they’ll tell you it’s a matter of drawing a line into an arc and then back onto itself. of course, what they don’t tell you is the amount of pressure each progressive swing takes, and how the matter of your fingers twisting doesn’t factor into any of it. but it does and in the figuring of one gracefull movement into another, you find yourself tied in knots, wrists for thumbs, hands for elbows.
Monthly Archives: January 2005
Hello world!
hello, welcome to some online nonsense. had to “fix” an already “bent” php installation to get it to work on apache 1.33
but it works, and here it is.
much changes ado…
you forget to continue
you forget to continue. The spoon perched inches from your lips and you forget, you hold steady but you forget and remain still. A still life, still passing for what’s called living. You then hear a truck blare its horn outside your window, or the clatter of garbage cans, a cat in the alley screaming for children. You stutter and focus your eyes. There’s the spoon full of mush, you bring it that much closer, clamp your lips around it. It’s gotten cold sometime between picking it up and swallowing.
All days come to this and for some sooner than others. I want oblivion, this bliss of absence, of forgetting of place, identity, of disappearing into the walls. I want to disappear. I do not want to grow old. I look at my daughter and although the fear is still there, I reminisce more often. I think of my childhood, more specifically my teenage years. I try to trace where I faltered, where I stopped being a successful student and let myself go to waste. I sometimes try to delineate that, but most of the time I am trying to remember for when she comes of the same age so that I might better understand her. She’s barely ten months old and already thinking of her teens.
You pull the spoon away from her mouth, gently caress the underside of her chin. Even after all these years, her skin is so soft, so pale. She slowly chews, eyes out the window at an indiscriminate point in our past maybe? When we were young and fought and loved passionately? Before we ended here wiping each other’s ass when it occurred for us to do so, when the stink provoked the shame out of us. We’ve turned into sacks of flesh that have forgotten who we were to one another, what the world meant with us in it.
affair chronology
i had decided to commit my life to writing when i was 20. i had a good teacher at the time, a very guru-like relationship that healed and broke all sorts of things.
i met my future wife towards the end of it and struggled through a graduate school whose politics overwhelmed me. i learned more about things i did not need to know, and with my passion bent, writing became a chore i abadoned.
i keep coming back to it however like a reluctant lover to his mistress and i thwart her everytime. i visit briefly, get my fill, plant a kiss and i am gone for months at a time. she is no longer an easy addiction i can afford.
in order to write, don’t you
missing days. Why, you do have to live in order to write, don’t you?
Snippets of this life: my mother, after having been hauled into the DMV to reconcile the mismatch between the name on her SS card and her driver’s license, wants to reconcile all her names into one common one. It’s entailed so far getting and translating her birth certificate from Greece, a trip into the city, and straightening out her driver’s license, marriage license and her SS. All that remains is her passport, which has the name she became a citizen with, her married name and her shortened first name, which bares no resemblance to her whole first name. Anyway, to wrap this segment up, I had wanted to go into the city with her again to the Passport Center but could not arrange an interview without first proving she had a ticket to leave the country within 15 days. In the end we went to the neighborhood Post Office and a woman there told us to just write a letter detailing all the name changes, from the divorce to her second marriage. Which I finally did, just today. Done.
We signed our end of the contract for the 5 bedroom house out in Oceanside. This is the third time I’ve written a check for such a large amount, and it’s never easy. Although I have to admit, that it has gotten tired. When we were going to go to contract on the first house we had wanted to buy in West Hempstead, our attorney, Bob Katcher, went over every line and clause, even took the time to go over the stuff that was crossed out. The second time, his partner, Alpa Sanghvi, summarized each section of the contract but I had forgotten to bring the check book. I brought the check the next morning. The third time however, all we did was initial and sign, breezed right through the contract not going over any of it all. There had been some concern over whether or not the sellers had certified the conversion of their garage into a den. I did not quite understand the concern considering that the converted garage should up as living space in the property�s tax records, didn’t the town after all, already know about it? Alpa had explained that when you filed for a building permit, the town right away taxes you based on the planned improvement, regardless of whether or not you submit the final work for a certificate of completion (which entails an inspection by the town). In addition, she pointed out, if I had never mentioned the converted garage or the second floor addition, as long as the survey the owners had was current, no one, not the bank nor the attorneys, would have raised an issue.
My brother-in-law Boris has come up to visit. He is intensely interested in our daughter Ioanna, which is not a bad thing, but there is something in his touch that strikes me as desperate, desperate for a child of his own. Currently he is involved with his first cousin, who claims to have divorced her husband in Colombia, and has brought her two boys with her to the U.S. She doesn�t want to have anymore children and I am surprised, given how Boris clearly is with children, that he has accepted this. Does he think he can change her mind? MZ and I broached the subject and despite our pleas, you could see he was becoming recalcitrant and uncomfortable. He even said at one point, “I came to visit Ioanna, not to be grilled…” We said to him, each of us in our own way, that he was much too special and giving to be with someone who could not give him what he so rightly deserved. The phone then rang, and he smirked, “Saved by the bell!!!”
And that what’s been going on, briefly, amongst other things for some other time.
expecting him although at the time
the problem is that writing takes time. It takes a toll. It isn’t just a stream of brilliance, effortless and meaningful, although for some reason, always in hindsight of course, I remember it differently. But seriously, that’s the number one problem with writing; it takes time: it takes time to do, it steals time away from living to do it well. While writing you cannot live (shamelessly maligning Blanchot here), but in order to write you have to live sometime (i.e. ‘Write what you know…’). And I hate it taking me away from this distraction of a life I am living.
A funny little man showed up my door today. I had been expecting him although at the time, I had completely forgotten. A little old man was at my door and I knew he was Jewish before looking at him because his name had all the right vowels and hiccuping consonants that Jewish names sometimes have. And when I opened the door, my mother was peaking through the shutters whispering, ‘Who is that man?’ And he shuffled in muttering his name, asking which way he could go in, either up the stairs to our apartment or into my parent’s home. I pointed into my parent’s kitchen and he shrugged his shoulders as if to say, ‘well that’s as good place as any.’
He was going to give me a ‘paramedical’ exam: draw a little blood, take my blood pressure, ask for a urine sample. It was for the life insurance policy I had taken out, given that my wife and I were going to soon be buying a home. He set up his tools, a cardboard box of plastic paraphernalia, a pair of rubber gloves, a cup and a smaller cardboard box with postage. No little black bag, no chit-chat, nothing to drink thank you. He asked for my arm and he handled it rather weakly, not out of embarrassment or even that he couldn’t manhandle my arm into the position he needed it to take my blood pressure, but rather he resigned to some unknown fact about the situation that I was not privy to. He noted my BP (120/70, not bad at all), then fiddled around with the short nosed needle and the vials he was going to hook up to it. He asked me to make a fist repeatedly, he tightened the tourniquet, tapped the inside of my elbow just like they do in those old WWII movies. And I don’t know why I remember it that way, but it seems that this tired old man in front me, sticking a shunt of a needle into what was obviously not a vein, was somehow connected to that time, even if he would have been just a boy.
He didn’t talk, just sighed as he snapped off one vial and snapped in the next. And when he was done with drawing blood from my not-vein, he asked me to put my finger on the hole as hard as I could and even took the finger of my other hand to show me where the hole was. Meantime he took little bar code stickers off of my application I guess and labeled each vial. Then he fiddled with the urine cup, which turned out had one little nip on its edge, like a spout and handed it to me and placed two other bar coded vials into it. ‘If you don’t mind,’ he said, as if it was all obvious, which I guess, it must have been. I had been nervous during the whole time that I wouldn’t be able to ‘perform’ this part of the show, as the old man was drawing blood I tried figure out where my bladder would be at.
But it went alright, almost too well, and as I was handing him the urine samples, I noticed he had already taken off his gloves. ‘Is that it?’ I asked. ‘Yes, yes,’ he got up and shuffled into his coat on the way out, ‘stay well…’ And the little man who I had been expecting but forgotten was gone with all my blood and piss in a box to be dropped off at the nearest post office.
basements with cathedral ceilings
I dreamt of change. I dreamt of houses with cathedral ceilings in their basements that echoed my footsteps. I dreamt of cavernous halls and doors that dwarfed me; walking into a room and declaring, “Honey, honey, over here: this can be our work out room?” How ridiculous. I dreamt of the house we are planning to buy, and how it turned into a much greater treasure than we had anticipated.
I dreamt of teachers and chemistry, somehow the purchasing a new home and returning to school dovetailing together. I dreamt of a life that ran sideways to this one and split off into directions that held a bit more hope for myself, a little less darkness. I dreamt of talking to wayward urban youth who all lived like a tribe on the fringe of war in and around a loft owned by an African American couple. Upward and refined with little or no time for nonsense. And these were good kids, who when I first thought of buying that loft, I developed a keen interest in their affairs, I think in the dream becoming a kid myself, a teenager again, wiser I hoped, and there were problems with school and relationships and rivalries with other tribes in the neighborhood. But I had left them for the home in the suburbs, the one with the cathedral basement, and they went from surviving to pillaging, from artists to war mongers. In fighting and jealousies, while the world mocked and scorned them from the outside. When I returned I had pointed this out to them, almost costing my own life. I might have made an impact, if I had stayed.
And lastly, dreaming of school, returning to school, again a teenager and discovering new interests. The kids of this chemistry class for some reason were all suddenly leaving or were being moved, displaced, I’m not sure, but I do know that it had something to do with our move, and both MZ and I were sitting in class, and while she was being supportive of my wrong answers and the chiding I received from the rest of the class (they saw through it all, they knew exactly how old we were), it was the fact that the professor, no the teacher, came over and signed my work, that encouraged me, that opened a new possibility despite it all.