some free-writing
I squeaked my brakes at the intercom at the drive-through.
“Blah, blah, blah, how can I help you?”
“Number 4, please, no pickles. Now, don’t mess it up because last time there was pickles.”
“Will that complete your order?”
“Dude, I’m serious. About the pickles.”
“Not a problem, sir.”
“Say, do you have to pay for your food when you get it here?”
“What? Yeah, you have to pay.” (Like, duh.)
“No, I mean do YOU have to pay? Or is the food free?”
“Oh, well I get like a little discount, sure, but not free.”
He’s still talking to me through the little voice-box, this loud scratchy voice, I think the speakers were turned up too loud or something.
“Say, man, have you eaten yet? Let me buy your meal today, call it like a tip or something.”
“Aw, that’d be great.” Doesn’t miss a beat, what a humble guy.
We complete the transaction, I let him take his order and drive through to the window. I bet the guy’s baked. He’s the kind of guy that should probably shave his mustache, because it doesn’t really work for his face.
“That’ll be $$$.”
“Hey, dude, before I pay, I want to check the bag to make sure the order’s right. Is that okay? Can I do that, huh?”
“You want to check the bag before you pay?”
“Yeah, yeah. I just— let me have a look at the sandwich.. I want to make sure there’s no pickles.”
He pauses. Nearly an awkward silence, what am I supposed to do, smile? He hands me the bag and instead of checking what’s in it, I just drive off without paying.
I know, I know, I’m a terrible person. But, thinking about the drive-through tender I can imagine when reporting to the manager he would describe the hit-and-run as if I had run off with the order in its entirety — including the meal he’d ordered for himself, on my tab (consider it still open!) and ate whatever it is he thought he was getting.
——-
“This sandwich is greasy. Oh, look, it splits in half!”
“When I was driving home just now I started thinking maybe all this time, I’ve been driving for twelve years, maybe I never knew how to drive in the first place. And want to know what happened?”
“Can’t talk, I’m chewing.”
“I, immediately, forgot how to drive. I was just, like, ‘Does this wheel TURN? Or something?’ And so I’m like swerving out of control and these two dudes are crossing the road to get to the bar and as I pass them they, like, KICK my car. And I hit the breaks (the whole forgetting how to drive thing was over pretty quick), and I get out of the car and I yell at them, but not like ‘Hey!’ or anything not even ‘hey’, I just yell, I’m like screaming no words at them like I was going to fight them. Then I just stopped and sat back in my car, thinking what am I kidding me?”
“Did you just say, ‘What am I kidding me’?”
“Jesus, c’mon. Look. I got pickles in my order.”
My culture is not a nation, but a tradition. I was born Catholic & no longer identify with the church, but still use its vocabulary as guides in my life. My mother’s Buddhist people immigrated into Saigon from a Cantonese town before anyone kept records about it, my dad was born in Saigon. They both came here to this evil place called America so that I could party with you guys and talk about it. Every now and again I come to terms, being born out of a womb that was full of this adaptive anguish, the kind of confusion that is hopeful, diligent, and piss-scared. Most days it’s out of my head, like a good alien puts it out of his head. A good alien does not internalize alienness, a good alien understands the planet around him is alien. A good alien finds a nice job, a wife, and shies from the limelight. A good alien is an ambassador. The flag on the tip of the iceberg. The pinched bridge between twin funnels of an hourglass.
Like POOF, it’s-
You’ve decided to quit tobacco for e-cigarettes. Your lungs feel like quicksand, your heart easily excites — manic, trigger-happy — it sucks, like your sternum is the grill for an old grease trap — your nasal cavity’s a chapped burrow, your brain a heavy ghost on a dry lake bed. One cigarette just murders you, after a while you’ll feel it, but you’re convinced that you’re proud of it (however self-mocking the show you’ll put on about how you should quit & how it’s fatal & whatnot). You’re going to miss it, buying the loose leaf ounce of moist Drum halfzware shag, tucking the rice-thin paper into your bottom lip, grabbing a pinch of tobacco, spreading it into a tapered log over the crease in the paper, pressing your thumbs against the cylinder of paper & tobacco, watching the pressure, redistributing the cuts of leaf, pinching upward for the smoothest roll, examining the finished cigarette — take THAT factory machines! You are a true artisan, a craftsman, a man who builds his own house. Then when the smoke is done, you make a game of shooting comets, flicking the butt of it ten yards away over the asphalt on the street.
But, tomorrow, you are going to buy an e-cigarette, & instead of this tiny revisited package — a complete package — one that starts, unwraps, & finishes — you will, instead, be injecting your own face directly through the mouth with vaporized nicotine. C’est la vie. Who needs any of it, anyway.
Nuoc
First, you learn that “nuoc” in Vietnamese means “water”.
The commander of a subjugated people bathes in a river and asks his allies, “How does one clean the dirt from his hands?”
They answer, “Nuoc.”
He kicks up mud from the river bank, cups the brown water in his hands, and continues: “Now, but how do you remove dirt from dirty nuoc?”
His allies do not know the answer, “How?”
Second, you learn that “nuoc” in Vietnamese means “nation”.
The commander replies, “With blood.”
If you have a bigger belief in your own inner workings than the workings of the outside world — does this make you anti-social, or an escapist, or unrealistic?
If you bide time because you do not believe in work for work’s sake, or failure for the sake of learning (but believe, rather, in work for the pride that flourishes after, that flourishes when examining the real product, regardless of if it fails or succeeds) — does this make you a tactless wader, a fool-headed wonder stuck in a slow current, but playing in a world of only fast currents?
I have as much money as I have desires — my bank account will attest to that — I desire very little. & we fall into the pit of mishaps sometimes — & sometimes at the worst moments — & in these moments they’ll tell you: “Who cares? Why get hung up? Keep moving! Get on with it! Aren’t you accustomed to the complications by now?”
But, you know, sometimes the only thing you learn is that you don’t need the advice of others. I don’t care if I have to be fifty years old before I get what I want out of life — if I do by then I’ll be all the luckier — but even then, goddammit, I won’t be any further from being in the present, nor any closer to it, so what’s the difference?
Travel opportunities, that’s what. But even, then, so what? Sometimes I swear that the entire world is just one big mythical event; sometimes I think when I die every one of you guys won’t exist anymore either.
It’s okay to be hung up, I don’t mind it. As far as the human condition is concerned: being hung up is the only real thing one can write about.
(Source: vanstanley)
American Pietà
You’re living your days as if you’ll be famous when you’re dead. Why is that? I don’t like that. First of all: it makes the assumption that we’ll be digging through your garbage when the croak comes, & second of all: it’s just plain lazy.
You lie on your couch, you jingle potentials between the cushions like loose change, you think dying will take care of your greatest achievement: a lasting mark of the memory: a stone carving of a figure, immortally cradled on the couch.
(Source: vanstanley)
The Rite Of Spring
You may only find a thing if you are looking for it, one might say. But chance and self-proclaimed fate do not match up at times. Life. Art. Life. Imitation. Art. If you like art, you’ll love the imitation of life. Or is it vice versa? To make a thing takes knowing a thing. How do you make a thing without knowing a thing? Without knowing anything? It would probably be a paradox if not for time’s passage, error’s allowance, practice’s necessity. Practice makes mistakes before it makes perfect. It’s okay. What you need to do, the weight you must add to your own investments (think: long-term), the trials you must suffer - they are okay. It’s okay. No one, no one, and I mean no one is watching. Pick yourself up from the trippings, the trimmings. No one is watching you fail. So you, you self-conscious FREAK, you stop watching as well. All you can do now is release every which waything until there is enough dirt to sift for some grit and an idea.
Every writer I’ve personally known, every writer that writes about a woman (that I’ve known of) writes about ALL women (that they’ve known). Is love exclusive? Is it limited to a single, solitary, isolated emotion expressed and focused towards a single solitary, isolated instance of Woman? Towards an individual? What do we seek? If only…
Typing. T-t-t-typing. To the rhythm. Of the piano. I once sketched the nude figure of a sixty-something-or-older man named Henry. Henry was a French ex-patriot spending his days and making his living as a proud and professional nude model for art studios and workshops in Houston. His testes were entirely too massive and the bloated tip of his penis would drip involuntarily with semen although he never appeared to be aroused by his own exposed movements. Once, he sat regally upon a cushioned seat, hunched back leaning against the studio wall, feet planted firmly upon the cold concrete floor, eyes straight ahead over the spray of students sketching and sitting Indian-style before him. His bulbous nose blared like a beacon, a clenched fist, or a royal French crest. One student felt inclined - as I’m sure we all felt inclined - to ask: “So, do you paint or draw at all? Do you make art, Henry?” He replied, with chucked laughter: “No, no. I do not paint. For, you see, you have your piano players and you have your dancers. And the piano player cannot dance so long as the dancer will not play piano.” Every time I meet a new person, on the street or in a cafe, I wonder to myself: “Are you a piano player? or a dancer?” The answer doesn’t matter. What matters, however, is the interpretation of the question. I want to write a song considering a blind dancer and a deaf piano player, the one depending on the other to produce their art.
There is another story, inspired by Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring: in an older Russia, young virgins would ritualistically dance themselves to death as a sacrifice. The prize for payment was a much-valued spring in Russia. One year, a girl named Olga is chosen for the occasion as the dance-to-the-death virgin, mainly because the village reasons that she is hardly attractive anyhow. Olga is designated her bare patch of dirt. The village elders adjust the wraps of their fur coats as they nod for the girl, young and naked, as she was, before them, to start. A boy taps a solid beat with a calf’s dry thighbone. Olga bends and her belly heaves to the ground as if she might faint. She begins to dance. The entire village has its eyes set on her and its hopes set on the possibility of springtime. Olga’s toes twist awkwardly at first. Her calves turn and lift and extend as her heels rise from the ground in rhythm, her knees seem to buckle before retracting firmly, her thighs spread and expose their inner sides and then press together, bumping her knees together, her waist jumps and churns within and without itself, her torso pounds, her breasts wave, her arms waft the crisp Russian winter air, her neck circles, her eyes never open. Olga’s hair catches the wind and tames it. Olga danced because everybody wanted spring. But Olga danced and everybody wanted Olga. “Oh, Olga, darling, forget spring. I’ll spend a winter with you, Olga.” Olga kept dancing. My friend, if you thought she looked beautiful dancing, you cannot imagine how beautiful she FELT while dancing. Olga’s every joint caught fire, she was a perpetual piston churning and yearning for the first time, she was living and thriving off of her own freedom, the grace in her movement radiated so deeply that even she, in each humble feature of her looks, could not deny it. No, Olga could not- Olga would not stop dancing. Not for the life of her.
Springtime was never so haunted by loss. It came, as it would have, as did the rest of the year, as it would have, but no elementary sustenance, no amount of fortunate weather, could fill or erase the void Olga left behind. She was eventually, after nearly two and a half decades of trial in the Eastern Orthodox Church, canonized as a saint. No further miracles were necessary as proof of her holiness: Olga destroyed spring.
(Source: vanstanley)
If you have a bigger belief in your own inner workings than the workings of the outside world — does this make you anti-social, or an escapist, or unrealistic?
If you bide time because you do not believe in work for work’s sake, or failure for the sake of learning (but believe, rather, in work for the pride that flourishes after, that flourishes when examining the real product, regardless of if it fails or succeeds) — does this make you a tactless wader, a fool-headed wonder stuck in a slow current, but playing in a world of only fast currents?
I have as much money as I have desires — my bank account will attest to that — I desire very little. & we fall into the pit of mishaps sometimes — & sometimes at the worst moments — & in these moments they’ll tell you: “Who cares? Why get hung up? Keep moving! Get on with it! Aren’t you accustomed to the complications by now?”
But, you know, sometimes the only thing you learn is that you don’t need the advice of others. I don’t care if I have to be fifty years old before I get what I want out of life — if I do by then I’ll be all the luckier — but even then, goddammit, I won’t be any further from being in the present, nor any closer to it, so what’s the difference?
Travel opportunities, that’s what. But even, then, so what? Sometimes I swear that the entire world is just one big mythical event; sometimes I think when I die every one of you guys won’t exist anymore either.
It’s okay to be hung up, I don’t mind it. As far as the human condition is concerned: being hung up is the only real thing one can write about.
observee asked: "The rules are to state 10 random facts about yourself. Then, go to your five favorite blogs and tell them that they are it."
1.) I have a semi-circle-shaped scar on the back of my left middle-finger that I got from slicing myself accidentally on the broken porcelain tank of a toilet at this disgusting little dive bar down the street. It feels good to be alive.
2.) My ancestors are tenderly watching over me & I can prove this to you if ever we should play a round of mahjong.
3.) I have never weighed more than 110 lbs.
4.) According to my father, his great aunt was one of the wives of the last emperor of Vietnam before being exiled with him by the prime minister of Vietnam in the 1950s.
5.) In some version of a perfect reality, I am David Bowie & I am married to Kate Bush.
6.) Often I prefer to read plays as opposed to either reading novels or watching plays. There is something about having almost pure dialogue on a page that excites my imagination more than the single voice of a narrator, or seeing people deliver lines on a stage. My favorites: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Glengarry Glen Ross, and Under Milk Wood.
7.) I hate horror movies, many times it’s got that repetitive near-scare bullshit or the repetitive guts-spew bullshit or the world seems to’ve oversimplified to’ve got nothing to do with anything else but some poor soul that’s better off left alone. You sit there & think to yourself, “What sick person had to come up with this in order to drag me down into a false sense of insecurity?” I think in pre-industrialized civilizations people got their sadistic kicks by conjuring up terrible methods of torture and criminal punishment — now they do the same by writing screenplays.
8.) A person on coffee is a steam engine; a person on tea is a monarch. Tea affords me the humility of slowing down when I’m consuming drink. I am exchanging chemicals with these leaves or these herbs. The water is hot for a reason, every sip one takes is in contemplation of that heat & a flavor that is — actually — subtly changing every minute with every pour.
9.) Gold-top Gretsch Electromatic with a chambered body and Bigsby bridge, run through a Fender Frontman 212R. Very simple set up, but only because singing is so much more fun than playing guitar.
10.) At age 25, I expected ten years ago to’ve been married & a father by now. In some ways you sort of get the same parental kicks by nurturing yourself, teaching yourself again the things you already know. A few weeks ago I reversed one of my acoustic guitars, to make it left handed — because my right hand knows how to hold a pick & how to strum, and it can teach my left hand how to hold a pick & how to strum — likewise my left hand knows how to hold chords & to move across distances, and it can teach my right hand how to do the same. It’s difficult as fuck, but the idea is to be a mentor to myself, to test exactly what it is that muscle memory has made me forget.
Cheers!
Do not be just a nother.
Do not be just a nother. For a nother is one who noths — & just as one who sits, is sitting —& one who stares, is staring — one who noths, is nothing.
