledge of our own impotence besides the world order and so we attribute control to all the others.
The American public would like to imagine that someone is in charge of their nation, that someone is checking the plan of execution against the constitution and thus ensuring a true course. The reality again is a little different, the founders of America had an idea and with it they created a national psyche but this was only a figment of the imagination, there was no truth to liberty, independence and the good will, those were just pillars of hope against the greater reality that it was through greed, religious fanaticism and civil righteousness that the country was founded and obtained greatness. The concept of America as a democracy or an individualist nation is not a factor in its current reality. America performs well against the world because of its “blind” single-mindedness, because Americans come together as a single National-Psyche, because they are willing to overthrow individuality, because they are mass thinkers and mass consumers and mass creatures with an immense sense of social duty to a larger cause! This cause might be the church, the state or the corporation, or even simply an endeavor like the space program. But Americans depersonalize themselves, they subtract the “I” from the equation and more rapid than most societies actually accomplish a social norm, a civic and national league that with its singularity of focus will outshine brighter ideas.
Mass behaviour depersonalizes it refuses individual control. America is indeed a democratic country but not because of the national right to vote but rather because the stampede always wins. There is a national herd instinct that becomes a national will to power. No one controls this and everyone must get out of its way.
America is a synchronized country, from sea to shiny sea the country has managed to take any nationality and to give them all the same idea, that they are unique, that they are special, that they live in the freest country on earth, that they have the right to chose their government, and their neighbors, and their religion. The reality of course is a little more harsh, most Americans are Christians, is that a sign of choice? Most Americans want to spread democracy. Is that open minded? Most Americans believe capitalism is the best way to manage an economy. Is that humane? Most Americans are consumers. Is that environmentally responsible? Most Americans believe that property and intellectual rights are titled deeds to be kept away from the rest of the world. Is that a global mindset?
In a sense Americans are a particular psyche, one can generalize because any and all national psyches are the dominant aspect representation of a given nationality. Colombians are by nature incapable of organization, they are self absorbed individuals that can allow their nation to suffer a forty year war without acquiring the energy or volition to accomplish genuine change. They watch their forty year wound bleed and have nothing to do about it, because they don’t have the energy to bring change or to suffer the repercussions of change but prefer the tragedy. Unlike Americans Colombians prefer their family to the nation, they are more united by soccer than by nationhood; and the nation as a whole, well it is something but nothing warranting their immediate attention rather their immediate disdain. Colombians don’t trust governments and so they keep their government weak and corrupt to justify their perception. That is our national psyche, Colombian is a loose fitting coalition of a people that have never had the guts or combined energies to form any significant civilization. At the same time we are not of the here and now, a forty year war its just an itch. That too is our national psyche, suffering is inconsequential to our metaphysics.
But be we Greeks or Americans or Colombians there isn’t anyone person or organization that can control our interests because our interests are controlled by the clash of our desires with reality which in turn equal a national sense of being; that at best represents no one and everyone.
Jake I do hope you are a wine drinker, it is part of my human psyche. Here is a red to you.
ricardo
The assumption that there are controlling interests is not wholly wrong, certain lobbying groups and class structures permit a certain degree of control so as to maintain existing social and economic structures. The conservatives and the liberals act as true manipulators of the infinite degrees that a society can hope to move up or down, left or right. But none too much in the extreme is Nationally or Globally permitted because this would dissolve the consistency which adds social order; and more important a sort of economic and social autopilot so that we don’t have to think our lives away. I mean that all successful systems are by nature conservative.
It is not uncommon for our ancestors to believe that the Illuminati, the Jews, Skulls and Bones, Order of the Bull’s Blood, etc administer civilization. This is an important concept among the majority of the populace because at once it gives them a reason to feel good about themselves, as they are helplessly not responsible for the world that they have to live and act in everyday. Two, it gives them the comfort that at least someone is really planning everything and that there is some kind of an elite mastermind behind everything.
The counter idea, that no one is really in control of the world and that it mostly aimlessly moves through a sort of silent agreement between all parties, as ideas, thoughts and actions combined to make a sort of obtuse compromised reality, is not acceptable nor comfortable.
However I propose just such a truth. While I cannot claim to have access to central bankers and Chief Executive Officers psyches, I do believe that they are mostly reacting to events as oppose to thinking forward their master plans. In fact most of anything that happens at the political or corporate level is a reaction and usually a helpless reaction which when executed is not optimize but rather a consequence of “even the circumstances” which impose themselves as yet another option for action.
We are deterred from the view that the world is a happenstance because we are control freaks. And we believe that others, the elites, the corporations, the supra-entities are in control because we know for a fact that we are not. Obviously we cannot circumvent our knowledge of our own impotence besides the world order and so we attribute control to all the others.
The American public would like to imagine that someone is in charge of their nation, that someone is checking the plan of execution against the constitution and thus ensuring a true course. The reality again is a little different, the founders of America had an idea and with it they created a national psyche but this was only a figment of the imagination, there was no truth to liberty, independence and the good will, those were just pillars of hope against the greater reality that it was through greed, religious fanaticism and civil righteousness that the country was founded and obtained greatness. The concept of America as a democracy or an individualist nation is not a factor in its current reality. America performs well against the world because of its “blind” single-mindedness, because Americans come together as a single National-Psyche, because they are willing to overthrow individuality, because they are mass thinkers and mass consumers and mass creatures with an immense sense of social duty to a larger cause! This cause might be the church, the state or the corporation, or even simply an endeavor like the space program. But Americans depersonalize themselves, they subtract the “I” from the equation and more rapid than most societies actually accomplish a social norm, a civic and national league that with its singularity of focus will outshine brighter ideas.
Mass behaviour depersonalizes it refuses individual control. America is indeed a democratic country but not because of the national right to vote but rather because the stampede always wins. There is a national herd instinct that becomes a national will to power. No one controls this and everyone must get out of its way.
America is a synchronized country, from sea to shiny sea the country has managed to take any nationality and to give them all the same idea, that they are unique, that they are special, that they live in the freest country on earth, that they have the right to chose their government, and their neighbors, and their religion. The reality of course is a little more harsh, most Americans are Christians, is that a sign of choice? Most Americans want to spread democracy. Is that open minded? Most Americans believe capitalism is the best way to manage an economy. Is that humane? Most Americans are consumers. Is that environmentally responsible? Most Americans believe that property and intellectual rights are titled deeds to be kept away from the rest of the world. Is that a global mindset?
In a sense Americans are a particular psyche, one can generalize because any and all national psyches are the dominant aspect representation of a given nationality. Colombians are by nature incapable of organization, they are self absorbed individuals that can allow their nation to suffer a forty year war without acquiring the energy or volition to accomplish genuine change. They watch their forty year wound bleed and have nothing to do about it, because they don’t have the energy to bring change or to suffer the repercussions of change but prefer the tragedy. Unlike Americans Colombians prefer their family to the nation, they are more united by soccer than by nationhood; and the nation as a whole, well it is something but nothing warranting their immediate attention rather their immediate disdain. Colombians don’t trust governments and so they keep their government weak and corrupt to justify their perception. That is our national psyche, Colombian is a loose fitting coalition of a people that have never had the guts or combined energies to form any significant civilization. At the same time we are not of the here and now, a forty year war its just an itch. That too is our national psyche, suffering is inconsequential to our metaphysics.
But be we Greeks or Americans or Colombians there isn’t anyone person or organization that can control our interests because our interests are controlled by the clash of our desires with reality which in turn equal a national sense of being; that at best represents no one and everyone.
Jake I do hope you are a wine drinker, it is part of my human psyche. Here is a red to you.
ricardo
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