The Great Chain(s) of Being and Friendliness:re-connecting with a kindred spirit despite being served & surveyed at my local, highwayhood Samsarabee's

A Prefatory Note of some note to my Dear Reader(s)*:

The following mini-meander on the highwayhood of neighborliness was written sometime in late August; there I was, attempting to inscribe whatever "creative non-fiction" may or may not signal in the temporal and temperamental time/space continuum of that durn "blogisphere"; blog spaces are all about the "right now" of hyper (no KIDDING) textuality, but I'm rather absent-minded, like slow-food as much as I like "slow scroll," and was consumed by the following life-stuff, rendered here for you in despised discursive form, otherwise known as "bullet list". So I didn't publish it "today" (that someday in August) because I was

• Preparing for the then-upcoming and now all-encompassing Academic Year
  
• Finishing my Paint Quest 07 Paint-a-Thon
• Avoiding preparing and/or painting (and much else)
• Being rather absent-minded and losing the survey that was to be snarked

So, I create this bullet list of poor excuse, present to you a prefatory note of current intent in Tahoma Red 12, and self-publish (because who else would effin' do it?) a piece that's "so old; outdated; why bother?" today-today instead and realize that I need to re-consider my relationship with said hyper- hypertextuality. This makes me think that I would like to start the "Slow Scroll" movement! Who wants in? Let us stroll and scroll slow. Slow Scrollers of the Blogiverse, unite! The only thing you have to lose are your RSS Feed Chains! Or something like that. . .

Much has changed since I wrote this. We're all living that spare-change, so I'll spare it, but share some context that seems share-worthy.

My living room is now that perfect shade of periwinkle that haunts bridesmaids but compliments cherry wood and bone china plate; the snarky of summer self has given over to the promise of pumpkin picking in some future October day, no doubt, but above all, my dear friend who lamented her Bartleby "Before" shots is now a colleague. :) She decided that people and their words are worth the Slow Scroll (and the severe pay cut) after all, and thus, this is dedicated to her dedication to helping our peeps communicate in complete sentences, in MLA TNR 12, and in ways they never imagined possible. May she find her voice as she enables the tenor and treble in those she edits and abets. :) Congrats, Tiff! Woooo!

And yes, I lost the damn survey. Shit, but that was one creepy document of snark-worthiness, folks. Damn. . . . I honestly think I threw it out with the outdated rebate forms from Home Depot I never got around to filling out. All I know is that at some point when I thought to look, I only came to found that my damn pharmaceutical-grade survey was gone. But certainly, as we live in an Assessment Obsessed "Culture of Assessment," I knew something would turn up eventually. And then, lo! A new year begins (September will do that to a teacher or student type) and suddenly I forgot about this essay altogether! Yep. It sat in Draft Limbo (very much like much of my life, it seems) awaiting some sign or "exciting coupon" of remittance. And there it sat, until the above pictured "Reader/Customer" survey slipped out of a book I was browsing and my WTF?! florescent-on-a-timer turned on. As I "filled it out" (the only way one can, of course), I remembered

*plurality, like hypertextuality, is a state of being my "audience" may consider optional. . .

“In a free economy, people do not always buy just because they have money. . . . Theirs is the sovereign right of choice. One of the hopeful developments of recent years is that new knowledge is rapidly being accumulated about the aspirations and wants and motivations of our people.”

–President Dwight D. Eisenhower on the wonders of consumerism and consumer surveys in relation to the prospects of the national economy; quoted in A Consumers’ Republic by Lizabeth Cohen.

“Sauntering the pavement or riding the country byroads here and there are faces,
Faces of friendship, precision, caution, suavity, ideality,

. . . . . . . . .

Sauntering the pavement or crossing the ceaseless ferry, here and there are faces;
I see them and complain not and am content with all.” --From “Faces,” Leaves of Grass by Brotha Walt

“Would you be mine? Won’t you be mine?” –Fred Rodgers

I have actually existed on this portion of our planet for 33 years and had never as of yet experienced the pleasures of dining at an Applebee’s . . . until this very day. The wondrous thing about this bizzaro fact and life in general? Well, there are always firsts;

and lasts.

Apparently, until today, despite my thinking otherwise, I hadn’t truly experienced “local” dining; as the façade and interior of the chain portrayed, I had finally arrived at my “neighborhood” grill, after all. And I didn't even need to bring the buns.

These were my “neighbors”; Applebee’s: my “friends.” Funny thing about these neighbors, though. They reside on a highway. Funny, that.

I hadn’t seen her in over a year; an old friend, we had a lot to catch up on and share. She knew nothing of my recent neuroses, hobbies or honey, and I knew nothing of hers. There were over 365 days of life’s bliss and boredom to compile into bite-size bits in between bites. And even though I almost hesitated to meet being still in the midst of catching up to the middle once again of my Apartment Revitalization Plan, I stepped away from the blue tape, nothing to paint here, and got ready to head out. She lives in a sweet little beach town in Monmouth county but has the misfortune of having to commute to work up here near enough to my hood; thus, knowing we should meet somewhere in proximity to her work, my residence and the GSP, she sent a text asking if meeting at Applebee’s would work for our reunion. “Never been. . .” began my text-reply, but I looked forward to seeing her, and perhaps, I half-joked, trying out something from the Weight Watchers menu, as I am always, obsessively watching and measuring that.

I also tend to be an obsessed foodie-in-the-making. I can be a bakin’ fool depending on my particular hormone count, and I certainly enjoy cooking for my peeps, and when I can, I pretty much attempt to eat/shop in that pathetic but not SAD fashion: whole, organic, local and all that jazz. This “pretty much” healthy and as the "flex" happy wordies call a “flexitarian” lifestyle--coming from a chick who as a young girl believed a balanced meal consisted of Classic Coke, Sour Patch Kids, Andy Capp Hot Fries and Little Debbie Oatmeal Snack Cakes--is an accomplishment that’s been well over a decade in the making. Trust me, I was (and, heck, still am at heart, and man, ya gotta have that) a Joisey Diner girl, a drive-through Diva, and an all around junk fetishist. But I just couldn't do it anymore. And time went on, and so did I. When I do eat out—and gosh, but I love to dine out with folk— I tend to stick to my local Baristaville eats owned and operated by actual families (not corporations) and gen-u-ine chefs (and not TV chef personalities represented on laminate menu selection). I don’t really have that much disposable income, but I will and do spend on food. I’m a bit obsessed with it. But, hey, I’m American. Who isn’t obsessed with food in one way or another round these parts?

“Welcome to Applebee’s. Let me start you with a drink. We have a new Red Apple Sangria, and there’s the Banana Berry Breeze, and . . . ”.

It was a discursive equivalent to a daiquiri filled machine gun, and I was the “kill”. “And don’t forget the drink specials. . .” She must moonlight as a telemarketer, I thought. She’s so quick; she almost has the face down straight. She’d be good. Especially on the phone; that way, they wouldn’t see her ever-so-slight and ever-so-repressed smirk as she maneuvers through her script.

I stare and blink out an “S.O.S” at Tiffany.

“Diet Pepsi,” she offers our telemarketing ninja neighbor.

“Unsweetened ice tea and, um, water,” I exhale. No more machine gunning margarita mixes. I turn to Tiffany to begin the year’s exchange.

With our drinks comes a new line of fire: “How about an appetizer? We have a special that includes . . . and don’t forget to add. . . and you should try the. . .” she directs her pen-weapon at one of the many laminated pictorial menus which work to make a gaudy, shiny altar to the Buffalo Winged Margarita Gods at the window side of the table; “we have the wah-wah-wah-wah where you can choose three wah wah wah for . . .”. At this point I can’t believe that the scribes of the Neighborhood Welcoming Committee Volunteer and Anima-Donor Recruitment Speech believe me to be so. . . well, gullible? Lulled by siren sheen of tropical colors in laminate? I don’t know. I mean, c’mon! Do they really think we aren’t paying attention to the fact that they sprayed down their weedy-lawns and replaced dandelion and crab grass with AstroTurf? Do they really think we’re buying the gaudy green for something real and living? Do they?

Do we?

When the curious child holds a strip of turf to the Man Loafing, does he reply, simply, “It is the handkerchief of Monsanto”?

Hey! What’s so weird or wonder-worthy about listing appetizers? you may ask. Don’t you always get a “specials” tirade at any given restaurant? What gives? I know I have been accused of “thinking too much” about things not deemed thought worthy by my kind and patient peeps (and occasional reader!). The thing is, there was something different about the whole experience—er, no, approach. There was something different yet familiar about this script. And it wasn’t the “Cheers” familiar where everyone knows my name and “taste preference”. It was scripted; it was . . .“customer”-oriented; it was retail; it was all about the sell.

“No thanks,” Tiffany begins. She’s good. She sees that I’m too awestruck and fascinated by the wonderment of it all and brings me back to her presence and “reality”. In retrospect, and after all this wandering about nothing, I am still so glad for that repressed smirk. I can’t imagine if I’d get much sleep tonight if there wasn’t one.

"Love Thy Prospect"

The manager walks from table to table: “How is . . . fill in the blank?”. As anyone who eats out anticipates the owner and/or chef crawl, you’d think the manager’s walk through would give me the same sense. But there’s just something about the place, you know? Something about the overdetermined nature of their overt neighborly determination. And for crying out loud, but how many chefs or proprietors walk around in standard issue polo shirt and “Manager” name tag? But Mr. “Managing by Walking” wasn’t smirking. He may even have been sincere in his stops and stride, actually. I’d like to think that I remember feeling comforted by the human face behind the Customer Service Protocol. These lists of lines and protocols are everywhere we turn, behind the doors we ignore if we are not “employees only”.

A few weeks ago when I visited my family in Miami, I went to get my hair dyed by my cousin at her salon. She works for a popular strip mall hair chain; it was a slow morning, and I walked around and stared at the mugshots of missing stylists on licenses taped onto mirrors and the racks of clearance hair product bottles as my cousin slipped out front for a quick smoke before she washed my grey away with her magic touch. Stopping by the employee’s room, I became transfixed by the rules of engagement presented in Commandment Poster-board on the other side of the open door. Eye contact. Name and familiarity exchange. Shampoo sales (through indirection). Service extras (indirection strategies listed and repeated). Retention strategies (oh! Sorry! That last one’s a slip; that would be the student—er—customer service lingo of my "biz," sorry! Golly!). Every bit of relation, of interaction, from how to look, position your body and speak, down to the final goodbye was rendered in bullet list on that poster. Everything scripted and mitigated by the potential sale add-on. By the

“three course combo for $12.99 is a great choice ” (smirk).

This may seem overboard, but sometimes I wonder how it is we can truly, well, follow suit and "love thy neighbor". I am left to wonder: what are our reference points for relation? What are our notions and metaphors for such exchanges nowadays? That love, real love, is possible is a testament to the beauty I found there along the highway, despite the décor.

See: "Edwardo, Party of Five" (including grandma) celebrating the youngest son’s birthday.

“Carrie; we need singers: Anne, Jennifer, Carrie? Birthday,” commanded a server as I returned from the ladies. The Special B-Day Task Force maneuvered and assumed positions and voices. They sang, clapped, and moved on to the next performance in appetizer plea, and a year in a young life was celebrated.

May he have many, many more.

I continued toward our table. “Mom, I just think you can do better,” the large woman with the thick and frayed blonde curls pulled back in a vintage “scrunchie” leaned over and whispered to her on-the-cusp-of-elderly mother. It was a contrast in hands and hair. Her mother’s hair was sleek and smooth and a pristine yellow-white. But her hands were small and withered and spotted, rendered “old” in light of the large but elegant and smooth, kindly hands of her daughter. “You can,” she clasped both hands, and the small spotted fingers disappeared in her own.

As I sat down our server returned to place two pieces of paper on our table and ramble through lines in reference to them, but at that point I was just in complete awe. I couldn’t believe what I was looking at: surveys. A survey! To be filled out and . . . Now.

Then she went through the various desserts we should order. I looked at her; I looked at Tiffany. I couldn’t help myself.

Tiffany and I laughed through my coffee and her cola order.

“A survey!” I went on and on about my other obsession with our other cultural obsession: assessment and metrics. Oh, the glories of assessment. It’s in everything we do; it is everything we have become. We can say the phrase “data driven” without a single smirk. We are fully in love with our identities as customers, and we speak, breath eat and think in the language of satisfaction surveys. So began my tirade, and when the coffee was brought to the table, we were regaled with a reminder:

“Don’t forget to fill that out for me, ok?” the pen taps the surveys.

I sipped. It was getting late; the commute ahead for Tiffany made me for once thankful that it wasn’t me making that long trek to the other side of the Raritan, and I felt sorry and selfish for a moment. “You’ve gotta go!” I chugged. We began cramming in thoughts and ideas we’d wanted to cover but left out, and new ones that happened along the way as we started to maneuver to call it a night.

“Are you going to fill this out?” asked the anxious pen.

I am, of course, leaving out the two other “reminders” we were offered. I suppose there is some sort of penal code and system of reward and punishment these poor peeps reckon with in light of the surveys. No doubt it was plastered on the back of a door somewhere. By this point, though, I had already smuggled mine into my bag. Consumer contraband for a future survey snark!

“I don’t think so,” Tiffany politely responded. Subtly firm with a slightly scrunched up nose and side-turned head, yet assuredly polite, Tiffany is an ace at the call and response of the retail and service blues.

Having worked in retail most of her working life, she knows the ins and outs of all the dance moves. She’s a writer at heart but currently a Buyer by trade, and the Bartleby-esque apathy in which she described her work between those bites seemed a fitting discourse in our current hood:

“I spend my day with vendors; we have the data on what our clients want, and then yell at the vendors to re-configure the product to get what we want: to make sure that the features they want and need are only on the expensive, higher end models; It makes me sick. But I’m supposed to think this way. This is supposed to be normal; I mean, it’s not “normal” for me to think it isn’t, you know? Because that’s our job, right? It’s our business. I’m supposed to enjoy spending hours strategizing about squeezing every last and extra cent out of our clients. Because, hey! they’ll pay more for the gingham check fabric, don’t forget. Gingham check fabric! So I spend my days figuring out what we should buy from the vendors, and my nights writing and proofing catalog copy in order to sell it.”

Sans smirk, our server grabbed at the single survey remaining and then the part of her body I could see as she walked away wished us a good night. She was rushing toward the table adjacent to our own. It’s not easy to get all the protocol straight.

My neighbors at the adjacent table, apparently, can see a good “free appetizer” survey bribe for what it is: “Do you have a pen?” the woman with the hair scrunchie and the beautiful hands asks. “Oh, sure!” she replied and gestured with her trusty weapon.

Maybe they were the mysterious Pharma Reps referenced in the survey’s question #15. Yes. Question #15. When I scanned down to it, I just couldn't figure out if I was in a snarky post modern Twilight Zone recreation, or if it has really come down to a world of Question #15s. I'm afraid of the outcomes of this question I'm questioning. . .

#15: “Are you a pharmaceutical representative?”

Answer:

W . . . T . . . F?!

As we collect our things, I am distracted by a flash of light from the window behind our laminate altar and notice the birthday-celebrating family huddled close for one last shot before the sun set. There are hugs and smiles exchanged, and the boy breaks free from grandma’s grooming ritual and runs toward an eggplant colored (and shaped) mini-van. I watch each get in and then, remembering myself, turn away to get ready to leave as they drive off to their own neighborhood and settle in next to their own neighbors. For a moment, despite the décor, it seemed as if they were mine as well.

"Our Vision is becoming the world's favorite neighbor" -- from the Applebee's "Vision and Mission" Statement

I live in an apartment which is essentially the second floor of a large, old converted house where my neighbors’ lives are played out above and below me. As this is an old house, and we have but wooden floors between us, I sometimes hear the daily dramas enacted above those boards and behind those walls. There are four sets of lives living in this house. Four. But I’ve never once had a cup a tea or java in their kitchens. Not once. Only once did I actually sit a spell and get to know my upstairs neighbor. She had locked herself out and was waiting for our landlord's son who was heading over with a spare key. When she knocked on my door, she apologized and asked if she could just use my bathroom; she was honestly planning to wait on the steps in the hallway. Breaking the false boundary of the hallway threshold, I pulled her into the kitchen, placed her shopping bags on the counter, showed her where the bathroom was and proceeded to spend two hours talking, laughing and learning and discovering the life I’d only glimpsed in moments through brief seasonal-themed exchanges, kind hellos and hallway echo. She’d been my upstairs neighbor for well over four years, and this was our first kitchen table chat. Our first and thus far, only. I hope not the last.

I know the names and many of the standard life stories of my local deli clerks; I know the names of my favorite dry cleaner, grocery and wait staff, and they know mine. They know my “preferences” sans check-box. I know the names of many if not most of the folk who help me consume the things I like to consume, and somehow that makes my life a little more life-like, but for the life of me I can’t remember the names of the sweet and hard working couple on the first floor unless I remember to check their laminated tag on the mailbox. And I keep meaning to ask them up for a cup; I keep meaning to bake a thank you batch of muffins as he always takes out my garbage to the curb. I know I will; man, I sure do hope so. And this is not a merit-accruing attempt at “radical hospitality”. But I gotta admit, I like that concept. I like the notion of opening that door and listening to a life. I’m tired of the parking space lines we draw between us. I try to find ways to re-figure those borders, but I can't always figure it (or me) out. So, I try, but I fail at it often. I do. I still see "obstacle" if not a car instead a person driving a car on the GSP as I blindly speed my way toward the place I think I’m going . All of these folks, just like me and so not like me, going and vibing and try but who (or what) do I see? People? Not really. “Phantoms,” to borrow a phrase from Curtis White's latest. Phantoms.

But there are moments when I remember that it isn’t—despite what the tee shirts say—always and all about “me”. I’m not even sure what that means, anyway, and especially not as “I” have been rendered on pre-shrunk cotton and the false frame of survey check boxes. So the day my neighbor got stuck outside, I was in the middle of a "Holy Shit! Deadline!!!" writing frenzy and attempting to write a proposal for a project at work; when I heard that knock and the "Roseanne?" which followed it, I found myself automatically shifting into the “this is not a good time” gear. And when I debated whether to stay behind my half painted walls to finish my work or go out and reacquaint myself with an old friend, I also re-discovered (as I do on the daily) that oftentimes, most of the things we do (or really should do) really aren’t about us. Yet somehow, in the process, they really are quite becoming.

Home is Where the ♥ Was: Homeward bound happiness in half-finished flat enamel (but alas, no flat screen TV)

"I’d like to buy a vowel, Pat”: The Return of the Penates (or, a welcome mat of obscure observations at the HomeGoods with my honey)

Summer Session I: Solstice/June/Freedom and Promise in Certain Numerical Protection Factors


“Look!” he said from across the aisle. He came running toward me almost like a child, and I laughed and put down the "salad spinner". In his upturned hand he held a small, shiny, red cast iron owl. I think to myself a pepper mill? He’s freaking over a pepper mill??, but I come to see that it is, simply, wonderfully a

“penates!” And I’m thinking we could use one right about now. No doubt we’re about to rehash our former convo about the movement and distinction between Gods and Goods, as we are most certainly products of not only the Great Vowel Shift, but seemingly the EVS, or Extra Vowel Shift, where all hinged and turned to and on a word and we followed suit: Goods are God. Just add an “o” and see . . .

See the young girl! She’s doing that little girl dance by the stack of pillows wrapped in clear plastic. You can tell she wants to squeeze them all, and she begins to start the squeeze fest; the joy of soft and squeezy stuff gets a hold of her; she begins to dance again. She dances and then, I suppose, realizes she has lost her primary audience.

“Mom? Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa? Mom?! Look!” she grabs a Queen Euro Sized Pillow and starts her twirl. The plastic sheeting begins to tear and it seems as if the Euro is falling apart. Her mother is nearby, along the wall where the gaudy, tasseled towels that never dry your hands properly beg for relocation.

“Loooook!” she’s slightly stomping and now twirling the pillow above her head; certainly, she’s revving up her performance to get Maaaaaaa to see; to look. She let’s go and continues the spin and with my now ignored Penates in hand I mouth “Look ma! No hands!” and my honey catches it (the Penates, that is. . . before it crashes to the floor; I’m slightly absent-minded). She’s spinning hands-free, and I’m entranced. You know by now she’s drugged by the dance and loving it; the top of the pink spray of glitter-plastic flower on her bobby pin catches on the plastic, and she gets stuck but laughs and spins and

“Alyssa, stoooooooop....” says the backside of her mother to the back of a set of curtain hooks. She’s not looking. We know this; you know this. Children dance and play in wonderment of all things, and we have grown and grown tired of looking. This is not judgment. I am no better than Maaaaaaa. I have done and do the same. Often. And no doubt, you have, too. This is not judgment; this is life after the Great Extra Vowel Shift. We are all caught up in those shiny curtain hooks.

“Born down in a dead man’s town": Jersey Soundtracks for the Bastard Bennies Blues

The aforementioned HomeGoods sojourn is the result not only the residue of EVS, but mostly because I am in the middle-nearing-end of my summer-wondering inspired, full-on Apartment Revitalization Plan: Phase 2. It is the summer. It is, then, of course, time to wander. To wander and wonder and somehow—well, I can’t seem to wander (psychically, if not physically) beyond the implication of these walls, this space. An academic year’s worth of neglect and negligence called out to me somewhere around May when I decided I wouldn’t move to Central Jersey (. . .just yet). Yes, I was “this!” close to finally making my move to the other side of the Raritan which cuts this oddly capped fellow of a state in half; ah, the Raritan River. Ah, the as of yet still standing Driscoll Bridge. Ah. Ok. So I've admittedly made a Persephone joke or two, but that’s just the stooopid Nawth Joisey snob in me (which, isn't saying much nor saying it well, apparently).

I work in and for Monmouth County which is right smack dab in the middle of the state. It’s odd, that county-- odd in the contradictory detritus of McMansion aluminum siding commingled with historic shore line sea shells and bungalow sideboard. Neither North nor South, it is caught almost without an identity in the standard Nawth/South Jersey Family Drama. It is, however, somehow so very “Jersey,” even though it’s not the venerable Sopranosesque that the world beyond EWR and the highway sound walls wish to project (besides, those would be the Bennies, anyway). It’s “perfect” in the slightly-creepy way former Governor Tom Kean used to enunciate, “puuurfect together,” when he’d advert for the “New Jersey & You” tourism campaign. Puuurfect. I mean, hey! It has to be. It is the county where the epitome of “Jersey Pride” reside: Jon Bon Jovi and da Boss fa cryin' out loud! And well, isn’t “Bruuuuuce!” enough evidence people? And, of course, commuting 80 miles a day, four times a week for the past seven years on the GSP can take its toll, even with EZpass (aye. . .cheap. . . sorry). Despite my subtitilo soundtrack snark, many of my most cherished peeps and places reside in said space, so move I was! Yes! Move it! New address! New me! Yes, this was supposed to be my “Summer of Change” accompanied by my “Indie S.O.C” inspirational, motivational playlist of travelin’ tunes on my busted wheel o’ iPod; I was going to move. I was going to do it. But, somehow, well. . . Enter “Phase 2.”

As a consequence, now, a few of those precious summer months later, after having returning from a week-long Monmouth Co. dog and house sitting expedition which was immediately followed by an almost month-long trip to that (according to my mother) other home known as and in Miami, I am once again in the midst of my Apartment Revitalization Plan. And now, once again, I am facing certain half-finished re-zoning projects scattered throughout the premises. Certain pieces of furniture and knick knack sorry ass bric-a-brac that have seemed to cement themselves to their choice locations with dust I seldom, well, dust, have succumb to the smaller-scale version of Apartment Living Eminent Domain and have been displaced, only to find themselves in recycle or garbage bins (or stuffed into the dark, seedy corners of basement and closet).

It all began with the initial Solstice Plan. Once Apartment-white walls would soon be bursting with Wonka-vision kaleidoscope color: a candied-orange hallway, French’s Mustard yellow kitchen, Pistachio/Chocolate Chip Mint Ice-cream bathroom, (a soon to be transformed) lollipop purple-blue "grape" dining room with an “asparagus” green living room and a Lemon-ice bedroom; but the Collard Green Office will have to wait for Winter Break, I think (hmmmnn... the foodie in me wonders about my comfort-color choices). Yes, this apartment; this pad; this place, this. . . “home”?

“Yankee, oh Yankee go home” (Home: love it and leave it and wait for the refrain to return once again)


Sometime in Solstice, Continued. . .

I had just returned from the Home Depot with two gallons of that mustard yellow I thought matched a snap shot I took during a long ago summer Stand Issue 20-Something Backpackin’ Euro-wander; it’s a fuzzy, off-centered pre-Photoshop shot of yellow sun-baked walls of a Venetian home which now has prime wall space in the kitchen. I knew the paint would be perfect, but it was time to clean before the storm of paint and uber urban kitchen renewal. And then:

“They don’t live the way we do. . . . They don’t do things the way we do. . . . They don’t sit home and watch TV; they hang out in the streets and talk. . .”.


Preparing for the eventual kitchen makeover, I was mopping the kitchen floor when that statement came through my tinny radio speakers.

I stopped mopping.

Standing akimbo, with Swiffer Wet-Jet poised for eternal battle with the disposable nature of my kitchen’s cleanliness, I wondered at the words and the implications of the speaker’s construction of “We”. Us and Them. These and those. Those and We. We. “We” the People! . . . We . . . sit home and watch TV. And. . . Those, the Not-Us/Not-We-People, well, they are taking over! They’re OUTSIDE! VISIBLE! And worse!!! AUDIBLE! Talking to one another! In their godforsaken forked tongues of . . . . Spanglish! Oh! How awful. How icky. How . . . un-American!

Maybe, I thought, maybe this explains my TV-free existence. When my stunned and dumbfounded students discover and ask me why in the world of High Def and Dish I don’t own a freakin' TV, clearly, I can now point to my First-and-a-half-Generation-Un-American-Values! Yeah. . . And I figured, well, perfect! This makes perfect sense, to me, of course. Because as a First and a Half Generation American, I have sometimes felt somehow stuck in the middle somewhere, not like my Cuban-born but "naturalized" American mom, and not like

“the White kids”. Weird, but that's how it sometimes figured in my brain as a kid. Not at first, of course. Who thinks that way “at first”? Do I trace it to being put in the “Spanish” afternoon Kindergarten class until they realized I actually spoke (and read; and wrote) in English? No. I don’t remember that; but my mom sure does. I really don’t know when that became a phrase, a way of saying and seeing self and other, but eventually, alas. There are things one actually learns at school, apparently. And it's odd how it's stuck; and yet, it’s odd how I’m stuck. I was never part of the Identity Reclamation Crew, with “Proud 2 B . . .” fill-in-the-blank ethnicity License plate or bumper sticker. Despite my disdain for identity parade and charade, I have still on occasion found myself on the other side of the Pronoun Divide: “those [insert brackets] [insert 'white'] people”. But to my differently race-d "white" [Cuban] family living in Miami, when they talk about “those” people—the very same people I'd be bracket-snarking, of course—they say, “Americanos,” or if they want to be really cutting,

“Yankees.” (Juh-ahn-Keys; that’s right).

I got me some super strange stares once when I used the phrase “racism” in reference to an incident my cousin had with a racist (to this Yankee) client at her hair salon. After a few blinks and stares, I realized that “my people" see themselves as white and can’t figure out what their Yankee "Gersey" cousin could possibly mean by suggesting the primary difference between my bottle blond cousin and her bottle blond client would be constructed on race. To them—on the surface-- it isn’t about “color”. It’s the passé irrationality of nationality. But I am sure, like me, they have discovered and learned that to despite their seeming shared space on the Revlon color wheel of synthetic hair samples, the chain links that both hold and separate these false strands change and make us in very real ways.

In so many ways, we're still dealing with the interesting synaptic phenomena of how things kinda look different when you're not in Kansas anymore. The funny thing, of course, is that residing in ethnic liminality as I so often do, I'm not sure what I face when folks attempt read my face and match it to my name. I can't tell you how many times I have been regaled with

"Cuban? You don't look Cuban."

Shit; I suppose I missed out on that episode of "Extreme Ethnic Makeover". But I may live differently than most; I'm a Super Creepy Weirdo, recall.

I don't even own a freakin’ TV.

I don't own a freakin’ TV, but I have the average myTube brain (despite my super creepy cred). I know the scoop on all "the shows". I’ve got screens, if not tubes. Yeah, I’ve got screens, and I know the scene, new school and old. But I guess I’m old enough to vibe nostalgic in a generational “tube” sense. Like so many of us who have been raised 'neath antennae and behind tubes and screens, I've got that other Modern Man disease otherwise know as the Life as Mixtape--er--Soundtrack--er--Playlist-anitus ringin' in my now 33 year old brain. Oh, I have a perma-soundtrack running through my click-wheel meets vinyl 45s adapter wheel of a brain for many and most a scenario; it can include anything from walking into a messy room and suddenly hearing old "Mr. Clean" jingles to much, much worse. . . .

I can sing the entire "Golden Girls" theme song. I can name that theme song in one note. . . ;-) It's just amazing what noise will fuse and frame a synaptic fragment of self, isn't it? Yeesh. But hey, Sophia kicked ass, yo.

“They don’t live the way we do. . . . They don’t do things the way we do. . . . They don’t sit home and watch TV; they hang out in the streets and talk. . .”.

Yep; that’s what he said, and it's stuck here, as I am, and as a consequence, you are as well, dear reader, with the above poorly portrayed Passport ID head trip 'round my as-of-yet only partially painted pad sometime earlier this summer (and this 'sentence').

Our immigration debate is implicitly framed by the larger, “global” problematic of home and nation, of white picket fence-dreams that make good neighbors and 12 feet deep concrete walls that make good nightmares. I teach contemporary World Literature at my College, and it happens to be one of my favorite courses to teach. Themed around the very premise of this particular dialectic dance--between the premise of the “Global” and the presence of the “National”--it attempts to interrogate through language this bizarre, seemingly unidentifiable liminal space we seem to be stuck in currently. Our world, with it’s ever-present and projected Extreme Global Makeover in a Big Box to Go (careful: contents are extremely warming), is now more than ever most obviously holding on with bleeding, torn finger nail desperation to the fabric of flags. Never mind the insidious discursive shift from "International" to "Global"; we’re keeping it real in our hood, and freakin’ out about

“leaking borders!”

Apparently, we have been told that we want flexible, “temporary” workers. We want flexible people-er-"guest workers", to pick our fruit, and well, clean things up around the place, mow lawns and paint walls, ya know; but shhhhhhhhh. Yes, fluid, flexible people! Acrobatic, invisible “Guests”! Yes, flexible and fluid peeps. But we want

“tighter” abs and borders! Tighten those abs and borders, now! C’mon! How oh how can we figure out what it means to be “American” if “those” people can just waltz right in to our family room whenever they choose? I mean, really. And I was right in the middle of watching “24”.

I listened to disembodied voices debate the demise of the Mom and Pop Shop. I contemplated the purple plastic of the mop. Yes. I thought. We want flexible workers for our flexible and fluid and lovingly disposable "global" community. Because, as I've recently noticed, my newly acquired parting gift of a "Miami" refrigerator magnet has a tiny "Made in China" circular sticker on its backside, right behind the clear plastic line of genuine "Miami" sand held affixed within said magnet. I'm assuming I'm safe from potential lead paint hazards, anyway. Between the words "Miami" and "China," there is a shifting line drawn in occluding sand. It suggests something other and even more sticky and seemingly permanent than the terms temporary, flexible, or even "global." It points to these words we exchange and have become since 20^th century post war reconversion efforts turned tanks into refrigerators you purchase at your “local shopping center” and Main Street into a place you visit at Walt Disney World.

(co)dependence Days: July, July!
Summer Session II: “Little pink houses for you and me. . .”

Last year, when my mom first moved to Miami, I had constructed a hybrid tableau Miami to which she would soon reside. Part Golden Girls, part Vice, part Crayola Havana of my mind, having never been there, I could only imagine it into being through the busted Viewfinder Archive of Miami Stereotypical Images I inherited thanks to my youthful love affair with TV. Ideally, she would reside in an Art Decco complex with groovy guys in Havana Shirts, sipping Café Cubano and playing dominos; my nightmare scenario? Not necessarily where she'd live, but who'd she'd become in and thanks to proximity. I was happy with my Ethnically Challenged and challenging mom who cooked canned beans and never made a cake that didn't have the Crocker seal of hapless baking approval. She seemed eons away from my Cuban-American friends' moms, but also light years away from my White-Ethnic friends' moms. She was this weirdo puzzle of influence and identity crisis with a piece of the Citadel de Havana and a corner piece of Plaza de Madrid and a whole slew of pieces suggesting north Jersey factory towns forced into relation.

Funny, but my mom wouldn’t do well piecing a literal puzzle together; it’s her hands. Three days into her New American Life my mom found herself sobbing on a public bench near a compassionate soul who didn’t understand a word of Spanish but apparently understood humanity and introduced her to the front gate and foreman of a factory where she would begin her American Working Life on said day three. Her first “Made in the USA” job title was as a welder; she would fuse filaments for the picture tubes in those old school television sets at the RCA factory in Harrison. I was there, too. Working through her pregnancy, I have “baby shower” pictures of my mom’s shy smile next to four other women in 70s pastel and plaid, posing with her boxes of baby things set in front of fence and brick face. She occasionally blames the arthritis on those initial 6 years of exposed joints in freezer-cold warehouse climate, and for some odd reason in my odd head, I am reminded of this as we pass yet another construction site marked off by temporary fencing on our drive over to purchase her glucosamine at The Vitamin Shoppe in one of her many strip mall shopping stops on the stretch of 88^th which runs through the suburb of Kendall, Miami; her new home.

Frankly, when I initially thought about my mom’s move, I was afraid I'd visit the New and Improved Born Again Hyper-Cuban Mom. And, indeed, like the myriad lives and residences she's inhabited, she has seen the light and is baptized anew in "La Llave" Cafe for certain. She says things like, “Up there in Jersey” which makes me feel like I’m apparently chillaxin’ at the barbarous North Pole on occasion. She’s gained a new accent and is dismayed to report having “lost” her “English” (apparently leaving it “up there”). But as many know, the life and flickering avatars of the Exile are never as singular and stable as the ironic solidity of the term itself would suggest. Up here in Jersey, she was sometimes too “Hispanic” to be comprehensible to the “Accent = Listening in Stereo” Types. I’d watch her ritual of frustration as she’d carefully construct sentences that had only a prepositional slip and fall here and there and then watch the shut down faces of the Anti-Accent Automatons waiting for the apparent Babble-Woman to stop and loudly retort, “Whaa? I don’t undahstand you; I don’t speak Spanish.”

But there in Kendall, I know she still feels like a stranger in a strange land. I’ve heard her say things like, “Here, in this country” in reference to Miami itself (as if Miami were not just a new city in a new state but a whole new nation of peeps, so to speak). And, of course, there’s the problematic one-two punch of consumption and identity in relation to time and place: “They called me ‘Yankee’ the other day” my mother dramatically laments in reference to the response to her order of salmon and asparagus rather than cerviche and arroz con pollo at the restaurant. And I've noticed the ever-present reality and shadow of the refugee-exile in her as well. She still can't sleep in a bed. I woke the first morning of my stay to find her downstairs, snoring away on her recliner. For the first time in the her American Life, she has her own "upstairs" bedroom (something I still long for), and she can't be comfortable in a bed. Unlike most parents who don’t sleep together, I knew my mom’s late night sneaking off into the living room to chair-sleep was in part due to the fact that she’d spent most of her initial years in the States with a rocking chair for a bed/room. And it stuck.

"It's good here," she sleepily retorted when I yelled at her to "go to bed".

"It's good; I like it better. Por favor: leave alone!" She replied, and noisily turned away on the faux leather “bed” as I walked over to the kitchen to prepare to brew the "American" coffee. I scooped the Starbucks out of the new bag of beans we just purchased at the Publix, which, she proudly informed before we began our grocery jaunt, is just a “short drive away.”

Miami's suburban sprawl is evident in every inch and yard of terra cotta Olive Garden. These developments of houses and condos seem only linked by the color if not quality of roofing material and the surety of a Publix grocery store only a car drive away. Everything is only a car drive away. And what, pray tell, is "everything"? "We have everything here," my mom gleams and gloats with consumer pride. "Targeh, Bar-nes y Noble, el Publix, el Winn Dixie, Kmar, Walmar (pronounced sans "t" so why not honor phonetic identities?)

Time Travelin' Tourist!: a brief rest stop of a return to sometime in solstice before we U-turn back to July

“So what does it mean to you? 'Home'?”

It was late, and I needed to start to get ready to head back up north to that 'home' I was working on. It was a conversation I found myself striking up with everyone I could. "Home?" What does it mean? Is it a place? Space? Ideological construct? Sense? Feeling? What? I was now asking one of my closest friends who lives far too far away from me in that county I have yet to fully call my own. We’ve had lots of deep convo on that couch in that living room. I guess it was right about the time I had decided I wasn’t going to move just yet. I guess it was the HGTV coming through the white wicker entertainment center; she loves that channel (and I love her effin’ furniture).

It appears that this beloved friend with the sweet furniture watches HGTV to assess the market and value of the homes featured there (and as a consequence, be aware of her own). She hits realtor.com like our students hit MySpace. Spaces and estates, real or otherwise, seem to be on everyone’s mind, if not screens. My cousin-in-law’s latest identity is sub-prime mortgage lender: "Best rates; no credit, no problem" he smiles and winks and cracks open a Presidente. In Cuba, he was a high ranking and trained para-military officer. Here, he's just another Cuban/American trying to find steady work to keep his family under mortgaged terra cotta rooftop: satellite dish installer; contractor/house painter; and now: “loan officer”.

A few weeks ago, when a group of us came back to my cousin’s home from a day at the zoo, we found my cousin-in-law and uncle huddled around his laptop, oohing and aahing over a house they were checking out on no other than realtor.com. It's a newer ranch down by the end of 104th Street, where the "developed" suburbs of this end of Miami end, and all that remains beyond is yet to be. . ."developed". “Oh… look at the ‘game room’…” mused my Uncle as the jumpy video panned a large, empty room furnished nothing save for billiard and ping pong tables. Those tables looked untouched; the green too pristine, like the infamous dining room where no one ever dines, this game room seemed like a display area rather than a place of play. Somehow, Kendall seems the end of the line; so much is new, so much on display and being built before my eyes, and each visit brings with it a new erection of Chain Store Nirvana. Soon, my mom will have her Panera Bread to go along with her beloved Barnes y Noble.

”Oh, look!” said my mom, turning to my cousin in the back seat. I was tired of seeing only the suburban outskirts of this city and I wanted my mom’s radius of being to expand beyond the boundaries of Publix and future Panera parking lots. We were off to Vizcaya; I needed me a fix of some sweet old school estate architectural brilliance. On the way, however, it seemed my mom was more excited about the newer evidence of, um, “architecture”. “How nice!” my mom comments, pointing to a new, huge, looming box of a public storage warehouse. “This is so much bigger than the one I used, Mari” my mom protests to my cousin. “It’s so . . . big!”

Something you might notice, should you care to look, would be the homeless working and wandering along 88th Street. As you head further north, closer toward older Metro Miami, you'll see men carrying cardboard blessing you for food or donation, and other men in yellow tee-shirts working against the apathy and protection of driver side windows and door locks in order to solicit donations. Miami, in so many ways, is a city bursting to the brim with the subtleties and explicit nature of homelessness. Whether sheltered in condo development, Miami McMansion or bus stop, there are storied seekers all around you. You just have to look. And listen.

Before I leave for "Gersey" this time around, I sit out back with my aunt and uncle and listen to new stories. Like the one about the soon-to-be exile women who'd hide their jewels in lipstick cases and hair buns. How the woman who invented the secret chamber hair bun idea actually lives in Miami, and is rich and famous for her hair products. I love hearing stories about Havana! This time around they tell me about the houses with the "false" walls. Behind these walls were hid all the goods the initial and second round of refugees left behind, believing they'd eventually come back to reclaim their properties. My uncle tried to convey the images of all these abandoned mansions, these huge homes with everything still inside, everything except for homeowners.

"When they redistributed and others took over the houses, they'd knock down walls just to see; so many walls to break down, you know?" I think of all that's been tumbled down in my family's life. How walls and doors and floors have been trampled and disrupted. How, in Cuba, after having her front door busted down, sending a plume of dust and sunlight across that black and white marble tile she always described with awe, and after her cupboards, dressers, and essentially every piece of my grandfather-carpenter’s handmade furniture was shredded, she somehow still managed the courage to offer a cup of coffee to a machine gun with a man behind it. They didn’t find what they were looking for. If they did, well, I guess it would be safe to say you wouldn’t be reading this. And this is one of the many miracles and testaments of faith she attributes to her multitude of saints, like, St. Anthony, for example, the patron Saint of Lost Things. And she believes. And in my way, I do too. While I was in Miami, I kept thinking about these unfinished walls yet to be painted here, “up” in “Jersey”; how summer is actually almost over now, even though just a blink and a few paragraphs ago it had just begun, and how despite the fact that all I kept thinking about was getting home, I found it there, in moments.

AUGUST (and back again)

Summer Session III: "Someday we'll meet beyond the land that you call miles away"

So, I am apparently home again.

Ah, home. I'd been texting and messaging peeps about the intense longing for this space--this half-assed, unfinished space that I don't even own. But will this paint really make a difference? Beyond the aesthetic coat, what changes? The odd thing is that it might be nothing at all. But how to tell? How do I, um, "assess" the Change? How do I measure the "outcome" of my Apartment Revitalization Project? Forgive the snark slippage, folks, but it seems that while I'd like to believe that "home" is a process rather than place, I am somehow bound and pulled by the idea that it is more idea than anything else, tangible or otherwise. Process? Place? Lately, it seems we’ve pawned it for and as an elusive obsession, as a quest to consume and consequently display "happiness" or, even worse, how the calculated notions of our “achieved" and “maximized” consumer happiness and satisfaction is now and forever being re-assessed and measured despite the fact that it isn’t and cannot be attained nor achieved in these numbers, flow charts or those damn paint samples. ;-)

Recently, I was myself similarly obsessed with reading this pretty rad book that traces the trajectory of the "development" of consumer culture; I finished it on the plane ride home (not really a huge fan of "Mr. Bean" re-runs, sorry). And as I peeked over my neighbor's tray table full of suduko and mini pretzels to spy me some glorious Exit Row View of what will always be the most nostalgic view of all, I came to an odd conclusion. It all came together for me on that flight home, as things often seem to make the most sense to me in transit. You see, I don't find it at all a coincidence that, at the mid-point of the 20^th century, when post-war America was figuring out what to do with all these peeps and space, with the then and now disquieting proximity of race and place, of class mobility and the purple heart of front lawn mowed grass; when America was “developing” itself: building and building and buying and buying until somewhere along the way our Hero "Man Consuming" was consequently consumed by the term and will from now on be played by “Consumer,” well, I don’t find it at all a coincidence that the birth of the 'Burbs also coincided with the birth of the survey. The development of the Modern Home Owner is the development of the newly Measured Customer. It makes sense. I see it. We see it. We live it and in it each and every day.

If you would recall, I began with an apologia; this isn't nor could ever be "judgement"; this is pathetic little pixel of an attempt to link to the beautiful-sad contradiction of Life after the EVS. I shop at HomeGoods. I like to do it. I guess I do. Well, it’s what we do. In fact, I shop in various places and spaces, am accosted by more muzac and more plastic packaging I can’t make heads or tails out of opening than plastic arts I can make heads or tails out of apprehending; I consume goods more than I consume art, despite the fact that I live in a less than 15 mile radius (measured in driving OR public transport distance) to dozens upon dozens of the worlds best art houses, gardens, museums. . . but, see? See Saturday afternoon and see the mad rush of me and my neighbors: we are mowing and moving bright red plastic shopping carts along aisles of prints to hang on walls painted (or otherwise). Sorry, but that new collection of urns can wait; I've got my prescription to pick up at Walgreens, see? No time. No time, sorry! Who has the time, or desire for something else? Or, as Hugh Wolfe suggests, “sommat" more? ;-)

. . .

I walk into a pile of torn-up catalogs that were smartly recycled as make-shift drop cloths and smile, give in to the almost slip and fall. My honey painted my bedroom for me while I was away. I now have a bright, lemon yellow bedroom. "Lemon Cake," I mused but then thought the better of it and went with, "Lemon Ice!" mmmmmmm....

On the phone he described it as "happy," and it sure is. While I was away I sure did miss these walls, but there are others--some I have only witnessed in the puzzling pieces of my imagination fueled by stories my mom and aunt and uncle and cousins have and will tell--that I seem to somehow miss more.

“El Patio de mi casa es particular: se llueve; se moja, como los demás”— lyrics from a (very familiar) lullaby

I can’t do it. I can’t buy the owl. I don’t know why. It’s not like I haven’t bought numerous other things, things that I haven’t even imbued with such significance as this. But for some reason, I can’t do it. Walking over to the rugs, I skip over to the middle of the aisle where a “Welcome Friends!” mat in bright greens and reds signals entrance to nowhere but the center of the aisle. I find this kinda snarky. At that moment I hear the familiar “door bell” sound of an in-coming text message and I scoop inside my over-sized “it” bag to see what’s the good word:

“Pita; estoy counting los dias hasta cuando tu vienes para tras a tu casa en Miami. Ya compre tu chair para el desk en su cuarto, y un lamp para leer en la noche. Todo esta esperando aqui. It is raining, so I finish Norah Roberts today. Love y besos, Mom”

Like Dorothy, I make for the mat and click my heels to speed the way.

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.