Ever since I can remember, I've always hated riding the bus.
It's 9 a.m. I should not be up this early. Fucking bullshit. But I have to catch the bus to get to work. My body is still catching up to the fact that it's awake. My eyes are red and stinging, swollen and purple. My body aches. I stand at the bus stop and breathe in the exhaust from the cars driving by. I see the bus in the distance. What a fucking morning to be alive.
I step on and slip two crisp, new bills into the machine. Twenties. I throw a few more at the bus driver. "Make it fast Charlie. No bullshit, got it?" He swallows and nods nervously. I slap my hand against his cheek just loud enough to make a little noise. "Atta boy." Spineless quivering motherfucker.
The bus is packed like fucking sardines. People are all jammed up in the aisle. I look to the back and see there are a few open seats. I never did understand why these people, sheep really, all fucking stand stupid and clueless at the front of the bus while there are four or five open seats in the back. I decided a long time ago I couldn't live that way. If society thinks the right thing to do is stand at the front of the bus, then fuck society. Who doesn't want to be able to sit comfortably on the bus, look out the window, lean back and relax? These fucking pussies just don't have the guts to do it. But I do. So fuck 'em.
The bus starts moving and I grab onto the railing and start moving back. The sheep people lean to the sides of the aisle as I muscle my way past them, cowering motherfuckers who don't even have enough guts to move back themselves at least. Now that I could respect, if they realized what they were doing and took a seat. Then I'd stand. I wouldn't be fucking happy about it but at least I'd be surrounded by real stand up individuals.
I get to a tight spot - three of these fuckers are all squished side to side in the aisle and I can barely get past. They all look away like they don't know I'm trying to get through. You don't recognize me? You don't know who the fuck I am? You better fucking let me past.
"You've gotta be kidding," mutters a woman under her breath. She's wearing a big blue overcoat and looking down at the ground. I grab her by the hood of her coat and yank her head up so her beady little eyes and snub nosed face are inches from mine.
"The fuck you say?"
"Nothing, nothing..."
"Oh no motherfucker. I don't think you said nothing. I think you fucking said something. You wanna say it again? See cause my hearing's not so good. I don't think I quite got it."
"I..."
"Listen you fucking cunt. You get out of the way, and you don't fucking talk back. Got it? Do I look like I want to be standing here? Am I just fucking walking down the aisle for fun?"
She just stares at me. So what can I do? I punch the broad in the face and she goes down like a sack of bricks. Her head hits the rubber floor with a thud. I give her legs a few good stomps until I feel the bones breaking under my shoes. She won't be standing in the aisle anymore now.
I look around the bus.
"Anyone else got a problem?"
The bus driver turns a blind eye. Those twenties keep his eyes on the road, where they belong.
The rest of these stupid motherfuckers part like the Red Sea of pussies and I leisurely make my way to the back. I sit down and spread my arms across the back of the seats. I survey my kingdom. It feels good to be on top.
*snap*
"Ohh... sorry... excuse me... excuse me... sorry"
Nevermind. I'll just stand in the front. Sigh.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
On the Waterfront
There's a bench next to a bronze statue between piers 53, which houses the waterfront fire station, and 54, which has an Ivar's restaurant and is the beginning of the touristy part of the waterfront. The bench is a perfectly nice place to sit and see the waterfront. Sometimes I've seen tourists crowding around the bronze statue - a fisherman - taking pictures. But most of the time it's occupied by homeless people. There are lots of little benches and parks that dot the waterfront, and most of them are populated by homeless people. Most of them are by themselves. They sit with their bags of belongings. They don't usually ask for change. If they do, they're more likely to be standing along the concrete barrier that separates the sidewalk from the water, holding a fishing pole with an empty cup at the end or doing something to try to attract the attention of the tourists who stream past.
But the homeless people on the benches just sit there with no intent other than to sit. Usually their bags are arranged carefully around them and they set themselves up in the middle like paupers turned princes reclining on thrones of collected junk and old clothes. Often they sit there with a cigarette in hand, although never a full cigarette. You never see these people pulling a cigarette out of a pack and lighting the virgin end. Their cigarettes are always in some state of consumption, usually showing more filter than white.
The bench next to the bronze statue is a few feet lower than the statue, but close up next to it, so that whoever's sitting there can nestle themselves, surrounded by their bags, into the crook under the fisherman's arm.
When I walked past there was a woman sitting there, hunched over with her limbs bowed out in front of her, and her stomach sucked back in under her chest, the pit at the source of her outstretched extremities. She held a fat hand rolled cigarette that was burned down to a nub and looked like it was about to fall apart. She brought it up to her lips with a leathery hand. Her mouth was encircled in something brownish yellow, but I couldn't tell what it was. It was on her hands too. It highlighted the creases and wrinkles and the wiry stray hairs around her chapped lips. Her hair looked like it hadn't been washed for a while, and stringy clumps brushed across her forehead. Her eyes laid buried under wrinkled flaps of skin and were a dark gray-brown; whatever was in them was obscured like the bottom of a deep well. (Does this make sense? Do you see what I'm getting at? I think I might need to change this still but it gets the general idea across).
She wasn't asking for money. She had no sign, and didn't say anything to anyone who passed. She just held the cigarette up to her lips and closed her mouth around it, but not all the way. When she inhaled her chest arched back slightly and her stomach came out of its pit. It was like all her internal organs had turned into a big lung, and when she inhaled, the entirety of her torso expanded with the smoke. She made a horrible noise as she did this; a low, deep wheeze with a rattle of phlegm that played itself in reverse as the smoke came out. She didn't look at anyone and the cigarette stayed at her lips or near them. I turned away as I walked past, and as I got further away the noise faded. I looked back again and she was still sitting there with the cigarette against her withered yellow lips, puffing metronomically like an iron lung keeping the burning end alive.
But the homeless people on the benches just sit there with no intent other than to sit. Usually their bags are arranged carefully around them and they set themselves up in the middle like paupers turned princes reclining on thrones of collected junk and old clothes. Often they sit there with a cigarette in hand, although never a full cigarette. You never see these people pulling a cigarette out of a pack and lighting the virgin end. Their cigarettes are always in some state of consumption, usually showing more filter than white.
The bench next to the bronze statue is a few feet lower than the statue, but close up next to it, so that whoever's sitting there can nestle themselves, surrounded by their bags, into the crook under the fisherman's arm.
When I walked past there was a woman sitting there, hunched over with her limbs bowed out in front of her, and her stomach sucked back in under her chest, the pit at the source of her outstretched extremities. She held a fat hand rolled cigarette that was burned down to a nub and looked like it was about to fall apart. She brought it up to her lips with a leathery hand. Her mouth was encircled in something brownish yellow, but I couldn't tell what it was. It was on her hands too. It highlighted the creases and wrinkles and the wiry stray hairs around her chapped lips. Her hair looked like it hadn't been washed for a while, and stringy clumps brushed across her forehead. Her eyes laid buried under wrinkled flaps of skin and were a dark gray-brown; whatever was in them was obscured like the bottom of a deep well. (Does this make sense? Do you see what I'm getting at? I think I might need to change this still but it gets the general idea across).
She wasn't asking for money. She had no sign, and didn't say anything to anyone who passed. She just held the cigarette up to her lips and closed her mouth around it, but not all the way. When she inhaled her chest arched back slightly and her stomach came out of its pit. It was like all her internal organs had turned into a big lung, and when she inhaled, the entirety of her torso expanded with the smoke. She made a horrible noise as she did this; a low, deep wheeze with a rattle of phlegm that played itself in reverse as the smoke came out. She didn't look at anyone and the cigarette stayed at her lips or near them. I turned away as I walked past, and as I got further away the noise faded. I looked back again and she was still sitting there with the cigarette against her withered yellow lips, puffing metronomically like an iron lung keeping the burning end alive.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
I know a place we can go where you'll fall in love so hard you'll wish you were dead
Memory changes as time goes on. Memories become more distant, just as vivid but inaccessible. Perception of memories becomes different with change of context, past perception of the future is more reflection of the past than what the present would actually turn out to be. Physical parts of memories – people, places, are still there, but not the version/context from memory.
When you're 12, all memory seems within reach. Up until about age six, most of your memories are a hazy patchwork of remembered events or ones constructed from things you are told you have done but may or may not actually remember; birthdays, Christmas, skinning your knee, watching cartoons. So by age 12 you essentially have six years of solid memories, and although there are many changes between ages six and 12, they all happen within the same daily context of going to school, playing with friends, and living at home. For most people, there are still another six years until that context will change at age 18. Although you know that everything from age six to 12 has already happened, you can expect to continue experiencing things in the same way for the next few years at least – Christmas at 10 is not so different from Christmas at 12 or 13, nor is going to school or eating dinner with your family.
By age 23 you have nearly doubled your altitude in time and all of a sudden age six looks incredibly far away – memories now populated by ant-sized people which are viewable from the precipice on which you stand but out of physical reach. On the mountain of time one can always look back down, but physical movement can only go forward and upward. Life starts at the bottom, a sort of base camp, but the further one gets, the rockier and thicker the terrain gets, sometimes in a way that makes it hard to traverse, other times in a new way you never would have expected or imagined but that is intriguing and enjoyable nonetheless.
This experience of seeing the past from such a great height all of a sudden can be jarring. Up until age 18 or so, life goes on at a steady, even pace, along a shallow incline. But at age 18, or whenever one becomes an adult and moves away from the context of family and school to independence and adulthood the trajectory becomes steeper, but you are so intent to climb up it as fast as you can, excited to get to the next level, that you don't look around you and see how quickly you are moving up, until you find yourself standing on that precipice looking back down at all the time you've covered. Seeing how far you have gotten is not the only thing that makes this experience jarring; it is compounded by the fact that that distance creates a barrier in one's memory which, until this point, could not have existed because there was not enough time between memories to create one. Christmas at 10, 12 and 13 may be a predictable experience, reinforced and confirmed by past memories and expectations for the immediate future, but Christmas at 23 is an entirely different and new experience, one that is different in a way from those previous Christmas's in a way you didn't realize it could be.
At 13 you can experience the same joy and excitement about Christmas that you could at nine. You have this excitement and joy because you remember having had that feeling before, and you live more or less in the same environment in which you previously experienced it, so naturally it would be as consistent as the rest of your experiences that are shaped by expectation from recent memories. At 23, however, the barrier of memory-distance stands between you and that feeling. You can remember what it felt like, you can observe and recognize the same sentiment in others, but you can't actually experience it again. Of course this barrier isn't all of a sudden put up one day, barring you from your previous experiences. It is built slowly, at a pace at which one barely notices its construction. It's simply that you don't realize it's there until it's built up all the way. By 16 or 17 it is already halfway built, so when you do something you have done before there is an aspect of newness in your experience of it, but there is still some of the old as well, and so you don't recognize the new as something that will eventually replace the old as your primary experience, but something that is being added on to it. While the “you” of the present looks at it as a combination of present and past memories, your subconscious is quietly removing the bottom bricks of the wall you've always known and moving them away into storage.
This isn't to say that once that wall is built up you are stuck on one side with no new experiences or memories looking back at a forbidden greener-grassed past. New memories are still always forming, although there is now a tinge of bittersweetness in experiencing them, because you know that eventually these memories will be behind another wall. This bittersweetness is a good and bad thing. On the one hand, it can make you nostalgic for your experiences in the present, saddened by the knowledge that they will soon be gone, but on the other hand, it forces you to appreciate your experiences as much as you can in the moment, squeezing out all the joy you can from the fleeting present.
Memory is funny because while it exists entirely in your head, the majority of things that trigger memories exist in the external world, but there is no way to physically reconcile your memories with what you see in the external world in the present. This morning when I walked from my house to the Ave, a six block walk along 45th, I crossed through a lifetime of memories. I walk past the Metro theater and I'm eleven years old again, waiting in line with my grandpa to see a movie, holding his hand and looking up at him excitedly from my younger stature, or I'm 19, on a date, nervously standing in line absentmindedly folding and unfolding a 20 dollar bill and trying to think of something clever or witty to say. But I pass it and I am 23, on my way to work – a new experience that is still populated by transparent wisps of memory replaying themselves over and over like holographic movies. Everything I encounter is Proust's madeleine.
The memory-distance barrier not only changes how we look at the past, but also the present and future. Many of our experiences in the present are things that we imagined in the past, especially our broader and more encompassing experiences such as work, home life, friendships, hobbies, etc. In our memory there is a distinct image of what the future would be, and most often it is the case that the future is not what we imagined it to be, but rather that that fantasy of the future was a projection of our lives at the time of the memory onto a skeletal view of what the future would be - for example, work is the skeletal frame, but the rest of the body is the content and experience of work; the soul the imagined future of work and the flesh the reality.
Of course this analogy applies not only to work, but to almost all our experiences. When I was 17 I knew exactly what my apartment would look like and where it would be at age 23. My imagined future was shaped by my interests at the time, but not particularly by a realistic idea of the future. At the time I had started watching the show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and ascribed religiously to its aesthetics and its version of what a classy, cultured man should be like. So I imagined my home would be like the ones they created on the show, but not just in how it was decorated, but where it was, what floor it was on, what view it had. I was also becoming more and more interested in cooking, particularly Japanese, and so I imagined my home would be equipped with all the necessary tools for cooking mostly Japanese food, the pantry stocked with imported ingredients, etc. In my free time I would write and read in a way at the time I couldn't really imagine, but I knew that it would be superior to the way I did it then. Some of these things came true. Others never really had anything to do with the future, and realized their full potential in the past (when I was 17 and had no need for it I used lotion and moisturizers to keep my skin supple, when I was 22 and working in a professional kitchen, my skin being assaulted by a barrage of detrimental substances, I ignored it and let the damage go untreated because the fantasy of perfect skin was no longer relevant in the reality of kitchen work which left no time for aesthetic worries, and furthermore was too exhausting to even try to make them a priority). In none of these things did I factor in the element of money, or of finding and getting the perfect job that would frame all this, nor did I factor in the increased load of responsibilities that would come with entering the "real world," and like the exhaustion of the kitchen, make most of my 17 year old fantasy impractical. Of course some of these things came true, but not in ways I had expected them to come true. Others came true maybe only because the soul of their memory was stronger than the flesh of reality within their skeletal frame; I had wanted so badly for them to be true that I made it so, even if it was impractical for them to be true. I needed to realize them regardless to somehow not let down the former me. My imagined wine collection turned out to be more cheap empty bottles in the recycle than expensive ones in the temperature controlled room (although I still bought the expensive ones, but half the time they were drunk as quickly and callously as the cheap ones). My bedroom is full of books, but I still have the same bookshelf I've had since I was 16, and now it's falling apart. I've become a much better writer than I was then, but not in the capacity of a well known food writer, but a struggling (but satisfied) writer on a blog whose sole readers are the author's parents.
Not only material things, idea of self changing but who you are is rooted in you, personality can't change and idea of future (including material things) is reflection of personality, so impossible.
These projections of past memory of future still effect our present because what we based our plans for future on is not true, is different, and also serves to illustrate the gap and time passed in memory.
When you're 12, all memory seems within reach. Up until about age six, most of your memories are a hazy patchwork of remembered events or ones constructed from things you are told you have done but may or may not actually remember; birthdays, Christmas, skinning your knee, watching cartoons. So by age 12 you essentially have six years of solid memories, and although there are many changes between ages six and 12, they all happen within the same daily context of going to school, playing with friends, and living at home. For most people, there are still another six years until that context will change at age 18. Although you know that everything from age six to 12 has already happened, you can expect to continue experiencing things in the same way for the next few years at least – Christmas at 10 is not so different from Christmas at 12 or 13, nor is going to school or eating dinner with your family.
By age 23 you have nearly doubled your altitude in time and all of a sudden age six looks incredibly far away – memories now populated by ant-sized people which are viewable from the precipice on which you stand but out of physical reach. On the mountain of time one can always look back down, but physical movement can only go forward and upward. Life starts at the bottom, a sort of base camp, but the further one gets, the rockier and thicker the terrain gets, sometimes in a way that makes it hard to traverse, other times in a new way you never would have expected or imagined but that is intriguing and enjoyable nonetheless.
This experience of seeing the past from such a great height all of a sudden can be jarring. Up until age 18 or so, life goes on at a steady, even pace, along a shallow incline. But at age 18, or whenever one becomes an adult and moves away from the context of family and school to independence and adulthood the trajectory becomes steeper, but you are so intent to climb up it as fast as you can, excited to get to the next level, that you don't look around you and see how quickly you are moving up, until you find yourself standing on that precipice looking back down at all the time you've covered. Seeing how far you have gotten is not the only thing that makes this experience jarring; it is compounded by the fact that that distance creates a barrier in one's memory which, until this point, could not have existed because there was not enough time between memories to create one. Christmas at 10, 12 and 13 may be a predictable experience, reinforced and confirmed by past memories and expectations for the immediate future, but Christmas at 23 is an entirely different and new experience, one that is different in a way from those previous Christmas's in a way you didn't realize it could be.
At 13 you can experience the same joy and excitement about Christmas that you could at nine. You have this excitement and joy because you remember having had that feeling before, and you live more or less in the same environment in which you previously experienced it, so naturally it would be as consistent as the rest of your experiences that are shaped by expectation from recent memories. At 23, however, the barrier of memory-distance stands between you and that feeling. You can remember what it felt like, you can observe and recognize the same sentiment in others, but you can't actually experience it again. Of course this barrier isn't all of a sudden put up one day, barring you from your previous experiences. It is built slowly, at a pace at which one barely notices its construction. It's simply that you don't realize it's there until it's built up all the way. By 16 or 17 it is already halfway built, so when you do something you have done before there is an aspect of newness in your experience of it, but there is still some of the old as well, and so you don't recognize the new as something that will eventually replace the old as your primary experience, but something that is being added on to it. While the “you” of the present looks at it as a combination of present and past memories, your subconscious is quietly removing the bottom bricks of the wall you've always known and moving them away into storage.
This isn't to say that once that wall is built up you are stuck on one side with no new experiences or memories looking back at a forbidden greener-grassed past. New memories are still always forming, although there is now a tinge of bittersweetness in experiencing them, because you know that eventually these memories will be behind another wall. This bittersweetness is a good and bad thing. On the one hand, it can make you nostalgic for your experiences in the present, saddened by the knowledge that they will soon be gone, but on the other hand, it forces you to appreciate your experiences as much as you can in the moment, squeezing out all the joy you can from the fleeting present.
Memory is funny because while it exists entirely in your head, the majority of things that trigger memories exist in the external world, but there is no way to physically reconcile your memories with what you see in the external world in the present. This morning when I walked from my house to the Ave, a six block walk along 45th, I crossed through a lifetime of memories. I walk past the Metro theater and I'm eleven years old again, waiting in line with my grandpa to see a movie, holding his hand and looking up at him excitedly from my younger stature, or I'm 19, on a date, nervously standing in line absentmindedly folding and unfolding a 20 dollar bill and trying to think of something clever or witty to say. But I pass it and I am 23, on my way to work – a new experience that is still populated by transparent wisps of memory replaying themselves over and over like holographic movies. Everything I encounter is Proust's madeleine.
The memory-distance barrier not only changes how we look at the past, but also the present and future. Many of our experiences in the present are things that we imagined in the past, especially our broader and more encompassing experiences such as work, home life, friendships, hobbies, etc. In our memory there is a distinct image of what the future would be, and most often it is the case that the future is not what we imagined it to be, but rather that that fantasy of the future was a projection of our lives at the time of the memory onto a skeletal view of what the future would be - for example, work is the skeletal frame, but the rest of the body is the content and experience of work; the soul the imagined future of work and the flesh the reality.
Of course this analogy applies not only to work, but to almost all our experiences. When I was 17 I knew exactly what my apartment would look like and where it would be at age 23. My imagined future was shaped by my interests at the time, but not particularly by a realistic idea of the future. At the time I had started watching the show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and ascribed religiously to its aesthetics and its version of what a classy, cultured man should be like. So I imagined my home would be like the ones they created on the show, but not just in how it was decorated, but where it was, what floor it was on, what view it had. I was also becoming more and more interested in cooking, particularly Japanese, and so I imagined my home would be equipped with all the necessary tools for cooking mostly Japanese food, the pantry stocked with imported ingredients, etc. In my free time I would write and read in a way at the time I couldn't really imagine, but I knew that it would be superior to the way I did it then. Some of these things came true. Others never really had anything to do with the future, and realized their full potential in the past (when I was 17 and had no need for it I used lotion and moisturizers to keep my skin supple, when I was 22 and working in a professional kitchen, my skin being assaulted by a barrage of detrimental substances, I ignored it and let the damage go untreated because the fantasy of perfect skin was no longer relevant in the reality of kitchen work which left no time for aesthetic worries, and furthermore was too exhausting to even try to make them a priority). In none of these things did I factor in the element of money, or of finding and getting the perfect job that would frame all this, nor did I factor in the increased load of responsibilities that would come with entering the "real world," and like the exhaustion of the kitchen, make most of my 17 year old fantasy impractical. Of course some of these things came true, but not in ways I had expected them to come true. Others came true maybe only because the soul of their memory was stronger than the flesh of reality within their skeletal frame; I had wanted so badly for them to be true that I made it so, even if it was impractical for them to be true. I needed to realize them regardless to somehow not let down the former me. My imagined wine collection turned out to be more cheap empty bottles in the recycle than expensive ones in the temperature controlled room (although I still bought the expensive ones, but half the time they were drunk as quickly and callously as the cheap ones). My bedroom is full of books, but I still have the same bookshelf I've had since I was 16, and now it's falling apart. I've become a much better writer than I was then, but not in the capacity of a well known food writer, but a struggling (but satisfied) writer on a blog whose sole readers are the author's parents.
Not only material things, idea of self changing but who you are is rooted in you, personality can't change and idea of future (including material things) is reflection of personality, so impossible.
These projections of past memory of future still effect our present because what we based our plans for future on is not true, is different, and also serves to illustrate the gap and time passed in memory.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)