Archive for September, 2005

Cubicles

Posted

September 29, 2005

Categories

Uncategorized

Tags

Comments

No Comments

I found a draft of an observation about an old job.

I try to make my middle way through life around me, but it isn’t always easy. I suppose it is better somehow, than the path of least resistance, or the path of most resistance, and it is the middle between those two extremes that I struggle to straddle the most.

People who sit in cubicles behind me, they take the path of most resistance. Here I am with them, and it is nice to get along with the others. That’s what they are, though — others. What do I mean “they take the path of most resistance”? I mean to say that they are most resistant. Offer them sushi and watch what they do. They decide that this alien food is toxic to them. Its not that the food is distasteful, it is that they have a distaste for it. This is not a complaint that some people don’t like sushi. Many people dislike many things. Some people dislike most things, all but the familiar things, and the dislike is strong enough to cripple the experience of anything new.

Pin Ups

Posted

September 29, 2005

Categories

Uncategorized

Tags

Comments

No Comments

Umbrella Pin Up

My Friend Trisha has completed a new set of photography. She calls it “pin up” photography and describes it with adjectives like “artfaggy” and “sec-say-ness”

He Talks to Ghosts

Posted

September 29, 2005

Categories

Ephemera

Tags

Comments

No Comments

Just before dinnertime, I took a walk across the Guilford Street Bridge. Winds drove themselves between buildings, bringing with them smells of the sea, smells of food cooking, a million dinners. There, in the middle of the street, was a man introducing himself to no one. But it was not no one. There were many of them. But there were not many of them. No one else was there.

“Yo!”, he said, and assumed the posture of a man introducing himself. He turned, as if in conversation with a group, and spoke inaudibly. He waited for something less audible, and laughed as though in response to a joke. He pitched his head behind him at an angle, as toward a voice calling him from behind, but there was only the wind, so far as I could see.

You can’t have my army cot.

Posted

September 28, 2005

Categories

Uncategorized

Tags

Comments

1 Comment

You can’t have my army cot. Its my couch, and when I don’t have a bed, when I am also living out of a duffel bag, it is my bed. My grandfather was a colonel in the army. (Isn’t it funny that we don’t spell it “Kernel”?) The cot was his cot, his bed and his mode of transportation after an injury n duty in china. He got drunk and drove a Jeep from a bridge, jumping from the jeep at the last minute. Drunken leaps from moving automobiles apparently run in my family. They carried him on that cot until he recovered. He was a statistician, so his job was not impaired by the injury. The Chinese would run him from the casinos at gunpoint, because of his statistical skills. Me, I can’t even multiply. I’m much more like my dad.

My father kept the hat that was part of my grandfather’s military uniform. The hat would rest on the plastic skeleton that had been used by the university’s medical department. That skeleton, along with the hat, became “Colonial Bones”, which was a model for many of my father’s drawing courses. My father is an art professor. He raised me after my mother left.

And so, I grew up to become the guy who has an army cot for a couch. If you’re looking for a couch, well, I don’t have one. Its a cot.

Platitudes

Posted

September 27, 2005

Categories

Ephemera

Tags

Comments

No Comments

A friend of mine has died. It was an unexpected death, as so many of them are.

The people my age, the young ones, those who knew him well, they have few words for it.

“I found him there. He had been like that for a while.”

“I touched his arm, at the funeral. I was angry with him, but that wasn’t really him, whose arm I touched, was it? I said goodbye for you, since I knew you couldn’t be there.”

“He’s dead; how about that!”

The older ones, those who never knew him, they have platitudes.
“When someone dies, someone your age, unexpectedly, it’s shocking. You never expect that.”

I met my friend at a poetry reading, on my sixteenth birthday. For years, I had accidentally carried around a pack of poems my friend had written, in the back of an old notebook. I had always meant to return the poems to him. I would see my friend, in town, on occasion, and ask, “Did you know I still have those poems of yours” and “would you like me to return them to you?” I can still hear his voice, as it would sound, reading the poems. I cannot find the notebook they’re in. They are all I have of him, and they’re gone. The only thing left is the memory of a tone, and the memory of a tone fades.

He had a calm voice, a cadence part jazz part monotone, and the tone was nasal but deep. He spoke slowly but excitedly. He would occasionally get ahead of himself. He would nod when spoken to. I will never hear his voice again.