Those Mean, Scene & (American) Dream Girls: an inspirational quote magnet message in a Breck Bottle to "The Precious Pearl of Spunk"

(a heart-shaped Post it! note stuck outside the shampoo bottle:)

"Dear Readers, (and hey! that includes all three, now, ya hear?)

While the titles which accompany these rambles usually don’t make much sense to anyone--never mind to the rambling author who penned them--the namesake for this installment will certainly take the door prize of seeming meaninglessness. Pardon: it's an inside title. You see, this be no ordinary wonder-wander: this is a super uber secret coded message of inspirational intent with adhesive and magnetized potential to a Fellow Traveller in Sista-Hood: Hemingway’s Half Wit Sista. All, however, all welcome to the inanity found here, as the wandering that will be afoot is a friendly wander on the ins and outs of friendship and inspiration, both of which I have been fortunate to be offered by the universe and its goodliest peeps, and both of which I stumble and fumble over as I try and intend to "pay it forward" in my too often clumsy half-wit ways.

(wait; hold on. Not much fits on a Post it! note; let's digress to the message in the bottle itself, shall we?)

So, Please enjoy the heart-felt if not hair-happy contents of the following message, Dear Readers Three, for you are all welcome to the sudsy residue of inspirational intent you might find there,

♥ WHS "



"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born." --Anais Nin

"I no doubt deserved my enemies, but I don't believe I deserved my friends." --Brotha Walt


Friendship is a wondrous and strange vessel. It carries and holds such odds n ends along the way; like friendship, we too, are sometimes strange vessels, indeed. Our bodies seem to belong on some other girl, not us, not ours. They don’t listen, don’t work, don’t obey our (sometimes) good intentions. Or maybe it’s the other way around; I still haven’t figured it out. All I know is that when she told me about the special braces she’s using to get her body through the particular challenge of running that marathon which will finally take place tomorrow, I couldn’t help but laugh. And the laughter was less about her collection of knee braces as it was about all the things we stick and fasten on and all the things we swallow and consume in order to get across our respective finish lines. Yeah, we make a funny pair: The Bionic Woman meets the Supplement Queen. Wander Twins, activate! Form of: . . . um, a vitamin bottle and an ice pack? yeesh.

I remember visiting her on a Saturday after one of her crazy-ass "long runs" she would run weekly in preparation for tomorrow's Uber effing crazy ass long Run, and there she was, sitting on her couch, ice packs and that exercise ball thing for that planter-flah-shi-tus-thing that was going on with her foot; I don't know. I'm too often consumed by my own busted gams and inner noise to really listen to what's being said by the world or my peeps around me. What a gal, right? Yes, indeed, on this very evening I can also recall sitting on that palm tree patterned wing chair and rummaging through my purse to find and take my nightly installment of Omegas and other inflammation reducing promises encased in gelatin capsule. Between her ice packs and braces and my rainbow collection of various supplementing supplements, we'd make one perfect and completely healthy, supported chick, braced and supplemented and ready to face all the Creepies and other evils lurking in the dust and dog-hair covered corners the universe also contains. But, of course, we aren't this girl, this Uber Girl. No, instead, we are the slightly bruised and scarred, sometimes inflamed, certainly insecure and intolerably normal that all girls, seemingly uber or otherwise, must contend with in the dark of night when the mascara and the lights are off.

As I popped the last of the Omegas, I turned to watch her hobble over to the kitchen to let out Gusta-Rhymes the Uber Dog, who cared little for our busted selves; he wanted to head out and loaf in the cool, night grass. Sometimes I think we should listen to dogs more.


"Plodding wins the race." --Aesop

"All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible." --William Faulkner


(We begin by sailing into the Cape of Cliche, because the reason why it's Safe Harbour Status has stuck around must be because there's something true there that sticks)

But she always listens. Funny; she always remembers to listen, even if she can't always remember what she's said or heard. In the past few years, "through it all," despite the occasional miserable wretch that I could be then and now, she has "been there." After my surgery a few years ago, she was there to help me heal my gimpy gam and listen to me wax poetic about being able to run a mile or two or wax pathetic, "I can't run! I get so swelly! I can't! " And when I started to become a potential Creepie by acting like a creepy nervous wreck after finally and truly quitting smoking and thus, embarking on the Voyage of Eating Everything in Sight, she showed up just at the right time in this heroic but comic cycle to remind me that I still looked like this cool, chic and lovely actress she swears I look like, but I will only attribute to her kind eyes and forgiving Pisces Perspective. Yeah, she’s got vision. And it’s that vision that’s helped her get through the Thorny Patches of Prerequisite "Unexpected"-Patch-O-Thorn-in-Plot that have popped up along her Way. Because even when she thinks no one knows or sees, even when she thinks she's just barely plodding along and fakin' it, in my eyes she stridin' like a

. . .

“Stallion!” I answered. “A magnificent stallion, just running along the beach; that’s you! That’s your animal,” I was right. She’s a stallion. We were on her couch, the one she used to have that was set up against the main supporting wall of her pristine bungalow home (a home she swears is nothing but dog hair and dust). I don't how we started, but we wandered in to a conversation on which animal best represents us, or at least, one of our "true" selves. And I was right. She's a stallion. And she was right. But, oh, how odd to be

“The Coca Cola animated polar bear cub,” she was cracking up when she finally got the words out. Sitting on her couch, we doubled over in one of our wonderful laughing fits and I don’t know how it came about that we started wondering which animal we most resembled in personality and spirit, but like I said, it was easy: she’s a thoroughbred, a stallion: a little bit Somewhere Else wild horse, a little bit Monmouth County show horse. But I was the Coke cub, the polar bear cub: the cartoon thing. My goofy, extended-childhood-vacation nature which finds me whining, “I’m hungry!” usually in the middle of her trying to tell me something of some import that I’m not much paying attention to, among other examples, will testify to the apt if not odd selection in her polar bear cub choice. The silly but sweet, sugar-addicted cartoon cub, that is, of course. ;)

The ways in which someone can become acquainted with the ins and outs of who we are is as much of what constructs us as we who contrive to fashion in our solo mirror dances. Here's a sometime snapshot: She: outward in such an unassuming, pristine, private way; Me: inward in such a loud, slightly-showy, public way. Opposites within opposites, contradictions of layered contrasts, despite the things we call out in one another, we carry so many other corners, so many other ways of seeing and feeling. As a friend, she’ll make you feel like your noise is noise worthy, and I'll, well, try. I try! :) At least, you know, "I try." (my favorite Stand By line)

I try, but my snark is of a different kind. I am the Rare Ro-Rose of Snark, and I seem to mine a different alchemical map; I don't have the salt she finds in cinnamon. I don't have that "spunk" she locates on Mean St. in Aberdeen (I don't even know where that is). So, I tend to get lost, and navigate awry, but despite my cubby ways, I can conjure, did you know? It's a Cuban-witchy-witchy-bruja thing, that other me no animation program can quite render.

(we now digress out of time to Somewhere Else; please stand by and dial "0" for assistance)

I call up the Precious Pearl, so named as such in her Sorority Daze, by those other Sistas and from those other days, I call up that spunky-chica-gal, I call her up and say, "Hey, beeatch!"

She answers and listens to hear the Bruja Buena on the other end of the spiral corded, yellow land line telephone, that kind you had to dial; it's receiver carried the scent of my mom's sweet coffee and cigarette breath and held the echo-memory of those brief but precious late night conversations my mom would have when she could finally get a line across to her family in Cuba. I conjure this particular phone to get the message across to the other girl from one of her many past lives, The Precious Pearl of Spunk. I inhale; I speak:

"Did you ever think about how a pearl is made? Did you ever really think about how a real one--the kind you find on Town and Country necklines--is actually made? You can't have a pearl without an irritant, you know? Without that annoying grain of sand that's snuck in and stuck it out; I heard it on one of my motivational Buddhist cds. It's called the 'pearl principle': no irritation, no pearl."

I wonder if she's heard.

(We now return to the much more realistic and sane modern world of cell phone towers that are constructed to look like trees)


"Courage is grace under pressure." --Ernest Hemingway

"All my life I looked at words as if I were seeing them for the first time." --Ernest Hemingway

She is a woman who surrounds herself in the motivating and moving words of others: on bumperstickers, magnets, postcards and pictures, she is the sun and those notable quotables seem like satellites and planets, spinning a world of possibility that doesn't always seem possible outside the lines. Sign posts of promise and forgiveness, the words she collects and arranges around her point the way back to a heart sometimes too loaded with empathy and understanding, too framed by the sad state of the way we run things in that impossible world and ourselves.

But on Sunday, she will run. She will run to

On Sunday, you will run. And how it goes, or where it goes matters little compared to why. Run toward

that loud place of happy; of--what's that called?--"quiet exuberance," of whatever it is when you say you’ve had a

“good run.”

Regardless of the mileage counter or clock, what will not be measured are those moments out of time, the ones you somehow continue to find and the ones that move you to that step beyond the last no one imagined in the first place.

Tomorrow

You

will run. With a precarious body bound and braced for the unknown in each measured step, if you look with listening, you will see the stallion running there: free and unbounded,

reckless in grace that happens regardless.


So dearest Readers and dear Sista:

Try, regardless.

. . .

To: Chris, Marybeth, Shawnda, and all the runners running for all the reasons that keep us in the race: good luck, good run.

Orienteering in the World Wide WildMart: a half-wit slacker's manifesto for a millennial busy body; or, how to feed a hungry ghost on Happy Meals

“We are determined to be starved before we are hungry”—Henry David Thoreau


Mid-day at the Super Stop and Shop, and the swell of shoppers is almost enough to keep me from hunting down my favorite brands of oat bran and strained plain yogurt; the sound of the Miserly and Count-happy Self Checkout “Voice” is doubled and echoed and troubles the constant doot, doot, doot of the Barcode Scan Suite. I am an ever present presence living in the moment of my present presence:

Dammit; they’re outta my cereal; damn. . .

I have to steer around two illegally parked and over-loaded carts belonging to two women who are obviously “catching up.” You see this all the time at groceries. I honestly believe there should be an easy-to-scan Guide to negotiating the expected dialogue in these ever present reunions; said guides can be conveniently printed out on the back of those red-striped coupon receipts I never use. No, I don’t want 20 cents off the competitor’s oat bran; I want my oat bran, dammit. And maybe that handy shopper’s list of pseudo-“quick text-esque” pre-scripted talking points for the Reunion in Aisle 32 Dialogue and quick Mop-up. One of the first things the hybrid coupon-guide should offer is a reminder that other people will still need to negotiate around your ass, so please park it by the olives, thanks.

“Yeah! Oh. Nice! Yeah? Nice. Yeah, I haven’t been there, but, yeah, we wanna do something too. Get out, ya know? Yeah, when the weather gets good, we’re gonna take the kids ta Bear Mountain, you know? Camping, we’re thinkin’. But I don’t know. We don’t have anything, you know? I keep meanin’ to get ova to the Sports Authority,” she points toward the shelves of olives, with the promise of tents and mosquito netting somewhere behind the pimentos and continues with a loud pause, “but I always end up here! . . .”

Yes, here we are indeed, and her gesture nearly taps my glasses off my face with one red polished poke, but I find my way around them, despite the Olive Pit-Stop Shoulder Violation.

The day would somehow continue a thread that found me here (in this virtual pit stop) as well.


“Buildings are going up everywhere! Workers raise steel girders higher and higher into the air. . . . Inside the unfinished building more people are working. They measure and cut boards. They plaster and paint walls. They connect pipes and wires. . . .”

“. . .Someday many people will have their offices here.”
--From Busy Day, Busy People, Tibor Gergely


Reading from those pages for the first time again after all these years left me reeling with nostalgia.

“. . . this was my favorite childhood book,” I said as I stared in absolute awe at the present before me. “I can’t believe this, love – it. . . it was my favorite . . . I remember I could stare at the people working and shopping and doing and being for hours, and oh! I loved this book! I can’t believe you found it. . .”

. . .

When I first met my darlin’, I told him the story of the "Four Books." You see, I can pretty much trace the bizarre nature of my wanderin’ ways to four Random House “Please Read to Me” PictureBack Books I received as gifts in my wee, wee tot years; four books, each purchased during a different visit to either the Paramus Park or Woodbridge Center Joisey-Mecca-Malls. I can actually remember traces of image and sensation from when my dad purchased “the” book of the four; we sat outside of the Waldenbooks on the edge of the Penny-Wishes-Magic-Fountain (well, that’s what I called it) by the Food Court which held the sweet promise of pork fried rice mingled with chlorine-laced wishes. I’m pretty sure he began to read it aloud to me then and there, just like the interior of the cover page implored adults to do in my name. I was so excited; a new book! And look! There was so much going on in those pictures! People! Look at all the things they do and buy and do! Look!

“It’s morning in the city!” my dad must have read those first lines dozens of times.

“People are hurrying to work and to school. Some stop to watch the construction workers who are already busy digging and hauling dirt, mixing and pouring cement, lifting and lowering pipes. A new building is just beginning!” reads the first page.

I suppose I have always been a half-wit in training, always wondering at the dynamic dance of “people” and the things we do, even those busy but “fictional” peeps found in the pages of Tibor Gergely’s childhood classic Busy Day, Busy People. On that first page, alive with the color of red and blue on cranes and yellow-helmet flash against the dull of soon-to-be-hidden dirt that was once perhaps something of a greener shade in a different imagination or page, there’s another story being constructed; yes, within that page, the one with children and adults cramming and peering into the dig through cut-outs in the temporary wall separating the site from the already-made outside beyond its bounds, our own collective fabrication is rendered.

“The supermarket is crowded with people. Some are busy putting food up on the shelves. Some are busy taking it down” – Busy Day, Busy People, Tibor Gergely


In the latest edition of Adbusters, the message is obvious and unmistakable: we are purchasing our disenfranchisement and demise, one occluding object scan at a time. My darlin’ knows how much I dig that particular publication, so he came home with it yesterday among the other purchases he carried over to the kitchen table. Fresh flowers, bottled water, and our favorite “healthy junk” snacks (artifacts recovered from a Whole Foods hike) now tumbled out and crowded my already-abundantly-messy table: receipts for previous purchases of healthy junk I always forget to throw out; furniture and clothing and alternative health catalogs I never seem to get around to, and my latest learnin' obsession: Buddhist practice and scripture-study evidenced by dog-eared books, contemplative CD jackets, and random notes scrawled on as-of-yet-to-be-paid credit card bills, these accoutrements would soon add to the faux attempt at Ikebana I’d make out of those gifted petals still wrapped in pink and green cellophane. “Ohh! Eucalyptus! Mmmmm. . . I love the smell of eucalyptus!” Out came the slightly chipped forest green glass vase and in went the stalk. Or branch. I don’t know really, because I’ve never seen a Eucalyptus plant “out there” in the domesticated or wild places where Eucalyptus plant fragrances roam; I’ve only experienced eucalyptus in essential oil pots, Vicks Vapo-Rub, pink and clear cellophane, and now in my forest green vase. I was so excited about the flowers and the new copy of one of my fave periodicals that I didn’t see him sneak over to the dining room to hide the precious-memory-busy book he would later surprise me with as I sat and sketched and snarked out my, um, Wilderness Log. Diverted by petals and periodical, he recounted his day and mused about his visit to his folks “back home”.


“In the city the department store is having a busy day, too. Crowds of people hurry to buy things. Everybody wants help right away! Sales people see that they find what they want. Below the store people work underground. They sell things to subway riders” – Busy Day, Busy People, Tibor Gergely

“Wait . . . wait. I . . . I don’t get it; you didn’t have a ‘town,’ or a ‘neighborhood’; you grew up in a. . .”

“‘development,’ yes. And no: no Main Street, no corner delis, no ‘corners’ really; we had a corner property, but we didn’t have a basement. Actually, no one had a basement in my development except for one house,” he said and I wondered at the concept and construct of the neighborhood translated into “development”. A community founded on, well, seemingly foundation-less-ness. “Coffee shops are Dunkin Doughnuts on Rte 9; 'neighborhood restaurants'? Try Applebee’s. The place is built around a highway; the whole place is built around that highway,” he looked out my kitchen window which offers the pathetic view of the Walgreens I frequent. I may have Main Streets, corner delis and coffee shops, but my views can rival Bartleby’s with brick and Walgreen-window-dressing.

. . .

I first discovered his past “Development Life” and had what would be the ghost of the above dialogue almost a year ago today, from that same kitchen table which seems the center of my small, small world. Growing up in an ethnic, working-class factory town of row-houses, two family Jack Green’s, and concrete front lawns, I couldn’t understand what it meant to live or grow up in a “Development” and not a “neighborhood.” “Development” was a process in my mind, something that something is “in” or “under”. Suburban life as it is imagined in the grid of Development was as foreign to me as the artifacts of ancient and lost peoples dramatized on display at the Natural History Museum we occasionally like to visit. And now, as he sat at my table once again, and once again recounted the ways Wyrd of the return home and back again, I become aware of the distance he feels and the lament in love song when he reports a “new Dunkin Doughnuts” is up; he discovered it on his way to his hometown—er—community’s Super Stop and Shop located on a highway that still recalls the history of our neon-rainbow-colored highway connection.

Despite the new, new, new of it all, there are the telling towers of the past; and while my home town was built around river and factory, and his around a highway, we’re still connected in that buzz and hum of the mercantile. In the end, the trucks that ran through that highway-home were perhaps loaded with cargo hauled on hooks that hung in creepy order of size/shape in my parents’ basement. My father, a poet-photographer-guitarist-dreamer 6 credits shy of his Bachelor’s degree in Bio/Pre-Med, gave it all up for reasons I'll never know but frame as a distaste in his brain and ache in his heart that lead him tumbling toward a deeper sorrow in that infamous former theater of war which serves as our current conundrum’s cultural touchstone. Unable to find his way back to being a "student" and in order to provide that roof over head and the quality of cement-ground I will never again find for roller skate, he followed his fisherman father’s footsteps and got a job as a longshoreman for Port Elizabeth. When my students discover and wonder why I in the world I find the NJ Turnpike to be poetry in motion, I can only sometimes suggest, "You should see the Ports at night."

. . .

I stood over the sink, rinsed the last dinner dish and recalled the way the cigar, sweat and salt-smell my dad’s flannels used to both comfort and embarrass me.


“Back and forth go the plates! When they are filled, they go into the dining room. When they are empty, they go back to the kitchen. There the plates have to be washed and ready to use again” – on the work of dinner time at restaurants in Busy Day, Busy People, Tibor Gergely

The images in the latest Adbusters are perhaps even more haunting and urgent than usual. Focused on the various facets of alienation in our global Development, your eyes scan across pages of hungry and contorted children and adults alike, bodies hidden, bare, exposed and crushed; people pushed into spaces of “just enough” to ensure and maximize efficiency and the "natural" world we now only virtually inhabit and experience as a wilderness Flickr display projected and reflected on LCD billboards aside skyscrapers. I was stirred by the images and especially struck by the article on China’s equivalent to our Technosexual Millennial Gen Yers: those who are known as the ‘80ers. Being in the position of professing to a mostly Millennial milieu, I am privy to the ways in which the In2U peeps have been positioned and are positioning themselves. I have sat through “Professional Development” cred-meriting “Faculty Days” where I’ve been warned against the whirring blades of “helicopter moms” and their structure-happy, tolerant and tested, multi-tasking Users. Being used to the freedom of expression in the confined concentric spaces of Scantron satisfaction surveys, many of my students shudder at an essay-centric course. “I hate 2 rite,” is a line I’ve read often enough that I’ve decided a bumper sticker is in order. But while some are hatin’ on the pen and suffer from Blinking Cursor Syndrome, there are many more mad for the performance, or for performing well, performing with “excellence,” of course. Apparently, our ‘80ers brothas and sistas share similar pleasure in performance anxiety; it’s a small, small development, after all:

“Even among younger members of the ‘80ers . . . we see similar trends toward dismal pragmatism. In 2005, the Research Center of Chinese Youth conducted a nationwide survey among students of primary, middle and high schools in both cities and the countryside. The results show that 57 percent found the content of their textbooks boring or useless. Yet 58 percent of the students said they hope to earn a Ph.D., and 42 percent considered having good test scores the happiest thing in their lives [ emphasis added]. (In comparison, only 19 percent regarded ‘play as much as one wants’ the happiest thing)”
(“Wo Jiu Xihuan [‘I’m Loving It’]”, Yunxiang Yan).

I want to bring the article in to use as a talking point with my peeps. It’s the end of the semester, and we’re all barely breathing at this point. My students work, and they work hard. Bakers, waitresses, retail clerks and nurses aides, many of my students find themselves caught in the cycle of work vs school that our modern day Education Industrial Complex of Excellence scripts in a draining and static dialectic that haunts the essays and student essayists most certainly left behind.

In an Honors American Literature course I have the snarky pleasure to co-profess, we recently finished covering those tree-hugging Transcendentalists types such as the likes of the oft quoted man of deliberation, Henry David Thoreau. As it is an “honors” course, many of these students have one aim in mind: to succeed deliberately. With “A”s emblazoned on their chests, framing the heart-sign of their desire, they work through puzzling lectures which ask them to read Whitman out loud at shopping malls and “take a risk! Have fun!” with their essay exams. I was slightly heart broken at some of my peeps' responses to my hermano Walt: "Scattered," and "Unfocused," and "I didn't get him; he's all over the place!" were the major threads in the theme of their initial complaints. We talked over some of their trepidations, and maybe I've won over a convert or two; but then, again, that's not the point. Not mine. I want critical thinking and they want to know what I "want" in their response essays: "Is this what you wanted? I'm not sure if it's right," goes the mantra.

The mirror of my requirements, however, sends back the estranged image of their requests rather than the expected and desired bullet listed manual for getting it right and writing what I'm "looking for"; instead, the mirror throws back and bent the dynamic, shifting and potentially three dimensional bodies-in-relation that we can be if we just looked and listened. I discuss the fact that they want to know what I "want" and start the Socratic by asking them why they believe that has become their inquiry in the quest for knowledge. And I understand my obvious idealism cannot transcend the truth: these are the sons and daughters of sons and daughters who found hope and home by rivers and highways and packed dreams in car ports and garages for lack of basements or those creepy climate controlled storage facilities. They want the other road offered in the "A," in the "piece of paper" exchange. They want the chance to be on the buying end of the Buy Buy Baby counter. And, well, could I please tell them how to get there in five paragraphs or less?

Honestly: how could I blame them?


"At the end of the day people are glad to go home. Tonight they will rest and see their families. Tomorrow will be another busy day!" --Busy Day, Busy People


So, I found myself once again at the Super Stop and Shop and once again I left without what I was looking for, never mind what I "needed". And his gift later that day made me lose my bearings a bit; I was me again: a curious child who could spend hours and hours doing nothing but playing my way toward some discovery or another, playing until I somehow forgot how to play, and became too "busy" to call my friends, go for a walk or just, well, listen to the world read me its story the way my book asks. And I am not alone, it seems.

We, kinda like a Bizzaro Blend of Doozers ceaselessly building, and Fraggles ceaselessly consuming (forgive my final fall into childhood trope-speak. . .), are constructing and consuming a world we apparently cannot sustain, despite our current and founding fictions. Yet and still, we build and build, and still again, we buy and buy, and load our carts with hope and promise-logo-jingle-wish (the grown-up version of the Penny-Wishes-Magic-Fountain-Wish) perhaps to fill a void that’s dug down, deep, beneath, something we modern day hungry ghosts must find and feed.

. . .

"Can you read it to me?" he asked and smiled.

I turned toward the former-ash-tray-now-change-collector which sits atop my microwave and spied the pennies collected there: "Heads, you read; tails, I do."

I flipped.

We decided on a draw and took turns instead.

The Gym Rat Trades in the Squeaky Wheel for a Shiny, Standard(ized) Issue (with some regret, but mostly, well, not. . .)

He brought me a towel. Maybe that was the clincher. The Staff member in the blue button down collar short sleeve standard issue Employee shirt brought me a clean, fresh-outta-the-dryer-warm white towel while I was half ellipticaling/half grading on the elliptical thing. Maybe that was it: a towel-gesture. So, I’m a pushover for clean linens and seemingly random acts of kindness, and I was sorta sweaty. I caved further into our beloved cave. . .

This was day two of a two week trial membership that only yesterday became an actual membership. I have joined. I am now a member of a gym that amounts to the Starbucks upgraded version of my small, corner lunch-counter, pre-coffee house kinda gym I’d been a member of for years and years. At said former gym, much of the equipment is so, well, old, that it literally squeaks. And sticks. And shimmies. All the women know this. Because the equipment is also so limited, we’d have to sign up to use a machine. Upon entering, check out the sign up sheet at the counter on any given day, and you’ll be able to assess which machine didn’t get the heart-rate granting miracle kiss of WD-40 that week. The long, empty column under Treadmill #5 will tell you that its incline still doesn’t have the inclination to incline, and the similar row of vacant check boxes under EFX #3, will tell you: well, shit. No one ever signs up for that one. It had its hay day when Fonda was Cardio.

But it was my gym, and its size and neighborhood proximity suggested something about us. It was where I, well, belonged. I’d been going to that space for over a decade, from the time it had a different neon name on its façade, and I didn’t have forehead wrinkles nor ever thought I would. I’ve watched the equipment shift, sag, decay, and—with much Scotch-Taped Sharpie Marker Proclamation on the back of a Schedule announcing, “Out of Order: New Replacement Coming Soon!!!”—occasionally be retired and replaced. I know all the cliques: the Cardio Crows, the Step Sisters, the Weights Witches, the Elliptical Loners and all the in between: I’ve known them all. It was to this gym I’d rush in order to meet with Linda my Pilates Queen to the Core trainer:

“I’m running late, Linda,” was my ever-crazed, cell phone mantra.

“That’s ok, Rosie. I’ll see ya when ya get in,” was her kind hearted reply, always, a kind hearted reply to my “Late!” or “Can’t!” or “Won’t!” gym routines. It is to this gym that I retuned after a year of a really effing bad back that found me gaining enough weight to see the BMI and size chart as an Enemy Combatant; and it was this gym which cajoled me back to its cardio cure for contested terms and waistlines. Yeah. my gym: with mirrors that have reflected back at least 4 different pants sizes, manifold more hairstyles, and two bruised and broken hearts whose weight and fragmented state could not be measured by the heart rate thingie that never worked on the machines anyway. Yeah. My crappy-ol’ gym. So, after an over-sized wallop of wistful guilt spilled here, you may perhaps begin to understand why I kinda feel like Gilbert when, at the last minute, he has to go to the UBERmarket to get a replacement birthday cake: because, well, they needed a cake (man, I love that movie).

Screen Siren: Adjusting (to) the color line; or Shadow Puppet Theater with Punch & (Judge) Judy! Wooo! Eff grading!

There’s something to be said about the local Mom and Pop being gobbled up by the “local” Stop and Shop (postmodern winkie-quotes included with your Club Card, of course). I’ve been saying it in my own way, been crafting my tirade against “standardization” and all the rest, with all the rest. Recently, at an academic conference that grappled with Higher Ed identity issues and the twin Demons of Standardization and Accountability among other creepy not/words, I was informed by a skeptical panelist that it is thanks to standardization that I was able to get to the conference (transport), partake in and of the conference (chain hotel), and enjoy substance (um, sustenance) at the conference (Viva da ‘Bucks! No “Sugar Free Cinnamon Dolce Latte” at the Hotel ‘Bucks? Well, the one ‘round the corner on 6th should have said syrup. . or the one down the street on. . .or). Indeed: all would be Babble if we didn’t have set standards and charts and timetables and ways and means and all the rest. But it seems as if the world has decided that to give up the eccentric flava of the Nuclear and its alternatives for the kinda creepy Oedipal Drama of the Multinational-bigbox-WallSanto-gentically-modified-sweat shop produced-Apron. Or, short sleeved-button collared

“Staff” shirt.

He was wearing a staff shirt. Staff wear blue; trainers, black. Employees clearly discerned from Rodents, and the rank and file clearly demarcated by color-coded Polo Cred. Black and Blue.

And Louie asked, “Why?”

Ok, ok. Louie asked a way more important question on the color theme and color wheel, but we know color lines haven’t gone away; the old standards remain, and new ones have been rendered and shifted in the name of standardization and customer service, of course. The lines have been outsourced for efficiency, and white washed for Fox News Object Lesson. But I digress (well. . .only kinda). Let us return to a color-less wheel of a different sort; that of the spinning sort. . .

“You might need this,” the arm came out of nowhere: big, sinewy and muscular, perhaps constructed with all things rhyming with “teen,” like creatine, glutine, protein, etc. I only saw the arm at first because I had given up on grading for the siren call of the “state-of-the-art audiovisual entertainment” screens. I didn’t see him because

I was staring at my state-of-the-art audio visual entertainment screen.

Had a bad day? Spin, Scratch, and Please do “Try Again”; or Seeking Shadow Names in Aisle 32 of the 80pk Frozen Chicken Wing Warehouse of Multitudinal Multipacks

At my old gym, I used to watch the Sulky Cell-phone Spinnas, the Mirror Maidens, the iPod People, or even more pathetic: myself. Occasionally, of course, I’d actually be paying attention to the spinning world around me and witness something really beautiful, but that’s not something one normally experiences at a gym, local mom n pop or big ass box chain (because we’re so often not looking beyond the fragile glass reflections of our “form”). But here in front of me was a LCD screen. I had to turn it on:

“Excuse me, sir!! Did I ask you to speak?!” um. . . no.

I quickly got tired of watching Judge Judy berate people, so I switched over to the NYSC’s music video channel. The videos were . . . pretty awful. But maybe it’s just that I was paying attention to them as genre as form, instead of using them as some sort of genre as inspiration and motivation for the sweat and burn. The only thing is that I’m not sure how their video offerings would do much more than heighten our isolation in standard shots, plots and 4/4. As I graded, I paused to watch Daniel Powter sing our collective neo-happiness refrain, ie. ‘bad day” theme song and had to keep myself from cracking up. I thought: they’ll think I’m making this up if I write about it. Then, I watched the lead singer from Snow Patrol lay himself down on a street and suggest he might just lay there. . . Cheerful. Yeah; they won’t believe me. It may have been a towel that made me sign, but it was the on-screen machine malaise that made my brain wander: video after video seemed to suggest our particular cultural dialectic: butt shakin’ booty calls or serious full on malaise; odd but telling juxtapositions for our booty shakin’ malaise on display outside of those screens.

So he handed me the towel, and at first I didn’t see him. I’m not sure if I can really recall what he looks like, actually. But I looked beyond the white towel and blue Staff shirt, the sheen of black and hot pink lycra parade, the color I’d ignored upon entering the screen, and began to take in the scene. His gesture of most likely mandated “customer service” suggested something outside the line of color, customer, and all other coded communication: he smiled and nodded to my papers clutched in one hand, I smiled and nodded at the screen, then the towel. So: is this my way of putting a recycled bow on my admitted hypocrisy? Of suggesting it didn’t matter in the first place: “It’s just a gym,” after all?

Maybe; maybe. But, hey! It’s my formula: my shtick. Sure, she be poorly rendered, but what can you do? Can I get credit for havin’ heart? Extra credit? Do u heart that? I’d like to fall on Brotha Walt’s old standby and say, “I contradict myself. . .( I am large; I contain multitudes),” but it won’t hold. The truth is that I’m not quite sure how I feel about signing my name on that line, about giving into the lure of shiny static screens and the big new! new! new! all around me: shrubbery so new, that the Home Depot plant tags are still sticking out from within the branches, and hell, I even got a free cup of green tea because they hadn’t even programmed the tea prices into the register. Imagine that! But that whole scene by the highway is new. Right across from the Barnes and Noble, Stop and Shop and Sports Authority-Plex, we now have a new Bed, Bath and Beyond, Vitamin Shoppe, and of course: a Starbucks (among other new names). Of course, said Towel Temple and Supplement Paradisio are only a few miles down the road from another pair of Towel Temples and Supplement blah. . . but never mind that. Your town might look the same, but you might not have the stream.

Behind the new Towel-Vitamin-Java-Plex, you gas up your hybrid at the Costco; but to get there, you must cross a shiny new little black bridge built over a stream that maybe had a name once but is overshadowed by bigger names that are echoed and repeated again and again if you follow that stream few miles west. Cross the now-nameless stream, beyond the 80pack frozen chicken wing warehouse, and you’ll find the still tagged shrubs, and the shiny, shiny screens. On occasion, or at least three times a week, you might find me; it’s just hard to see with all those screens.

. . .

Before I left I switched the channel. I wanted to see what there was to see, I guess. I missed the end of something or ‘nother, but was soon confronted by a commercial where laughing and seemingly “happy” couples and school children bore LCD screens as revelatory placards of their sad, sad selves; on these burden-screens, their projected pixels of pain, isolation, anger and anxiety portrayed what their bodies and faces buried. Yes, the metaphor has shifted apparently. LCD is not “Liquid Cave Display,” but something else, something “true”. “Reality LCD,” I suppose. The last shot displayed a middle aged, satisfied and smiling woman, strolling on the beach; on her LCD was the image of a little girl with arm held aloft by some unseen comfort: parent, or God, signaling the United Methodists promise of The Way back to Yourself guaranteed and revealed onscreen(s). I got off.

The towel-gesture made me sign, but the screens made me write, those screens, and this one before me, before you. Regardless of the performance, of the calories expended or the promise kept, I keep signing on to try again.