A Toast to the Little Things

Something in the way these fabrics are arranged haphazardly in the filthy storefront windows lulls me into a state of sudden tranquility. The colors pass, flash through my eyes and distract me from whatever mission i was on. Its like a long lost REM cycle that i had once as a child, swirls of dancing polka dots waltz briskly with the strips and solids. Sleepwalking through this city is easy, my feet hit autopilot and coast to no destination in particular. I start to wonder how cities divvy themselves up - could it be in a smoky saloon, late nights spent with city officials in wrinkled buttondowns and loosened ties, all shouting and pounding half full beer mugs on the table as darts are thrown at a pinned up aged monopoly board? Or maybe its done over a glass of chardonnay in a private jet, two capitalist profiteers joking and laughing and drinking from a birds eye view. Sporadically, and whenever they see it fit, one will press a large red button which drops whatsoever industry they please from their elevated height, maybe a mexican restaurant or a grungy cafe, and like a cherry pit spit out by an on-the-go-snacker, it takes root and forms an enclave of varying cuisines. Half lucid, i start to take note of my environment, disappointed in my legs for carrying the rest of me deep into what must be the city's textile district. My goal was simple enough, once upon an attention span. A cafe, a restaurant, perhaps a couch and the low vibrations of a spanish guitar, dimmer lighting and people scattered throughout the tables, all as alone and perfectly satisfied as i am. The beauty is in those details, but i'd settle for any cafe. I pop the clutch on my flinstone-mobile and downshift into third with a renewed sense of purpose.

I think back to freshman year, LJ and i meandering the salted streets of ann arbor, hopelessly searching for any place suited to fit our complaints and demands. Like a cartoon from the 90s, we turn out our pockets to find a collective 27 cents, a button and a piece of string - hardly enough to haggle for a cup of coffee. So we wander, nomadic in mind and soul, broke and exhausted and indecisive as ever before. Something fate-like carried us back to the linoleum halls of east quad's basement, and without hesitation we begin to test doorhandle after doorhandle in hopes of finding our personal Narnia. Finally, an unmarked door swings open exposing a line of lockers, a couch, and what appears to be a men's bathroom, and with no sense of dignity whatsoever, we sit down under the cracking fluorescent lights and breathe in the stale airfreshener as if this was our home. Now, face to face with that same desperate search, i tune in to my abounding solitude. If the saying is true, and two heads are in fact better than one, well readers, i'm fucked. My terrifying destiny of ending up along in a junkyard or atop a sacrificial alter surrounded by clocked middle aged men or anywhere else terrifically inappropriate grabs me by the ear and pulls me forward. Eagle eyes spot outdoor seating in the distance, 4 or 5 blocks and to my left, so i weave in and out of pedestrian traffic, never checking my rear view mirror or blind spots and occasionally knocking the more cautious sidewalkers off balance. Now i sit, listening to the mellowed tunes of some acoustic spanish soft rock with notebook out and mate in hand, i feel my first real sense of accomplishment here. Is this what growth is like? Is this how maturity overcomes? Does the bitter taste of this earthy tea represent fulfilled goals, tribulations skirted, and independence granted? I look at my watch wagging its finger at me, "you still have an hour to kill" it nags, "take it easy on the yerba baby". I pour and gulp without hesitation, i earned this drink.

El Gato Negro

The wood lining the walls of this tiny tea shop is stained with years of fragrant steam. The color of the cabinets change as you get closer to the bar, more worn and almost darker as the line of tea-pots sing in surprising synchronization. Trying to take in some self-directed courses on argentine history, i leaf through my book and let my eyes settle on the beginning with its conquest. I wonder why table manners and warfare etiquette never crossed paths. Centuries of fighting, plagues, domination, slaughter, scandle, humiliation, and all those fantastic little add ons that come with the "civilization" process could have been easily side-stepped if the royalty and generals just changed their perspective. Treaties i guess function in a similar fashion as the i-split-you-choose policy that us out-to-eaters are so accustomed to. But to flip-side this proposal, it could also make dining a dangerous experience. Hands bloody from guerrilla fork attacks, plates doubling as ceramic armor, and in the end you're left with a torn and soggy croissant that nobody really wants anyways. Maybe it is better to leave things in their current state of being.

Today's rain is impressive to say the least. It falls from all directions, pouring down against this broken borrowed umbrella, pounding up from the pavement and working its way through the threading of my jeans, and perfectly perpendicular when every carless car speeds over the shabby excuse for a drain that leaves muddy puddles to creep and slosh their way onto the sidewalk. Reading the awning aloud, i duck into "El Gato Negro" hoping for some dreadlocked musicians or maybe the jumpy superstitious type. The gentleman behind the counter is unfortunately neither, or so i type-cast by his rimless glasses and matching grey hair/sweater vest. Something floral, i think: i could use a little pseudo-sunshine. As i wait for a man too mature for that goofy red apron he's sporting to bring me my fruity tea, i feel the pounding guilt of reading in english, but the cover screams "Femenismo!" with its inverted punctuation that blogspot is not equipped to type, so i file this under semi-spanish and continue on my way. Two kids walk in, alongside a gorgeous portena woman who i disappointingly gather to be their mother, waving matching toys that light and spin and play an instrumental version of "Eye of the Tiger" at a speed that only Alvin and the Chipmunks could sing to. Each is perfectly unaware of the other and completely content pressing and lighting and conducting an offbeat round of their techno throwbacks, never long enough to actually rise "up to the challenge of our rival". The noise causes me to retreat, as it has for the past two weeks, but this place i was once so comfortable in is now new and flashing and in overdrive. My mind has begun to make mental loopty loops around its rusty metal frame like the afterhours of an amusement park open only to the carnies who work it and the locals who bribe their way in. This tiny fairground that i've swept and kept my entire life turns inside out, an exact negative of everything that i'm assured of. But this new point of view makes way for new combinations of ideas and thoughts, and i look at the carnies around me and i hear the children waving their toys and begging their hot mom for another cotton candy and to be quite honest i'm liking what i see.

Al Sur

I'm trapped in my own foreign film and from this point of view is awfully hard to read the subtitles. Where can you find it, you ask? In the discount section - to the right and all the way back against the wall at Blockbuster, in the midst of a full fledged blowout liquidation amongst hoards of people, teens desperately trying to get their hands on the latest R rated movies to stash with their soft core porn that their mother secretly knows about and 50 something year old women buying out every sentimental feel good to ease their pain of being alone on a saturday night and alternative 20 year olds looking for obscure documentaries about the life of patti smith as told from the point of view of her pet bullfrog that she killed when she was a child - hidden deep within a recycled cardboard box is a movie, my movie, that i will promise right now is not worth the wait. Overly decortative with rogue accents sandwiched between consonants, the cover is a shot of a beautiful city with gorgeous people, spilling culture and art in the places that aren't overwhelmed with smog from the bus system... and then there's me. Yeah, take out your glasses, or binoculars, right there, down on the lefthand side, that girl. No, no not that one, she's better dressed, I'm further left, clinging to that one-zipper backpack like it's my youngest of kin and reeking of a different brand of isolation that knows no name. Ay, mira esa mina, que lastima, que triste. Ay, pobrecita, tan confundida como melodramatica - deja de quejarse.

It's not that i'm complaining (well, that's a lie, and i recognize that a whine by another name still sounds as sweet), just narrating the constant stream of consciousness that isn't yet strong enough to break down this language barrier. It has to go somewhere. If not out my flailing lips then maybe through my fingernails, past the tips, onto this screen. If not to be heard by others on my program who i am too quick to call friend (because my spanish vocabulary is that of a 4 year old who never eats but just smokes and drinks), then by those interested eyes browsing the ether for something more distant from the lives of their own, because hey, you guys have to live your lives all the time; why not take a break and peek into mine. Es una experiencia, they say, and i agree, all too aware that there is a very deliberate reason for not placing an adjective before that noun. It changes, not by the day nor hour, but by fleeting moments that can only be measured in catcalls and extended eye contact, by las tazas de cafe amargo and trips on el subte. What comes out is instead the strangest side of my personality that i have ever seen (and take note that i've known myself for almost 21 years, maybe even more if your a diehard pro-lifer): i cling to people i don't know or necessarily like, and those that i do are doused in an overeager attempt to fasten any kind of relationship a little too tightly. I walk with a certain caution, little ease, and unforturnately no sense of direction. Appreciation of that time alone with my feet treading new pavement and my eyes darting rapidly from parts of my surroundings has disappeared, quickly replaced with a discomforting new tension that i'll get robbed or raped or worse, that someone might try to talk to me. And these fears that never had a permenant residence in my mind have started a barfight with a clan of pseudofilosophical ideas, outdated pop-culture references, and confident yet sleezy pick-up lines - i don't think i need to spell out which gang is winning. But alas, it's 10:20, and just minutes ago i was charmed by the meal stored safely for me in the microwave. At 10:40 i'll be busy thinking about which soap was mine in the shower and if this new ultra-femme smell it has is drastically changing my natural scent. And so on and so forth until i find another outlet willing to hold my thoughts.

mind itch - no cause, no relief

Ambiguity is the ibuprofen of the writing world, a temporary cure-all for any chronic irritation. Used liberally and in increasingly higher doses, sold over the counter in broken hearted love songs from one hit wonder 80s artists, found stashed in your fathers medicine cabinet, a few hidden in the beginnings of many a leather bound journal. They don’t have a support group for this kind of addiction, really, nothing substantial would get said. Instead we’d all just pass around the bottle hoping the rattling noise of pills against plastic might drown out our over-stimulated minds. “Write”, something says in the familiar raspy voice of your conscience, wiser than its years, softened by cigarettes and whiskey. Yeah, that worked yesterday and maybe last week, but tonight trapped in the haze of a passing electrical storm everything is jittery, one word misplaced and the friction will set these fucking walls aflame. So you sit, staring at a blank word document until that 80s song comes on, pounding out of your broken speakers, cutting through the humidity, trailing out the window, whining and crying with the same alleviating sense as the sound of a pen tracing across old paper. And you take no enlightening message away, and you can't marvel in the beauty of the words or composition, and you're fairly sure you heard Prince do an electronic cover of this once before, and you're even more sure that neither version is any good but jesus, that sounds great. And with the clicking of fingers rolling freely across keys, your ambiguous advil starts to lose strength, but your hands keep flying and the words keep coming and I hardly know you, but you’re still on my mind.

The myth of the firefly

In these extended evenings as the suns disappearance starts to tell the working-men of the world to wind down and the late-nighters to put on their party pants, springtime melts into the protruding signs of summer. Unsure if whether its you or the air that has taken on a slightly discomforting weight, everything smells and tastes thicker. Greenwood doubles as a wildlife reserve in the middle of this college tinker-town and i still feel like a tourist rather than a semi-permanent addition. Maybe the fumes exuding from bent exhaust pipes or mold collecting on tossed shoe strings dangling off of telephone wires have started to mess with the anatomy of normal residential creatures. Loitering in the midst of last night's celebratory beer cans and ashes doused in lighter fluid, you can find an unidentifiable animal, found in a mystical encyclopedia crosslisted where squirrel meets opossum meet steroid infused alleycat. He/She is comfortable living the life of a vagabond rifling through 947s mistakes and memories, which eases my transitory soul. The mosquitoes have doubled and size and determination, settling more easily on my skin then i do in it. Redbreasted birds, a species i've always hated, trot rather than flap along broken sections of pavement that glitter with a confetti of broken glass. I wonder how sensitive birds feet are, resenting how bound i am to my shoes on this one way street. But last night i met the most glorious of the midwest springtime residents - the firefly. I had hardly adjusted to the idea of outside having spent the majority of the day in my bed watching Buffy abide by her birthright. Somewhere in between episodes, night's stealthy agents slipped in and slit the throats of daytime guards and a stampede of darkness filtered in. I peaked out my front door, hand still rested on the unstable doorknob and stuck one toe out into the warm waters of my porch. Leaving your house is like riding a bike - a terrifying thought if you've been out of commission for a while but surprisingly easy to pick up once you commit. So i sit and breath and sip on reheated coffee from earlier in the day, thinking and breathing and dreaming. My peripheries catch a miscellaneous light, as if the flickering streetlamps had reproduced and were teaching their young to fly. My imagination, i'm sure, i'm just not used to the unbound world. Again, it goes off, i check my cup to see if i absentmindedly replaced coffee with leftover rum. Then it bobs, closer to me, up and down like a meandering fairy with no destination in particular. My head follows its motion as my eyes track its path and i start to think that whatever toxin that greenwood gives off has officially fucked with nature. The firefly, can't be a result of natural selection, the firefly, i wonder if it ever gets headaches or suffers from epilepsy. My curiosity wins in a mental wrestling match against my languidity and i get off my seat to follow the light. It steps and i step back, it turns and i twirl - i feel its intention like a follower in a tango is meant to, and the porch turns to dance floor where the table takes the seats in arm and sends the flying across the cement. But as i step ever closer to the stairs and out into the real world i feel bound by my coffee and bed and alternative reality, so i let the light turn the stucco corner of my house alone. Not quite adjusted to the night.

Shut up

I'm losin it.



Adderall prescription. calling my name. coaxing me like a pharmaceutical siren.



I need to go to bed. once.

Hot Headed

In heat such as this, everything is mirage-able. In heat such as this, the eyes are the least trustworthy gates into any of the senses. In heat such as this, the only provocative force is that which slithers up my nose and leaves hints of its presence in my mouth, send shivers down my spine, leaves my incompetent eyes blinking rapidly in a messy state of jealousy and astonishment. So on this 80-something degree day, i have come to appreciate smell - the one sense that i cannot seem to control, without turning blue and keeling over mind you. But in heat such is this, ohh baby, you better bet that smell has transcended it's invisible bounds and moved onto a much greater force.


Weaving through bikers and students and babies being dragged by their mothers' lowered arms, and mothers being dragged by their childrens' overeager curiosity, my feet sink deeper into the pavement with each successive step. The sprinklers are on and the grass is freshly mowed, sending brigades of grass blades down newly forged rivers. Well kempt lawns turn soft and marshy, the slowly sinking water trickles into soil and fills my body with pictures of worms in a wading pool, backstroking their way to the next mudbar. Oh futile eyes, you daring overzealous tricksters. Miscalculating the amount of dew it would take to send me backstroking or breathstroking or free-styling if that's more fitting with the grass as my floatation device and the ants as my lifeguards. My nose appreciates, my retinas overstimulate, my mind percolates in heat such as this.