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.
Sunday, October 11, 2009
“Just one tonight?” said the hostess.
“No, well – I’m meeting someone.” The woman quickly scanned the dining room, not knowing necessarily whom she was looking for, but not wanting to make it entirely obvious she was on a blind date.
“I don’t think he’s here yet though.”
“Alright, well let me get a table set up for you. Be right back,” said the waitress with a smile.
The woman looked around nervously, but kept a closed-lipped smile glued to her face. She was wearing jeans and a blouse with a delicate floral print of small yellow, orange and red flowers that faded to a pinkish-beige haze from a few feet away, and she still had on the pea coat she had worn as she walked from her car to the restaurant. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail with a ridge of short bangs hanging down over her forehead in the front. She had fretted for forty five minutes before she left over what to do with her hair, and finally decided that this would be the easiest, and besides, she thought it made her look cute. She was wearing a thin layer of makeup, and bright red lipstick. It wasn’t too much, but it was more than she was used to wearing and she felt a little self-conscious.
“Follow me,” said the waitress, grabbing two menus and leading the woman toward an empty table.
The waitress laid out the two menus, and the woman sat down, choosing the seat that was facing toward the front door so she could watch as people came in. She set an orange rose down on the table, trying to make it inconspicuous but still visible. She had told her date on the phone the night before to “just look for the woman with the orange rose. That’s me!” She slid her coat off and draped it over the back of her chair. She picked up the menu and studied it, although her focus kept drifting over the top toward the door.
The waitress came back with a basket of bread and a small bowl of olive oil with a globule of balsamic vinegar suspended in the middle.
“Can I start you off with something to drink?”
“I’ll have a glass of the Sauvignon Blanc,” said the woman.
She looked down at her cell phone, which was sitting on the table next to the rose. She tapped the screen to illuminate it. 7:05. They had agreed to meet at 7:00, but she figured he was probably just running a little late. Anyway, she thought, it was good that she got there first. That would give her time to sip her wine and smooth over her nerves.
She drank her wine slowly, raising it to her lips in carefully timed intervals so as to make herself look occupied. She looked out the broad windows that ran across the front of the restaurant and watched cars going by, waiting to see if one would stop. Of course, she told herself, he might not being able to find parking near the restaurant, so she also kept an eye on the sidewalk, waiting to see if one of the figures that came into focus from the distance could be her date. A car pulled up across the street from the restaurant, but a woman got out and walked into the gas station on the corner. She didn’t see anyone coming down the sidewalk, and picked up the menu again. A watched pot…
She looked at the menu and ran through each section quickly. She passed over each item without really taking any of them in. She was too nervous still to focus. She took a few more sips of wine. Her glass was half full now and she felt a little more at ease. She looked at her phone again. 7:15. She checked her call log, making sure that she hadn’t missed anything. There was nothing new though; just a phone call from a friend earlier that evening, whom she had consulted about what to wear, and the call from her date the night before when they finalized plans for dinner.
The waitress came back around.“Are you ready to order yet?”
“No, I’m going to wait for my friend to get here, thanks,” she said with a smile, trying to look confident. It was 7:20. He must be stuck in traffic. Maybe he can’t find the place. But you’d think he would at least call.
The woman looked around the restaurant at the other customers. About half were couples. All of them looked like they thought they were the only ones there, intently leaning over the table toward each other, their eyes locked as they slurped noodles like Lady and the Tramp. She looked toward the door again, thinking that’ll be me in just a few minutes. He has to show up soon. By 7:30 he would be inexcusably late, but he was still safely in the realm of the absent minded for a few minutes. She fiddled with the rose, thinking maybe it was too hidden and he just hadn’t spotted her.
The front door opened and her head shot up. She looked off into the distance just past the foyer, and in her peripheral made out the shape of a man. She casually let her gaze shift to door. The man looked a little younger than the person she was expecting, but she didn’t mind. He was handsome, well dressed. She recalled the voice she had heard on the phone and thought it could fit him. He said something to the hostess, and she looked out to the dining room. The woman couldn’t tell for sure, but she thought she looked at her table. She said something to him, then walked away for a moment. Behind him the door opened again. An older couple and a younger woman walked in. The younger woman slid her arm into the man’s. She said something and they all laughed.
The woman looked back out the window and took another sip of her wine. The glass was almost empty now, and its effect was slowly turning from confidence boosting to numbing. She checked her phone again. 7:32. She sighed and drained the glass of wine. She looked back outside. It was getting darker, and the window was starting to show more of her reflection than the people outside. She looked pretty, she thought. Everything else looked out of place though – the empty wine glass, the flickering candle, and the chair across from her still pushed all the way in with the menu in front of it untouched. She looked back to the dining room. It was getting too dark out to see anything anyway.
The waitress came back again. “Do you want to start with an appetizer while you’re waiting?” she asked.
The woman could tell the waitress knew what was going on, but appreciated her pretending not to know. She had been there for almost half an hour already and was starting to feel uncomfortable sitting there with only her glass of wine, so she went ahead and ordered. She hadn’t even thought about what she wanted, and ordered the first thing on the menu she saw. “I’ll have another glass of wine too,” she said, motioning to the empty one on the table.
“I’ll be right back with that,” said the waitress as she whisked the glass off the table and walked away.
The woman looked back at her phone, but looked away quickly, not even wanting to see what time it was. She picked up the rose and smelled it, looked at it skeptically, and set it back down on the table. She had stopped at a florist on the way to the restaurant and bought it. Orange roses were her favorite, and the scent had filled her car, wafting up from the passenger seat where it laid next to her.
The waitress brought another glass of wine, and set it down. “Thanks,” said the woman.
She still thought he might show up. Maybe he was running late, and in his hurry to leave the house, had forgotten his cell phone. He could have been out of the house all day and his phone had died, and he hadn’t had time to go home and charge it before he came. Who am I kidding, she thought, taking another sip of wine. He’s not coming.
The waitress had left the other menu on the table so that at least it would look like someone else might be coming. The woman wished she hadn’t. Now it just sat there staring back at her, a feeble stand in for the man she had thought was going to be there. She felt herself starting to get a little drunk as she kept nursing her wine. She hadn’t even touched the bread. She wanted to keep drinking, but figured she should slow down if she still had to drive home.
Her food arrived quickly. She took a bite, but the anxiety brewing in her stomach spread up into her mouth making the food tasteless. She wasn’t even hungry at this point anyway. She tried taking a few more bites but the last thing she wanted to do was sit there at the table eating alone, the menu across from her and the rose next to her phone mocking her solitude. She flagged down the waitress next time she came around.
“I’m just going to take the rest of this to go.”
“Sure thing,” said the waitress. “Let me box this up for you and I’ll bring you the check.”
The woman finished her wine. She looked at her phone again. No missed calls, but she had a text message. She opened it – it was from her friend whom she had asked for advice earlier. “How’s the date going??” She hit ignore and set the phone back down. She reached around and pulled her coat off the back of the seat and put it on. The waitress brought the check and her box and she signed the receipt. She got up, grabbed the box and walked quickly toward the front door, trying not to look like she was rushing to get out.
The waitress grabbed the empty wine glass and napkin from the table. She spotted the rose, and looked up to see the woman walking toward the door. She was about to yell to the woman that she had forgotten it, but she was already outside. She picked it up and smelled it. It looked fresh, and it was a beautiful deep orange color. She took it along with the rest of the things from the table and went back to the servers’ station just behind the door that led to the kitchen. She stuck it in a glass that was filled with pens and took another whiff before grabbing one of the pens, picking up another check, and going back out to the dining room.
“No, well – I’m meeting someone.” The woman quickly scanned the dining room, not knowing necessarily whom she was looking for, but not wanting to make it entirely obvious she was on a blind date.
“I don’t think he’s here yet though.”
“Alright, well let me get a table set up for you. Be right back,” said the waitress with a smile.
The woman looked around nervously, but kept a closed-lipped smile glued to her face. She was wearing jeans and a blouse with a delicate floral print of small yellow, orange and red flowers that faded to a pinkish-beige haze from a few feet away, and she still had on the pea coat she had worn as she walked from her car to the restaurant. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail with a ridge of short bangs hanging down over her forehead in the front. She had fretted for forty five minutes before she left over what to do with her hair, and finally decided that this would be the easiest, and besides, she thought it made her look cute. She was wearing a thin layer of makeup, and bright red lipstick. It wasn’t too much, but it was more than she was used to wearing and she felt a little self-conscious.
“Follow me,” said the waitress, grabbing two menus and leading the woman toward an empty table.
The waitress laid out the two menus, and the woman sat down, choosing the seat that was facing toward the front door so she could watch as people came in. She set an orange rose down on the table, trying to make it inconspicuous but still visible. She had told her date on the phone the night before to “just look for the woman with the orange rose. That’s me!” She slid her coat off and draped it over the back of her chair. She picked up the menu and studied it, although her focus kept drifting over the top toward the door.
The waitress came back with a basket of bread and a small bowl of olive oil with a globule of balsamic vinegar suspended in the middle.
“Can I start you off with something to drink?”
“I’ll have a glass of the Sauvignon Blanc,” said the woman.
She looked down at her cell phone, which was sitting on the table next to the rose. She tapped the screen to illuminate it. 7:05. They had agreed to meet at 7:00, but she figured he was probably just running a little late. Anyway, she thought, it was good that she got there first. That would give her time to sip her wine and smooth over her nerves.
She drank her wine slowly, raising it to her lips in carefully timed intervals so as to make herself look occupied. She looked out the broad windows that ran across the front of the restaurant and watched cars going by, waiting to see if one would stop. Of course, she told herself, he might not being able to find parking near the restaurant, so she also kept an eye on the sidewalk, waiting to see if one of the figures that came into focus from the distance could be her date. A car pulled up across the street from the restaurant, but a woman got out and walked into the gas station on the corner. She didn’t see anyone coming down the sidewalk, and picked up the menu again. A watched pot…
She looked at the menu and ran through each section quickly. She passed over each item without really taking any of them in. She was too nervous still to focus. She took a few more sips of wine. Her glass was half full now and she felt a little more at ease. She looked at her phone again. 7:15. She checked her call log, making sure that she hadn’t missed anything. There was nothing new though; just a phone call from a friend earlier that evening, whom she had consulted about what to wear, and the call from her date the night before when they finalized plans for dinner.
The waitress came back around.“Are you ready to order yet?”
“No, I’m going to wait for my friend to get here, thanks,” she said with a smile, trying to look confident. It was 7:20. He must be stuck in traffic. Maybe he can’t find the place. But you’d think he would at least call.
The woman looked around the restaurant at the other customers. About half were couples. All of them looked like they thought they were the only ones there, intently leaning over the table toward each other, their eyes locked as they slurped noodles like Lady and the Tramp. She looked toward the door again, thinking that’ll be me in just a few minutes. He has to show up soon. By 7:30 he would be inexcusably late, but he was still safely in the realm of the absent minded for a few minutes. She fiddled with the rose, thinking maybe it was too hidden and he just hadn’t spotted her.
The front door opened and her head shot up. She looked off into the distance just past the foyer, and in her peripheral made out the shape of a man. She casually let her gaze shift to door. The man looked a little younger than the person she was expecting, but she didn’t mind. He was handsome, well dressed. She recalled the voice she had heard on the phone and thought it could fit him. He said something to the hostess, and she looked out to the dining room. The woman couldn’t tell for sure, but she thought she looked at her table. She said something to him, then walked away for a moment. Behind him the door opened again. An older couple and a younger woman walked in. The younger woman slid her arm into the man’s. She said something and they all laughed.
The woman looked back out the window and took another sip of her wine. The glass was almost empty now, and its effect was slowly turning from confidence boosting to numbing. She checked her phone again. 7:32. She sighed and drained the glass of wine. She looked back outside. It was getting darker, and the window was starting to show more of her reflection than the people outside. She looked pretty, she thought. Everything else looked out of place though – the empty wine glass, the flickering candle, and the chair across from her still pushed all the way in with the menu in front of it untouched. She looked back to the dining room. It was getting too dark out to see anything anyway.
The waitress came back again. “Do you want to start with an appetizer while you’re waiting?” she asked.
The woman could tell the waitress knew what was going on, but appreciated her pretending not to know. She had been there for almost half an hour already and was starting to feel uncomfortable sitting there with only her glass of wine, so she went ahead and ordered. She hadn’t even thought about what she wanted, and ordered the first thing on the menu she saw. “I’ll have another glass of wine too,” she said, motioning to the empty one on the table.
“I’ll be right back with that,” said the waitress as she whisked the glass off the table and walked away.
The woman looked back at her phone, but looked away quickly, not even wanting to see what time it was. She picked up the rose and smelled it, looked at it skeptically, and set it back down on the table. She had stopped at a florist on the way to the restaurant and bought it. Orange roses were her favorite, and the scent had filled her car, wafting up from the passenger seat where it laid next to her.
The waitress brought another glass of wine, and set it down. “Thanks,” said the woman.
She still thought he might show up. Maybe he was running late, and in his hurry to leave the house, had forgotten his cell phone. He could have been out of the house all day and his phone had died, and he hadn’t had time to go home and charge it before he came. Who am I kidding, she thought, taking another sip of wine. He’s not coming.
The waitress had left the other menu on the table so that at least it would look like someone else might be coming. The woman wished she hadn’t. Now it just sat there staring back at her, a feeble stand in for the man she had thought was going to be there. She felt herself starting to get a little drunk as she kept nursing her wine. She hadn’t even touched the bread. She wanted to keep drinking, but figured she should slow down if she still had to drive home.
Her food arrived quickly. She took a bite, but the anxiety brewing in her stomach spread up into her mouth making the food tasteless. She wasn’t even hungry at this point anyway. She tried taking a few more bites but the last thing she wanted to do was sit there at the table eating alone, the menu across from her and the rose next to her phone mocking her solitude. She flagged down the waitress next time she came around.
“I’m just going to take the rest of this to go.”
“Sure thing,” said the waitress. “Let me box this up for you and I’ll bring you the check.”
The woman finished her wine. She looked at her phone again. No missed calls, but she had a text message. She opened it – it was from her friend whom she had asked for advice earlier. “How’s the date going??” She hit ignore and set the phone back down. She reached around and pulled her coat off the back of the seat and put it on. The waitress brought the check and her box and she signed the receipt. She got up, grabbed the box and walked quickly toward the front door, trying not to look like she was rushing to get out.
The waitress grabbed the empty wine glass and napkin from the table. She spotted the rose, and looked up to see the woman walking toward the door. She was about to yell to the woman that she had forgotten it, but she was already outside. She picked it up and smelled it. It looked fresh, and it was a beautiful deep orange color. She took it along with the rest of the things from the table and went back to the servers’ station just behind the door that led to the kitchen. She stuck it in a glass that was filled with pens and took another whiff before grabbing one of the pens, picking up another check, and going back out to the dining room.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
finger rough draft
Approximately 11,000 people lose a finger every year. Most of them are accidents, but a small percentage are on purpose, in the name of body modification. It’s hard to understand what would drive anyone to cut off their own finger. I don’t even like cutting my fingernails for fear of going too far and pinching the skin underneath. As shocking as this may sound as an abstract idea, it’s even more so when the result is suspended in formaldehyde, inches from your face on a kitchen table.
The aforementioned finger was in the center of a buffet containing all finger foods: taquitos, mozzarella sticks, egg rolls and French fries, and accompanying bowls of red dips. The finger’s former possessor was standing in the kitchen, chatting with the guests who had been invited to see the premiere of his autoamputation.
About thirty people had come to see the video, and everyone was milling around anxiously waiting for the computer to be hooked up to the big screen TV in the living room. While someone fiddled with the cords trying to get the computer hooked up, people started filing in and staking out their spots for the showing. Only three people had actually seen it; the star, and the two camera people who documented the whole process.
I settled in next to the couch on the floor as we waited for the video to start. People were getting antsy, nervously cracking finger jokes and passing around plastic bags in case anyone found the video too revolting to stomach. People were passing around a bong, but somehow the idea of watching the video stoned didn’t sound appealing; pot’s supposed to alleviate nausea but I suspect it would have the opposite effect in this case. Behind the bong came a case of beer, and the cracking open of cans followed the two. I grabbed one; it seemed like a more appropriate substance for the occasion.
After much (effort/work??? need to find better word) the first frame of the video appeared on the screen. Before it started, the amputee got up to make a speech.“Two years ago, I had an accident that resulted in me getting third degree burns on seventy percent of my body. I had to have skin grafts on my legs, which had almost no skin left on them. For the first two weeks I had to have my wounds and exposed muscle washed several times a day, and I had to go through two months of physical therapy. It was the most painful thing I’ve ever gone through, and I hope to never experience anything like it again.
“I’ve always had a fascination with people who have lost fingers, and nub fingers, and although I had thought for a long time about cutting off one of my own fingers, I never actually thought I’d have the nerve to go through with it. But after my accident, I realized that regardless of how painful it would be, it wouldn’t be as bad as my burns, and if I could live through that, I could handle cutting off my finger. Around the same time I also met a man who had lost one of his fingers, but he didn’t let it effect his life at all; in fact, he said that after a while he rarely even noticed it was missing.
“After a lot of research and planning, I decided I was ready to do it. My parents knew about it, and although they weren’t happy, they understood why I thought I needed to do it, and were ok with it. My friends kind of thought I was crazy. I can say now having done it that it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, and I’m happy with the results. Anyway, that’s about it, so let’s watch the video already.”
Everyone clapped and cheered, and the movie started. It was taken with a shaky hand held camera, and showed the future amputee sitting in a chair describing what he was about to do, shirtless, wearing a skull mask. The reason for the mask, he explained, was that he didn’t want to draw attention to himself, and anyway, the finger was the real star here.He started off by tying a black rubber band around his finger to cut off the circulation. After doing this the frame jumped and the film resumed half an hour later, with the finger already one foot in the grave – without blood flowing to it, it had changed to a grayish-yellow color and didn’t even look real. The next step was to numb the finger by soaking it in ice water. This, he said, was the most painful part, as he was essentially giving himself frostbite. Periodically he would take his hand out and poke it with the tip of a knife to check its sensitivity.
The audience was full of anxious laughter, the bong continued its circuitous route, and people chatted nervously, being sure to look one another in the eye so as to divert their view from the screen. The suspense was building, the finger now out of the ice, and on a chopping block. One of the amputee’s masked assistants handed him a knife, and he tested out various angles and techniques, coming down almost to the finger but each time letting the blade come to a dull stop on the doomed appendage.
Several knives were tested and discarded due to insufficient sharpness, and finally one was decided on. At this point, it became uncertain which attempts were tests, and which one would be the final blow. Each time the knife started undulating and gaining momentum, the audience winced collectively, letting out a sigh of relief when the knife was pulled away, the finger in tact.
The longer this went on, a good ten minutes at least, the more restless the audience grew, their laughter and joking growing inversely from their disquietude. The frame jumped again, and an image appeared of the amputee holding a pair of pliers, which he would use to break his first knuckle, assuring a clean cut through the skin and cartilage. He pressed down and there was an audible crack. Everyone laughed, but this time more quietly, less out of nervousness than disbelief. The room got significantly quieter, and the skittish energy manifested itself in the fogged up living room windows.
Finally the knife came down for the last time. The first shot of it was from behind the amputee, then from in front, but by the time the angle switched the finger was already almost completely off. It seemed anticlimactic initially, not seeing the initial severance of the finger. With the circulation cut off, there was no blood either; the grey lump of skin simply broke away from the hand, lying on the counter as the rest of the amputee moved away. It wasn’t as shocking as I had anticipated, but watching the amputee’s reaction on the screen, and remembering his speech, shock wouldn’t have been the right emotion. Nobody laughed, or screamed, and nobody had to use their plastic bags. The weight of the action sank in not only for the audience, but for the amputee himself. It was a surreal scene, and for a few minutes, the first and last time that night, the room was eerily quiet.
The aforementioned finger was in the center of a buffet containing all finger foods: taquitos, mozzarella sticks, egg rolls and French fries, and accompanying bowls of red dips. The finger’s former possessor was standing in the kitchen, chatting with the guests who had been invited to see the premiere of his autoamputation.
About thirty people had come to see the video, and everyone was milling around anxiously waiting for the computer to be hooked up to the big screen TV in the living room. While someone fiddled with the cords trying to get the computer hooked up, people started filing in and staking out their spots for the showing. Only three people had actually seen it; the star, and the two camera people who documented the whole process.
I settled in next to the couch on the floor as we waited for the video to start. People were getting antsy, nervously cracking finger jokes and passing around plastic bags in case anyone found the video too revolting to stomach. People were passing around a bong, but somehow the idea of watching the video stoned didn’t sound appealing; pot’s supposed to alleviate nausea but I suspect it would have the opposite effect in this case. Behind the bong came a case of beer, and the cracking open of cans followed the two. I grabbed one; it seemed like a more appropriate substance for the occasion.
After much (effort/work??? need to find better word) the first frame of the video appeared on the screen. Before it started, the amputee got up to make a speech.“Two years ago, I had an accident that resulted in me getting third degree burns on seventy percent of my body. I had to have skin grafts on my legs, which had almost no skin left on them. For the first two weeks I had to have my wounds and exposed muscle washed several times a day, and I had to go through two months of physical therapy. It was the most painful thing I’ve ever gone through, and I hope to never experience anything like it again.
“I’ve always had a fascination with people who have lost fingers, and nub fingers, and although I had thought for a long time about cutting off one of my own fingers, I never actually thought I’d have the nerve to go through with it. But after my accident, I realized that regardless of how painful it would be, it wouldn’t be as bad as my burns, and if I could live through that, I could handle cutting off my finger. Around the same time I also met a man who had lost one of his fingers, but he didn’t let it effect his life at all; in fact, he said that after a while he rarely even noticed it was missing.
“After a lot of research and planning, I decided I was ready to do it. My parents knew about it, and although they weren’t happy, they understood why I thought I needed to do it, and were ok with it. My friends kind of thought I was crazy. I can say now having done it that it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, and I’m happy with the results. Anyway, that’s about it, so let’s watch the video already.”
Everyone clapped and cheered, and the movie started. It was taken with a shaky hand held camera, and showed the future amputee sitting in a chair describing what he was about to do, shirtless, wearing a skull mask. The reason for the mask, he explained, was that he didn’t want to draw attention to himself, and anyway, the finger was the real star here.He started off by tying a black rubber band around his finger to cut off the circulation. After doing this the frame jumped and the film resumed half an hour later, with the finger already one foot in the grave – without blood flowing to it, it had changed to a grayish-yellow color and didn’t even look real. The next step was to numb the finger by soaking it in ice water. This, he said, was the most painful part, as he was essentially giving himself frostbite. Periodically he would take his hand out and poke it with the tip of a knife to check its sensitivity.
The audience was full of anxious laughter, the bong continued its circuitous route, and people chatted nervously, being sure to look one another in the eye so as to divert their view from the screen. The suspense was building, the finger now out of the ice, and on a chopping block. One of the amputee’s masked assistants handed him a knife, and he tested out various angles and techniques, coming down almost to the finger but each time letting the blade come to a dull stop on the doomed appendage.
Several knives were tested and discarded due to insufficient sharpness, and finally one was decided on. At this point, it became uncertain which attempts were tests, and which one would be the final blow. Each time the knife started undulating and gaining momentum, the audience winced collectively, letting out a sigh of relief when the knife was pulled away, the finger in tact.
The longer this went on, a good ten minutes at least, the more restless the audience grew, their laughter and joking growing inversely from their disquietude. The frame jumped again, and an image appeared of the amputee holding a pair of pliers, which he would use to break his first knuckle, assuring a clean cut through the skin and cartilage. He pressed down and there was an audible crack. Everyone laughed, but this time more quietly, less out of nervousness than disbelief. The room got significantly quieter, and the skittish energy manifested itself in the fogged up living room windows.
Finally the knife came down for the last time. The first shot of it was from behind the amputee, then from in front, but by the time the angle switched the finger was already almost completely off. It seemed anticlimactic initially, not seeing the initial severance of the finger. With the circulation cut off, there was no blood either; the grey lump of skin simply broke away from the hand, lying on the counter as the rest of the amputee moved away. It wasn’t as shocking as I had anticipated, but watching the amputee’s reaction on the screen, and remembering his speech, shock wouldn’t have been the right emotion. Nobody laughed, or screamed, and nobody had to use their plastic bags. The weight of the action sank in not only for the audience, but for the amputee himself. It was a surreal scene, and for a few minutes, the first and last time that night, the room was eerily quiet.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Sitting on a bench outside a farm exhibit at the Puyallup Fair watching waves of people move past, I feel like I'm the sole visitor in a giant open zoo, watching a strange species of human move all around me. The configurations of our bodies are the same, but theirs are slightly out of proportion, like the tumorous pumpkins on display in the agricultural hall. Their faces look all gaunt and stretched out by smoke, obesity or some secret hidden beneath their visages that only the wearer knows.
Among this subspecies there are interesting variations that become apparent the more I watch them. There are an inordinate number of people in wheelchairs, though few of them are missing legs, and none are wearing casts. Rather, they seem to be victims of lifestyle related ailments – all are overweight, and though I’m sure they blame their girth on their being in a wheelchair, I doubt they looked much different when they could still walk. In addition to the wheelchair, many of them have other extracorporeal aids helping their bodies function. I see one man in army fatigues missing a leg; he is the only person I see all day who is in a wheelchair solely because he’s lost a leg and walking is too difficult. I see another morbidly obese man in a wheelchair missing an arm, whittled down to only one usable limb probably by diabetes.
I don’t see any kids in wheelchairs, but the children take after their parents in body shape, their little features dotted on bloated canvases that stretch from their foreheads down to the crease that separates their heads from their chests. One of them walks past, a girl wearing stretched out pink shorts, a white tank top, and white running shoes with long pink socks that have fallen down and scrunched up around her ankles. I can’t tell how old she is – something about obesity skews peoples age, and she looks like she could be anywhere from ten to thirteen. It’s hard to tell whether or not she’s hit puberty yet – her flabby breasts are indistinguishable from those on the chests of equally overweight preteen boys. As she walks hurriedly toward the rides her legs, which are dimpled with fat, awkwardly clunk together.
The girl fades off into the crowd, and I spot an anomaly, although it doesn’t look entirely out of place. A young couple in their early twenties strolls through the crowd hand in hand. The man is wearing all black, and has a red hair that’s been molded into a strange mix of abstract and bowl cut (I saw a booth earlier in one of the exhibition halls offering haircuts for seven dollars from a group of bored hairdressers who looked like they had spent more time sculpting their own hair than other peoples’ - I wonder if he was the victim of an outpouring of their repressed creativity). His clothes look vaguely fashionable, but dated. Trailing slightly behind him is his girlfriend, a diminutive rail-thin Asian girl who peeks out at the crowd over his shoulder as he pulls her ahead.
Out of the corner of my eye I see the pink shorts come back into view, this time with an entourage. Three generations with no more than thirty five years between youngest and oldest, they are a living timeline of the life of a South Puget Sounder. There are the two parents, not surprisingly as overweight as their daughter, and wearing loose fitting, serviceable clothing. Although they heave and puff walking around the fair, sitting they look enviably comfortable. Settled in on a bench, the dad pulls out a pack of Marlboros and offers one to the mom, who quickly lights and inhales, then draws his own, which hangs off his lip as he lights it.There is another girl with them, an older sister, no more than eighteen years old. She’s wearing tight jeans and a loud black and pink Volcom sweatshirt, and unlike the rest of the family she’s surprisingly skinny. Her wrists are stacked from hand to sweatshirt sleeve with brightly colored plastic bracelets which match the contrasting green and pink hair ties that pull her hair into a ponytail and in front of her she absent mindedly pushes a stroller back and forth, containing what I assume is her baby, as if it were just another flashy accessory.
The parents talk and puff as the girl in pink shorts moves around restlessly. She squats in front of the stroller and makes faces at the baby, who is about six months old, wearing her hair up in two little pigtails that stick straight up from her head. The baby giggles and smiles as the girl sticks out her tongue and puffs up her cheeks at her. She tries to manipulate her little hands into playing a clapping game with her, taking the baby’s pudgy wrists in her hands and moving them around.
“Stop messing with the baby Kaitlyn,” says the dad. The words escape his mouth curtly in a plume of cigarette smoke.
“She likes it though. I’m teaching her how to play patty cakes .”
“Kaitlyn. Kaitlyn! Stop touching the damn baby,” says her dad again, this time grabbing the girl by the wrist and pulling her back.”
“Well when I was at Cindy’s house she was teaching it to her little sister and her mom didn’t care.”
“Well I ain’t Cindy’s mom and I don’t want the baby to start crying again. Just come over and sit on the bench and be quiet,” says the dad.
The girl goes over and sits on the bench next to her parents glumly, holding her chin between her palms and staring at the ground. She looks up at the rides and asks if she can go on the tilt-a-whirl again. The dad hands her a strip of orange paper tickets and she waddles off.
“Come back as soon as you’re done cause we gotta leave in half an hour,” yells the mom.
The other sister pulls out a cigarette and lights it. I’ve been pretending to mess around with my phone for the last five minutes, but I’m fairly sure now that none of them have any idea I’m even there, and I put it away and pretend to watch for someone coming from the crowd behind them.
“Kaitlyn needs to realize the baby ain’t a damn toy. She thinks it’s funny she should try taking care of her for a day.”
“You were even worse than she is when Kaitlyn was a baby. No wonder, that’s probably where she gets it from. Remember the time you made her ride around on the dog and she fell off and hit her head on the kitchen floor? And look at you now, all grown up with your own kid,” says her mom, laughing.
“You hear Stacy got fired over at Safeway?” says the older sister.
“I swear that girl can’t keep a job to save her life,” says the dad.
“This time she says it wasn’t her fault; the manager sounded like a real jerk. She got in trouble twice for coming into work late, even though it was only five minutes and it was only because the bus was late.”
“She don’t have her car anymore?”
“Yeah, but it’s broken and Dave said he was gonna fix it, but you know his lazy ass so now it’s just sitting in the driveway.”
The older sister puts out her cigarette and grinds it into the cement with her foot. She pulls a bag out from the pocket under the stroller and gets a bottle, then takes out the baby and starts feeding her.
“So anyway she came in late again yesterday and her boss fired her right there on the spot. And you know she don’t have nothing in the bank and now she comes asking me for money.”
“You better not give her any, doesn’t she already owe you a hundred dollars?”
The baby lets out a cry and she shoves the bottle back in its mouth.
“That’s what I told her. She ain’t getting anything else from me cause I ain’t about to be more broke than she is.”
The girl in pink shorts comes trudging back over from the rides and crashes into her mom’s lap.
“Can I have another ticket? I want to go on the roller coaster again.”
“Nah, we gotta get going. The baby needs a nap and you’re going over to auntie Barbara’s house tonight,” says her dad.
The girl in pink shorts whines and tries to bargain with her dad as her sister packs up the baby’s things and puts them back beneath the stroller. The whole family lurches up out of their seats and slowly they make their way off into the crowd.
Among this subspecies there are interesting variations that become apparent the more I watch them. There are an inordinate number of people in wheelchairs, though few of them are missing legs, and none are wearing casts. Rather, they seem to be victims of lifestyle related ailments – all are overweight, and though I’m sure they blame their girth on their being in a wheelchair, I doubt they looked much different when they could still walk. In addition to the wheelchair, many of them have other extracorporeal aids helping their bodies function. I see one man in army fatigues missing a leg; he is the only person I see all day who is in a wheelchair solely because he’s lost a leg and walking is too difficult. I see another morbidly obese man in a wheelchair missing an arm, whittled down to only one usable limb probably by diabetes.
I don’t see any kids in wheelchairs, but the children take after their parents in body shape, their little features dotted on bloated canvases that stretch from their foreheads down to the crease that separates their heads from their chests. One of them walks past, a girl wearing stretched out pink shorts, a white tank top, and white running shoes with long pink socks that have fallen down and scrunched up around her ankles. I can’t tell how old she is – something about obesity skews peoples age, and she looks like she could be anywhere from ten to thirteen. It’s hard to tell whether or not she’s hit puberty yet – her flabby breasts are indistinguishable from those on the chests of equally overweight preteen boys. As she walks hurriedly toward the rides her legs, which are dimpled with fat, awkwardly clunk together.
The girl fades off into the crowd, and I spot an anomaly, although it doesn’t look entirely out of place. A young couple in their early twenties strolls through the crowd hand in hand. The man is wearing all black, and has a red hair that’s been molded into a strange mix of abstract and bowl cut (I saw a booth earlier in one of the exhibition halls offering haircuts for seven dollars from a group of bored hairdressers who looked like they had spent more time sculpting their own hair than other peoples’ - I wonder if he was the victim of an outpouring of their repressed creativity). His clothes look vaguely fashionable, but dated. Trailing slightly behind him is his girlfriend, a diminutive rail-thin Asian girl who peeks out at the crowd over his shoulder as he pulls her ahead.
Out of the corner of my eye I see the pink shorts come back into view, this time with an entourage. Three generations with no more than thirty five years between youngest and oldest, they are a living timeline of the life of a South Puget Sounder. There are the two parents, not surprisingly as overweight as their daughter, and wearing loose fitting, serviceable clothing. Although they heave and puff walking around the fair, sitting they look enviably comfortable. Settled in on a bench, the dad pulls out a pack of Marlboros and offers one to the mom, who quickly lights and inhales, then draws his own, which hangs off his lip as he lights it.There is another girl with them, an older sister, no more than eighteen years old. She’s wearing tight jeans and a loud black and pink Volcom sweatshirt, and unlike the rest of the family she’s surprisingly skinny. Her wrists are stacked from hand to sweatshirt sleeve with brightly colored plastic bracelets which match the contrasting green and pink hair ties that pull her hair into a ponytail and in front of her she absent mindedly pushes a stroller back and forth, containing what I assume is her baby, as if it were just another flashy accessory.
The parents talk and puff as the girl in pink shorts moves around restlessly. She squats in front of the stroller and makes faces at the baby, who is about six months old, wearing her hair up in two little pigtails that stick straight up from her head. The baby giggles and smiles as the girl sticks out her tongue and puffs up her cheeks at her. She tries to manipulate her little hands into playing a clapping game with her, taking the baby’s pudgy wrists in her hands and moving them around.
“Stop messing with the baby Kaitlyn,” says the dad. The words escape his mouth curtly in a plume of cigarette smoke.
“She likes it though. I’m teaching her how to play patty cakes .”
“Kaitlyn. Kaitlyn! Stop touching the damn baby,” says her dad again, this time grabbing the girl by the wrist and pulling her back.”
“Well when I was at Cindy’s house she was teaching it to her little sister and her mom didn’t care.”
“Well I ain’t Cindy’s mom and I don’t want the baby to start crying again. Just come over and sit on the bench and be quiet,” says the dad.
The girl goes over and sits on the bench next to her parents glumly, holding her chin between her palms and staring at the ground. She looks up at the rides and asks if she can go on the tilt-a-whirl again. The dad hands her a strip of orange paper tickets and she waddles off.
“Come back as soon as you’re done cause we gotta leave in half an hour,” yells the mom.
The other sister pulls out a cigarette and lights it. I’ve been pretending to mess around with my phone for the last five minutes, but I’m fairly sure now that none of them have any idea I’m even there, and I put it away and pretend to watch for someone coming from the crowd behind them.
“Kaitlyn needs to realize the baby ain’t a damn toy. She thinks it’s funny she should try taking care of her for a day.”
“You were even worse than she is when Kaitlyn was a baby. No wonder, that’s probably where she gets it from. Remember the time you made her ride around on the dog and she fell off and hit her head on the kitchen floor? And look at you now, all grown up with your own kid,” says her mom, laughing.
“You hear Stacy got fired over at Safeway?” says the older sister.
“I swear that girl can’t keep a job to save her life,” says the dad.
“This time she says it wasn’t her fault; the manager sounded like a real jerk. She got in trouble twice for coming into work late, even though it was only five minutes and it was only because the bus was late.”
“She don’t have her car anymore?”
“Yeah, but it’s broken and Dave said he was gonna fix it, but you know his lazy ass so now it’s just sitting in the driveway.”
The older sister puts out her cigarette and grinds it into the cement with her foot. She pulls a bag out from the pocket under the stroller and gets a bottle, then takes out the baby and starts feeding her.
“So anyway she came in late again yesterday and her boss fired her right there on the spot. And you know she don’t have nothing in the bank and now she comes asking me for money.”
“You better not give her any, doesn’t she already owe you a hundred dollars?”
The baby lets out a cry and she shoves the bottle back in its mouth.
“That’s what I told her. She ain’t getting anything else from me cause I ain’t about to be more broke than she is.”
The girl in pink shorts comes trudging back over from the rides and crashes into her mom’s lap.
“Can I have another ticket? I want to go on the roller coaster again.”
“Nah, we gotta get going. The baby needs a nap and you’re going over to auntie Barbara’s house tonight,” says her dad.
The girl in pink shorts whines and tries to bargain with her dad as her sister packs up the baby’s things and puts them back beneath the stroller. The whole family lurches up out of their seats and slowly they make their way off into the crowd.
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
"Hey Daddy!"
I hear a woman - or a girl? - yell. I can't tell if it's a daughter yelling to her dad, or something more nefarious.
I walk further down the block and see that it's the latter, who's now talking to a man in a beat up old pickup truck. There's another woman next to her, standing back a little, but also peering into the passenger side window. As I walk down the block the truck pulls away, and the women walk toward the corner.
They're definitely not girls. They look older, but I don't think they're that old - hardship and abuse have stripped the years away, not time. Both have short hair, although it's not styled in any particular way - just easy to manage (or forget) probably. The woman who was talking to the man in the truck is wearing white capri sweatpants and a red t-shirt with a gap of round belly poking out from between the two. She stands with her legs spread slightly further apart than normal, like a runner on third base ready to steal home, but content to stay if the it's not the right pitch.
The woman next to her is facing her, and they're talking. She's wearing a cheap looking black sweatsuit that lets the same portion of her stomach stick out. As I get closer I can see their faces - both have dark black skin and in the sunlight, and through my sunglasses it has an almost reddish tint. The woman in black is facing toward the street - Martin Luther King Way, watching the cars speed past. The other woman is facing toward me. The closer I get the worse she looks. She doesn't look homeless - not quite yet, but almost. Clearly there are other things on her mind. Her facial expression seems like it's on autopilot - she looks at me as I approach with an emotionless hard stare. But despite her pursed lips and harsh features, I can see fear in her eyes. Not a specific or immediate fear, but a helpless, desperate fear. Her face is contradictory, at the same time saying "what the fuck are you staring at?" and "help."
I round the corner and catch a snippet of their conversation.
"My pussy ain't even beat up good."
I keep walking. Halfway down the block, I look back. The pickup truck has returned. Maybe she spoke too soon.
I hear a woman - or a girl? - yell. I can't tell if it's a daughter yelling to her dad, or something more nefarious.
I walk further down the block and see that it's the latter, who's now talking to a man in a beat up old pickup truck. There's another woman next to her, standing back a little, but also peering into the passenger side window. As I walk down the block the truck pulls away, and the women walk toward the corner.
They're definitely not girls. They look older, but I don't think they're that old - hardship and abuse have stripped the years away, not time. Both have short hair, although it's not styled in any particular way - just easy to manage (or forget) probably. The woman who was talking to the man in the truck is wearing white capri sweatpants and a red t-shirt with a gap of round belly poking out from between the two. She stands with her legs spread slightly further apart than normal, like a runner on third base ready to steal home, but content to stay if the it's not the right pitch.
The woman next to her is facing her, and they're talking. She's wearing a cheap looking black sweatsuit that lets the same portion of her stomach stick out. As I get closer I can see their faces - both have dark black skin and in the sunlight, and through my sunglasses it has an almost reddish tint. The woman in black is facing toward the street - Martin Luther King Way, watching the cars speed past. The other woman is facing toward me. The closer I get the worse she looks. She doesn't look homeless - not quite yet, but almost. Clearly there are other things on her mind. Her facial expression seems like it's on autopilot - she looks at me as I approach with an emotionless hard stare. But despite her pursed lips and harsh features, I can see fear in her eyes. Not a specific or immediate fear, but a helpless, desperate fear. Her face is contradictory, at the same time saying "what the fuck are you staring at?" and "help."
I round the corner and catch a snippet of their conversation.
"My pussy ain't even beat up good."
I keep walking. Halfway down the block, I look back. The pickup truck has returned. Maybe she spoke too soon.
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