Recent Memory #3
I am in my bed because I have started going up but I’m not sure exactly how many mushrooms I have eaten but all I know is that I ‘don’t like things anymore’. I try to read a book by Chris Ware, but all the comics are sad and I feel the sadness too much and everything is moving too much.
I text Vika that everything is crazy and I feel uncomfortable even though I’m in bed and that doesn’t make any sense. I text that the light being emitted from my phone is intense and it looks/feels evil. I apologize for not liking my phone anymore.
I put the book down and put the covers over my head and I close my eyes and a million thoughts and audio bites and sounds and memories wash over me on a neon grid. The neon grid keeps changing shape and color and sometimes it is a hole, sometimes the exterior of a massive digital worm, sometimes a gate. I am perpetuated through all of these things as I have no control over my motion.
I open my eyes a crack and I notice that everything goes away. I close them and everything starts. At some point Greg comes in and he is still laughing and makes sure I am okay and I say I am cause I am but only when everyone goes away and I just go back to the perpetual tube inside my head. Then Vincent comes in and he is laughing cause he is normal and I am being silly but I know I am silly so I don’t find it offensive.
Recent Memory #2
I went into the girl’s bathroom at the bar because no one was there yet and she needed the mirror and told me to come with her. I noticed the girl’s bathroom has more sinks than the boy’s.
I was at the bar and I was sitting at a table and my friend was DJing but you couldn’t see them because they were around the corner against a different wall and the seat faced towards the bar. I had a free drink in my hand. Toto’s ‘Africa’ began to play but I didn’t know what Toto’s ‘Africa’ was yet. I drank my drink really fast cause they weren’t going to be free in a few minutes.
Recent Memory #1
I went to a diner in Moscow, by diner I mean ‘diner’ I mean ‘a russian interpretation of an american diner’.
The booze is free, courtesy US Dept of State, so I get a tiny sandwich and then I spend the rest of the money on ‘giant’ frozen margaritas with a few friends but they run out of the giant glasses and I have to wait or just get them in tiny glasses. We waited and drank our giant margaritas but they’re skimpy on the booze so we don’t feel anything.
Then we go back and think about going to the hotel banya but it was closed for another hour or so and we are going to stay up and wait but I decide to fall asleep.
I Wonder What Happened To That Woman And Her Penis Coat
On the bus, a woman sat in front of me and reclined her seat but it was broken and went all the way back into my lap but she didn’t care and she just lay there. She was ugly, when someone is ugly and ignorant I hate them.
She took her coat and put it under her head as a pillow, but the sleeves draped over the sides of the headrest into my lap and onto my legs. I couldn’t say anything, but I took out my green marker and found the collar of her coat and drew a small green penis on the right side of her collar, in a place she probably wouldn’t see but everyone else would. She got off the bus before us, put on her coat, left.
I often wonder if the penis is still there, just under her chin. I wonder if people stare at her and I wonder if she notices. I wonder if she has discovered the penis, if she contemplates its origin. Maybe she never noticed, maybe the penis washed off in the rain. Don’t really feel guilty, though. It was a pretty good penis drawing.
Essay: You Are Just An Asshole and/or Internet Genius
It is annoying when I send someone an email with relative urgency and then they don’t get back to me for hours but the whole time I am waiting I am casually watching them ‘social network’ on various platforms meaning that I am effectively being ignored.
In those situations I feel that they are 80% likely to know that they have received aforementioned email from me (if smartphone is being used). Usually these emails do not require a complicated response (a date/time/yes/no). So the fact that they read it, and then return to actively and publicly ‘social networking’ to me means that they are essentially saying that I am of low priority.
A couple of times I have had to restrain myself from going ahead and calling them out on it (via social media platform they’re using while ignoring my email). But I never actually did, would probably come off as an asshole or something. Also feel like if they wanted to, they could just give me a lame excuse which would be impossible to refute unless I did a stalkerish amount of investigating. Then even if I were to prove my point, I would still be the asshole who has nothing better to do than devote large chunks of time to social network-sleuthing, which no one thinks is something to ‘take seriously’.
I would probably lose my friends and that would probably be okay. At least at this particular moment, mostly because I have been thinking about my friends and our relationship dynamic a lot recently. I’m beginning to think I don’t actually like my friends.
I’m not a lake
or a river that freezes over
So I’ll never break
beneath your shoes.
The Cut-Off Ponytail from the Run-Down Everything
This is an article I wrote for the fall issue of JUMP magazine in Philadelphia documenting an experience I had this past may in Ecuador.
I’m probably half delirious.
Fifteen hours of airport the previous day, twelve hours late to our destination – Quito, Ecuador. Fuzzy-headed with the altitudinal change. Five hours of sleep, maybe. Bussed to the edges of town, poverty stricken, we are told. Looks that way.
A small, hot room with some people inside. A man setting up some PA equipment. Dark complexion, middle-aged maybe.
He walks up to us, speaks in Spanish. Our broken skills put it together: he makes instruments. He’s going to go get some right now. He lives next door or something.
He comes back with a black case, pulls out some homemade pan flutes, starts to play. They sound good, as far as I can tell. I don’t know much about pan flutes. We thank him and start getting our things together to begin our workshop.
To clarify our geographical location: the fourth stop of the South American ESLfolk tour. Myself and three others, funded to go to various cities along the Andes and introduce a self-written curriculum/textbook about teaching English through traditional American folk music. This is the first stop where we are being ushered around by the embassy staff.
Next day, wake up in a gated community, pile into a twelve-passenger van. Drive to the place deemed ‘impoverished’ by the US government, get out. Watch the whole city fly by in between.
I WENT TO TUVA AND DRANK VODKA WITH NOMADS
Note: A modified version of this article appeared in the Summer issue of JUMP magazine. This is the original.
(photo courtesy of Helen Stuhr-Rommereim [who was also on this trip])
We woke up early, set out early. A long bus ride out into the steppe. We were to meet nomads. Grass and grass and maybe a small hill. The horizon was beset with very tall mountains with snow on the top. The bus was filled with people; four American visitors, one newly arrived Nigerian student, and about twenty local students. We had already started to drink cheap local beer out of two liter plastic bottles. The boys in the back had started to sing. The professors in the front shook their heads, probably thinking fondly of their youth or something.
Take a map of Asia and find the geographical center. According to the natives, this is where Tuva is. The south of Russia, in the center, technically Siberia, on the border with Mongolia. Most of the buildings looked like Russia, all of the people looked central Asian. We had started in Kyzyl, the capital, and were heading out towards the mountains, beyond some small nameless village we stopped in for various foodstuffs.
I had been in Russia for about seven months at this point, had taken this trip under the guise of working in the university and ‘spreading goodwill’ on behalf of the Fulbright program, but mostly because I had recently emerged from a period of serious purposeful solitude. Being around fellow Americans stationed in various Siberian cities felt good. I had felt pretty awful for months already. Also Tuva is where throat singing is from.
I am the bearer of too many wings/I am the bearer of too much flesh
Subcutaneous fat clouds
feel vascular
I am a heart beat or hemoglobic donut
I am unnaturally pushed
self important with thoughts like
‘probability is in my favor or something’
react with fear
as it pitches and/or rolls
‘physics still work at an angle’
later I will regain my confidence
acting/lashing out
look at that obese family
they are probably going to mcdonalds
what is their consumption rate of big macs
per capita per day/year?
today a massive polluter
tomorrow back on a bike
I laugh cause that family returns with big macs
if they try to sit next to me I will complain:
‘but they are obese, I can smell their fat/neglect’
‘they are everyone’s healthcare costs’
‘they are the tea party’
‘they are a diet of corn’
‘they are a massive waste of resources’
I will continue yelling until they drag me off and throw me on the Tarmac.
and each obese male will get 1.5 seats
each obese belly digests 2 big macs
subcutaneous fat bodies
additional unnatural pushers
turn secret sauce into additional fat cells
I will be the Tarmac walker demanding equality
or I will be the fat boy crying
cause that other kid beat me up and took my big mac
I may/may not be the silent hypocrite
I am an abandoned big mac storage facility
the correct size but big mac-free.
I am the voice over the speaker who judges you when you order those six big macs
I am sad cause I think I look like you but never touched a big mac
I am jealous that I did not get to be very responsible for my appearance
I am afraid for my life, that our combined obesity will cause us to sink into the hard hard colon beneath those subcutaneous fat clouds.
I am happier on the tarmac
I am unnaturally pushed
he thought that if he were to dash his bike on the ground his frustration would transfer from his muscles into the steel of the bike frame and shatter an invisible layer once the bicycle struck the concrete.
if/or/when a wolf
okay, so I think I’ve figured it out:
i am a man, and although I think differently,
it seems that I still am part wolf.
otherwise I have run out of ideas.
evidence being that a wolf
will bellow or snap or snarl
or show his teeth
mostly cause he doesn’t understand/is confused.
that is how I feel when I do
aforementioned wolf things
not a werewolf, those are a figment
i am a true shape-shifter
a real house-wolf
a confused boy when I snap out of
wolf-mode.
Note: I am not sure if it is something like the changing of seasons or an increased amount of pollen entering my lungs as a result of increased blossoming, but I know there is something that is not as it should be and I am currently dissecting my personal fibers and inspecting them for defects.
I am the person who is generally considered non-commital. Or something. Or what people thought/told others I am. And then I was not that person or I altered a mindset or I ‘fell in love’ or I felt like one entire person. And then I was dependent and happy. And then I wanted to romanticize that forever was the goal but she wouldn’t let me. But she was being silly and I was serious.
