October 10, 2005

Intangible Souvenirs

Machines to clean our dirty laundry and to dry our clean laundry for us are ubiquitous in America, yet the desire to shilly-shally doing it dilly-dallies. Simply tally it up and one reason might amount to your merely getting back what you started with, slightly faded. An excuse to leave dishes in the sink.

I'm three weeks away from getting off. A machine that pollutes our atmosphere but clears our heads, one flight at a time, of a kaput caput polluted with emptiness. If you like it rough, traveling will get it on with your brains and impregnate your mind. From a stationary stance, it's tempting to liken traveling to taking laundry from machines, getting back what you started with. Resist! Even getting back via a round-trip ticket, it's solely laundry that goes in circles.

The rules of life, if you believe in rules, are arbitrary. One current rule is that a visa to enter Brazil would have taken me ten days to obtain in Sydney. Another rule is that a flight out of Cape Town, South Africa can be overpriced. The rule that makes these rules relevant is my prevalence to act spontaneously.

A machine took me from Sydney, Australia to Buenos Aires, Argentina last Friday. The streets in Retiro have led me to tango dancers, clothed with clean and classy cloths, precisely moving horizontally, closely stimulating simulating a precise vertical movement. And the serving of salubriously fresh apple juice in coffeeshops has encouraged me to repeatedly drink salubriously fresh apple juice.

Once you realize your potential is unlimited, which it is, the next few years of your life become significantly more challenging to describe than the past few years. The more I learn, the less I know. The less I know, the more I want to learn. The more machines I fly on, the fewer machines I put my clothes in, and this is the second day in a row I've donned this shirt and boxers. Getting back, I'm already getting back more than I started with, so where's the laundromat?




October 17, 2005

A Reply to Mariela

I have a vision and she has a butt. We fare. She has a fair butt in my vision as she waits on the man sitting beside me, and she could be beside herself if I were to butt into her affairs. But looking back, while what is behind her waits ahead of me, she asked me if I want to.

In Ms. Fajnyzlberg's French class, when we weren't listening to the cheerful "Champs-Elysee" emanate from her small cassette player, we were learning that a club is called a disco. Even outside of academia. Outside of academia it may be the blunt brunt of contemptuous laughter, smacking of a club, that smacks smack on my ear if callous New Yorkers hear me call it a disco. That's not what it's called there. But that is what it's called in France and Argentina.

Come Thursday, the sucking on my ears or a dum-dum would come from fancy fantasy; my personal interpersonal interaction can be active in inaction. Even in English. I generally prefer plucking eyebrows in the sanctuary of my own mirrored presence. Or genially browsing eyes plucking thick airy thoughts through thin air from afar. I wrote in broken Spanish on her ripped sheet of paper, upside-down between her rows of words, in response to her broken English: "I think so. Can we see next week?"




October 31, 2005

The Starting Line

I peed in the closet. In the closet was a corner I could pee in that was familiar, closer, and safer than the unknown outside of my bedroom door. Known outside of my bedroom door was a bathroom, fully equipped with a toilet, for my unequivocal equipment to unload. Unknown between each door was the sporadic presence of an imagination hosting harrowing recollections of an Unsolved Mysteries episode. I was a boy.

My reflection bounces in ripples off the people I meet and symbiotically we learn about each other. Themes repeat themselves. There is someone living your life and having that same argument with a coworker at the bar. Coercing you to join them. That drunk person drunk to blame a lapse in judgement on a drink that can't defend itself is about to hook up with a convenient conversationalist with the suavest game. I'm somewhere in the mix letting thoughts about themes repeating themselves dance around my head.

Death is the epitome of predictability. Life is the opposite. In the process of one and awareness of the other, our identity and the world are everchanging and approximate representations of each other. I can't say I can pointedly pinpoint who I am, but I do have a better idea than I did when I left on April Fool's. No joke. What they say, whoever they are, about traveling is true: you learn about yourself.

My last stop was Laurel's crib in Puerto Rico before returning to Chapel Hill, NC. She dances. A lot. And she's superb, not just because she's my friend, but because she knows how to shake it. I don't dance physically, but I do dance mentally, and we all dance metaphorically. I have finally left my room and today I return home. But the music has only started playing. May I have this dance?