"me on stage" - a title.
The following, a paragraph:
"I don't know what I would do," she replied, when I asked her how she'd react to meeting a younger version of herself. "Fall hopelessly and violently in love with her, I guess."
The self-reflexive precociousness of the prose grows large; I can see the serif font on fibrous, yellowed pages -- a chapter ending of a paperback novella written for the teenage market. I see it on the page so clearly. Never the right story, but one that "made do." It's like how I never called Roland back after sleeping with him for two weeks because I got a new job doing data entry and he commented quizzically: "You mean, you like data entry?" Fool. I like the feeling that I'm getting by. The idea of success gives me the emotional shits and inspirational hemmorhoids (just a little something obstructing delivery).
Yet again, the spectre of my middling, make-do, improvised future! Glorious unplanning!
"I haven't met who I am going to have been, but I have been the met."
That means, there were others who came to me laid claim to me saying: I was once what you are and in that I was just as alone and that means we should be together; but then I says, that means you would have been us and been alone and I would be us and not be alone and you are cheating me of my destiny to be just like this and learn just like this and perhaps one day meet us again and have little us say, oh no, i have evolved. oh, spot! I'd like to damn it! But these are the gripes of lesser woman than that lady!
The gentleman in the train has short cuffed trousers and elegant expensive shoes. That is correct!
The strange man in the train wears flannel as a jacket, too much gel combed through his hair, moosen ear muffs, khaki pants that are a correctly short cuffed length, and NO SHOES. LOAFERS. That is not quite correct!
Friday, February 06, 2009
Sunday, February 01, 2009
apocalypse, how?
On certain downswings of my usual hypomania I wake with heavy eyelids I fear are from insidious chemical gas coming through the heat pipes (and the phantom hole that was once in my ceiling) and walk Nostrand Ave wondering if this is where I will be for the apocalypse? Who would I call first when people start dropping dead?
Of course it will be biochemical, I imagine. I don't think I fear artillery nearly as much. I fear people and how they react unprepared under stress. I fear the mass' survival instinct and how quickly the hard-fought unravelling of ancient tribalisms will retrograde when there's only so much to go around.
Perhaps I fear my cowardice. Perhaps I underestimate, as usual.
But really I wanted to write about pending doom only to celebrate previous glories, inspired by a subway ride's salivation over the word "crab" after dancing in a club where I worried the black people would judge me as trying to be black and the Asian boys were all called "David".
It's a scene for the far-flung during lunar new year week, the recitation of long-lusted homestyle dishes and the resonance of their memory. I joked today that it felt like a recitation of the names of the dead, only, it's not funny, well, only because I feel guilty that I've never sat through a recitation of the names of the dead, nor have I any historical attachment (yet -- oh god, no) to a historical event that would warrant it. HOWEVER - there is always the recitation of foods undeliverable across multiple oceans to my craving, homesick mouth.
slowly now, easy now ... as the genteel mother admonishes, "man man chi ..."
MEE GORENG
TAU POK
HOR FUN
DRAGONFRUIT
CHEE KUAY
TAU WEI
NGO HIANG
LA MIAN
MEE SIAM
JACKFRUIT
JACKFRUIT CHIPS
MANGOSTEEN
NASI PADANG
NASI LEMAK
CHILLI CRAB
PEPPER CRAB
MAN TOU
KANG KONG
SAMBAL
CHOK
PAU
MI
MEE REBUS
POH PIAH
CHEE CHONG FAN
PANDAN
PULUT SERIKAYA
KAYA
KOPI
..... I feel like at least 5 of the above words could be passable middle names for Western-born children on the basis of pure phonetics and new ageism.
But my point. That feeling. That feeling that is not lostness or homesickness, persay, but a distinct and slight rumbling of the "what if it really were all gone", what if you became too old to want something new and all you knew as that which preceded you, well, was gone. I used to lament this. I've lamented it enough in this very brog (coveting the childhood stories of innocent Singapore as seen through the lens of my willed sweetness upon the bitters of my parents' adulthoods). But it all feels different that the world does not seem infinite, that our water and skies and crispy vitamin-D generating sun-basking and naked days of skin on skin and a sense of do gooding (not un-badding) was a clear motive. What if? What if??
Out here in Crown Heights I here a low-flying plane above -- I wonder what it would sound like if there were hundreds. I walk to the subway on trash-littered streets (plundered by the local crazies, and strewn) and wonder how long it would take for a lack of trash service that trucks it magically away before disease would spread and unrest to ensue. Of course, these are mediated imaginings -- oh, to be caught by the future Gestapo dressed in nothing but red ribbon; oh, to be the sole-seeing heroine who knows exactly how to find the foods in the basement bunker! -- but my generation is growing up and I am growing up to see exactly what I am inheriting.
Is the home mantra strong enough? Who will stand up for your millions? The isolating, painful, homogenizing familiarity of that place is diminishing to the creative will, or willfulness, but ... forgetfulness is already a form of apocalypse.
Of course it will be biochemical, I imagine. I don't think I fear artillery nearly as much. I fear people and how they react unprepared under stress. I fear the mass' survival instinct and how quickly the hard-fought unravelling of ancient tribalisms will retrograde when there's only so much to go around.
Perhaps I fear my cowardice. Perhaps I underestimate, as usual.
But really I wanted to write about pending doom only to celebrate previous glories, inspired by a subway ride's salivation over the word "crab" after dancing in a club where I worried the black people would judge me as trying to be black and the Asian boys were all called "David".
It's a scene for the far-flung during lunar new year week, the recitation of long-lusted homestyle dishes and the resonance of their memory. I joked today that it felt like a recitation of the names of the dead, only, it's not funny, well, only because I feel guilty that I've never sat through a recitation of the names of the dead, nor have I any historical attachment (yet -- oh god, no) to a historical event that would warrant it. HOWEVER - there is always the recitation of foods undeliverable across multiple oceans to my craving, homesick mouth.
slowly now, easy now ... as the genteel mother admonishes, "man man chi ..."
MEE GORENG
TAU POK
HOR FUN
DRAGONFRUIT
CHEE KUAY
TAU WEI
NGO HIANG
LA MIAN
MEE SIAM
JACKFRUIT
JACKFRUIT CHIPS
MANGOSTEEN
NASI PADANG
NASI LEMAK
CHILLI CRAB
PEPPER CRAB
MAN TOU
KANG KONG
SAMBAL
CHOK
PAU
MI
MEE REBUS
POH PIAH
CHEE CHONG FAN
PANDAN
PULUT SERIKAYA
KAYA
KOPI
..... I feel like at least 5 of the above words could be passable middle names for Western-born children on the basis of pure phonetics and new ageism.
But my point. That feeling. That feeling that is not lostness or homesickness, persay, but a distinct and slight rumbling of the "what if it really were all gone", what if you became too old to want something new and all you knew as that which preceded you, well, was gone. I used to lament this. I've lamented it enough in this very brog (coveting the childhood stories of innocent Singapore as seen through the lens of my willed sweetness upon the bitters of my parents' adulthoods). But it all feels different that the world does not seem infinite, that our water and skies and crispy vitamin-D generating sun-basking and naked days of skin on skin and a sense of do gooding (not un-badding) was a clear motive. What if? What if??
Out here in Crown Heights I here a low-flying plane above -- I wonder what it would sound like if there were hundreds. I walk to the subway on trash-littered streets (plundered by the local crazies, and strewn) and wonder how long it would take for a lack of trash service that trucks it magically away before disease would spread and unrest to ensue. Of course, these are mediated imaginings -- oh, to be caught by the future Gestapo dressed in nothing but red ribbon; oh, to be the sole-seeing heroine who knows exactly how to find the foods in the basement bunker! -- but my generation is growing up and I am growing up to see exactly what I am inheriting.
Is the home mantra strong enough? Who will stand up for your millions? The isolating, painful, homogenizing familiarity of that place is diminishing to the creative will, or willfulness, but ... forgetfulness is already a form of apocalypse.
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