New Crush

Jill Carroll, the recently freed journalist in Iraq.

I got creeped out there for a spell when her death deadline passed and no word emerged. I'm really happy she's been released (and not just because she's a cutie!). It's a thing to feel good about.
-cK  ¶ 12:29 PM

  Word "Op"
For all the shows I’ve gone to over the past 15 years, less than 10 shows during which, I’m sure, I wore earplugs, I can’t believe I never learned sign language. I can’t believe all club kids didn’t learn sign language. But if we weren’t smart enough to wear earplugs (still not, though the underagers often do), we weren’t smart enough to figure out how to easily communicate in those environments.

A tale of another tribe:

I was part of a knot of mid-level nerds in high school. One year the girls took to speaking what they called Op. Op was a variant of English with pretty dependable rules, much in the spirit of Pig Latin. The rules, as I remember them:

1. Place “op” after every syllable in a word, save for the last syllable (in most words). Examples: Hopellopo = Hello. Schopool = School. Stopop = Stop.

2. In the case of a single syllable word, place “op” at the end of a word beginning with a vowel and after the opening consonant(s) of other words. Examples: Opand = And. Opit = It. Thope (pronounced Thop-ee) = The. Whopat = What.

3. The “op” insert is always to be pronounced with the short ‘o’, the nasally one. (This may have been significantly different had I grown up in Minnesota rather than around Chicago.)

Now, the mental dexterity required to do this is significant, I think. It blows sudoku away, I’m sure of it. The rest of us teen pundits publicly frowned on the linguistic fireworks, but privately attempted and failed to figure out how they were able to hold normal, if not faster, conversations in this manner. Their brains just hopped onto the ropails and topook offop. It was bizarre.

We were reluctant to believe they were actually interested in anything that didn’t involve 90210, the Bodeans, or that 6 ft. 5 inch bag sticks from another high school nicknamed Tree (the guy, not the school). Who was that dude!? I just remember him appearing in shadowy parking lots. “Oh look! There’s Tree!”

Ever read Joyce Carol Oates’ “Where are you going? Where have you been?”

To my knowledge, these gopirls rarely wrote in Op. It was apparently far easier to spopeak.

I’m not a terribly nostalgic person, have skipped class reunions, and have never wished for those days again. I prefer life as it hopappopens and what it may bope. But I’m fond of those friends today.

Chopeers.
-cK  ¶ 9:22 AM

  Gangi pér vel!! Best of luck and happy days to you--Lisa, John, and Lily--on your move to Champaign. We'll miss you dearly!



-cK  ¶ 9:05 PM

  Would YOU hire France?

A friend interviewed intern candidates at her publishing office recently. She told me that a dose of the potential interns didn’t bother to change their voicemail messages even though they expected an interview call. (We assume they expected a call.)

For example: “Like, I’m not even home?, so…you can leave a message, maybe, if you like? And, you know, I might return it. Buh-BYE!! Don’t cry!”

This is not surprising.



Sometimes, such as now, I feel quite a bit older, and I think every graduating student should pass in her last semester either (a) a kidney stone or (b) a basic course in survival. Checkbook balancing. How to read a credit card statement/offer. Tracking how much you spend per month just on liquids (beer, soda, coffee, bottled water). Why a Napoleon Dynamite t-shirt is probably not what your employer means by casual Friday. Basic résumé-writing. How to eat something that isn’t deep-fried. How to sit alone and not feel like crap for it. And how to sound job-ready on an answering machine.



God knows I could have used some of that coaching, but God would, that Busybody.

All this is higher in my mind today because of the riots in France. I’m a little conflicted about it all. They’re demonstrating against government programs that will decrease job security under the pretense of opening more jobs.

Huh? Firing someone and calling that job creation for another seems an awful lot like a null scenario.

Sidebar: I’m reminded abruptly of a radio interview about advances in transplant technology and tissue generation. The radio host was really geeked about it, as was the scientist, but the host really didn’t get it. To end the interview, fully juiced by talk of hearts and spinal repair and hand transplants, etc., he asked, excitedly, “And what about brain transplants!?” He queried about a future scenario in which the brain is injured but the body remains healthy. “Do you think we’ll be able to get a brain transplant?” The scientist said, “Um, you wouldn’t be you anymore.” Awkward silence. The scientist added, “You’d be gone.”



Back to France: Yes, the availability of jobs and job security. That’s the issue. The young people there have a really awful unemployment rate, something like 25%. It’s a dire situation. The bright spot in all this may be the conservative agenda is so untenable that it will, one hopes, yield a more liberal culture down the line.

But while I support the labor movement, and I’m glad to see that the labor core came out to support the demonstrators, I can’t help but note that rioting looks terrible on a résumé.
-cK  ¶ 8:14 PM

  Giving the Gas Face I’m in a good mood, I swear, but perhaps it’s one of those days when one is keenly observant.

So. Yes. I’m in the coffeeshop and the guy working on a computer at the table next to me just farted. Don't deny it, dude. We're sitting on the same bench. (It's an old church pew.) Your gas vibrates along the length of the seat.

According to this speaker maker’s Web site, wood provides excellent sound propagation, “for clear, crisp sound.” I concur. Literally, I feel your gastro-intestinal pain.

The speaker-maker’s Web site even juxtaposes an image of the speaker with an image of a beautiful forest—perhaps the one they cut down to make the speakers. Reminds me of what I've written here before, of restaurants that use the animal they serve as a happy icon, as if these pigs can’t wait for the carving to begin. No, no, no! Start with my ribs, please!



Oy. Now he's shifting in his seat. He sighs, or maybe that's a huff. Just go crap, buddy! Or is living what makes you sigh? Friends, if I ever become someone who just sighs because, say, the Web site I'm looking for takes 1.5 seconds to load rather than 0.5 seconds, please kill me. If I grunt just because I've stood up, kill me. (The exception: I've been sitting cross-legged for hours or, say, I've a spine injury.)

I expect you all to arm yourselves with knives. I'll get up, world weary, and sigh. You'll appear with the knives and say, “We really wish you hadn't done that."



ARRRRGGGHHHH!!! He just sighed AGAIN!!!



[Time passes.]

That’s it. I'm leaving. Two more farts and about 17 sighs later, I'm out. He’s now sitting with legs extended, and he’s leaning back, his ass pressed firmly against the edge of the pew. It’s basically a full-body buttplug, I’m sure of it. Are you going to shit your pants, man!? ARRRRRGGGGHHHHH!!! Now he’s starting to read/mutter aloud!!!

Fate’s really been mischievous on this one. When I walked in, the place was packed. I took the one open seat—the one next to this gas bomb. Soon enough, the place seemed to empty out. I could let the first fart go, that’s fine, whatever, but repeated offerings, all that sighing, all that muttering. Come on, dude!

Also, the elfish-looking old woman who calls everyone "Ma'am" is here. EVERYONE. I can understand it with me, I'm a little pretty boy (especially since I’ve let my hair grow), but 6' 5" dudes with Grizzly Adams beards and Andre the Giant bellies? And the guy to my left is incapable of doing anything without great noise: coughing, sneezing, setting books down, setting his coffee down, stretching. Jesus Christ. And there's only so much androgynous jazz singing one can take.



Another fart! GAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!
-cK  ¶ 10:29 AM

  Setting Sweet Valley High to Boil Francine Pascal is the series creator for Sweet Valley High, a series for which she, perhaps, wrote very little. Perhaps. Number 1 in the series is Double Love. The writing credit is given to Kate William, and some sources credit William with all 143 in the original series, but many online booksellers credit Pascal with the writing. Wikipedia’s stub entry about Pascal gives authorial credit for many of the books to the menacingly prolific Jamie Suzzane, but it’s unclear if this pertains to the original Sweet Valley series or the many subsequent incarnations.



According to an “interview” posted at Random House’s Web site, this New York-born and –raised series creator lives in New York and the south of France. (And according to this review of Francine’s edgier Fearless series, Book 13, her knowledge of New York is sketchy.) If one is to judge by the sun-worn quality of the photograph appended to the Random House page, Ms. Pascal—Why do I feel compelled to call her “Ms.”?—is about as easy to find as Sasquatch.



I’m no Sherlock, but I’m guessing she uses a pseudonym. If it is a real name, she must have grown up as Frannie Pascal (pronounced similar to Eddie Haskell). And maybe that’s the sort of dreamer whose mind becomes Sweet Valley.

So. Much in the way that water hurled onto a mogwai produces more mogwai, Francine’s Sweet Valley books still seem to produce new permutations. In addition to the original series following the blonde-headed, aquamarine-eyed Wakefield twins (Elizabeth and Jessica), what with their “all-American good looks” and Fiat, there has been the Sweet Valley Twins series, Sweet Valley Kids, Junior High, Senior Year, Elizabeth, and the uncomfortably named SVU series. (One must hope that is a university drama, unconnected with the Law & Order series.)



The reason for Francine’s success is probably an amalgamation of timing, tenacious marketing, and the salability of crap. But that has its value. (As a dedicated Days and Passions viewer, though, I suppose I'm biased. And, yes, I read Faulkner and Joyce too!) I haven’t the attention span to follow any series of books, but they are an absolute gas of a read; particularly their unrelenting advance and redirection of motive and plot. All of it occurs in the teen characters’ interior landscape (way out beyond Thunderdome). The point-of-view sits upon the character’s shoulder, the narrator (red spandex-clad?) seeming to stir the pot. Consider this passage:

So why didn’t Todd know it? Tears of angry frustration filled her eyes. She decided she would walk home from school. Whenever she was out walking, she never failed to attract a good deal of attention from passing cars. The more, the better, she thought, swinging her hips a little as she set off.

And this:

Enid couldn’t believe her ears and told them so. “I know there’s another explanation. I can’t accept these rumors, especially after Liz has denied them.”

Todd, a sad, faraway look in his brown eyes, said, “Maybe there’s just so much a person can take. I mean, how long can you go on trusting someone, believing in someone?”

Or this:

“How terrific are we going to be, Liz?” asked Jessica, happy once again.

“Get out of here, you idiot,” said Elizabeth, grabbing a small pillow and aiming it at Jessica.

As soon as Jessica left the room, the smile left Elizabeth’s face. Will it be such a terrific night? she asked herself, tears filling her eyes.

-cK  ¶ 8:38 PM

  Focus, please I'm having trouble focusing on much of anything at the moment, having eradicated the more valued functions of my brain through days of evaluating data. News of Nepal's Buddha Boy, though, sticks out.



Reportedly, Buddha Boy lived beneath a tree for something like 10 months without food or water. He left his meditation site, though, in search of better (meditation) energy, but prophesied returning to the site in six years. WTF?

It's probably racist that I find stories like this fascinating. If it was a white kid meditating for 10 months beneath a maple tree in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, I'd say the kid had issues. But Buddha Boy is in Nepal, which is exotic (to me). I'm more willing to grant this kid the benefit of the doubt.

More than anything, I guess, the starved soul in me wants things like this to be real.

A friend of mine who grew up Mormon recently recounted inviting Mormon doorknockers onto her porch for a little debate. Oddly enough, they tried to persuade her that the Church welcomed lesbians now. She's not buying it.

I didn't know much about the foundation of the Mormon Church, save for its presence in Utah. So she told us of the 14 year old (Joseph Smith) who'd heard the Lord and was visited by the angel Moroni (Italian?) and that there were special gold plates hidden in the hill. The rest is history.

She concluded, "Man, I don't trust anything a 14 year old says."

Indeed. Ah, but if we did ...

Maybe the Japanese are right. Maybe pre-teens really are quite scary.


-cK  ¶ 11:16 AM

  Delta Delta Delta Kind of, Sort of Helps Ya (i.e., Me) The flight out of West Palm was easy-peasy, as usual, but things got oogey descending upon Atlanta. The southern woman next to me, who’d already assured me that it was going to be no problem for her to get to her rental car, not tonight, and that she’d be at Mary’s house by 9—I didn’t ask who Mary is—began an intense “That’s a strange sound, Have you heard that sound before?” campaign as we taxied in. We taxied for a great distance. For all I could tell, we’d actually landed in Savannah and were now driving to Atlanta in a 757. The idle motor whined away, aping, I think, a remote-control airplane. It freaked people out.



All along the tarmac, the chaos continued. Luggage cart drivers raced one another and pumped fists at the cats with the glow sticks who waved the plane in. The carts snaked in crazed patterns very much like those I saw plain-clothed Shriners in mini-carts practicing one afternoon in a parking lot near Mears Park in St. Paul.

“What IS that SOUND?” the woman next to me asked.



The connecting flight home to MSP was a 50-seater we were going to board outside, an unsettling moment that recalls to me the deaths of Richie Valens and the Big Bopper. (More precisely, the film version of their deaths.) It was still a jet, sure, we’re not talking prop plane here, but it was a little thing they’d badly oversold. A gigantic man with a very soft, effeminate voice waved his hands and apologized. They weren't going to give me a seat. I began writing a complaint letter in my head. I thought about saying something stupid like “I paid $550 for this!?” But it wasn’t his fault, and complaining makes me very uncomfortable. I was ready just to be put on a cot, maybe shuttled to the Red Cross, perhaps interviewed on CNN.

Then they offered $200 and a flight an hour later to anyone who ... before they finished, a college girl shoved me aside and slapped her ticket on the counter. “That's a lot of money, man,” she said. The clerk laughed and punched a furious sequence of buttons. The printer whirred to life, and I had myself a ticket. She looked at me and smiled. She smelled like someone who’d been traveling all day, and who perhaps had woke up too late to begin with. “Take it while you can,” she said. “I’ll sit on my ass for $200, thanks.” She held up a well-dog-eared copy of Memoirs of a Geisha. I liked her smile.

So I made it onto the flight. Not long after I'd settled in, the same girl appeared on the plane. Apparently, someone had canceled at the last minute, so she got a seat after all. We smiled at one another in that vague “You” kind of smile, only hers seemed 200 “Delta bucks” richer. I think she'd already been given the credit. Nice one to her, eh?


Ah, but fate came back at us, and fate won. (Gaaaaaahhhhh!!!) This Geisha girl and I both got zapped at MSP. Our luggage (and the luggage of like eight others) was not sent forth. The poor girl behind the luggage counter had to deal with quivering voices, exhausted travelers. Our flight had landed 30 minutes late. (We’d been delayed because of too much luggage. It had, apparently, caused quite a bit of headscratchin’.) Tempers, you know? So I handed over my luggage receipt and played all cool-like. She asked me to describe the bag. I said, calmly, “Well, it’s kind of rolly, you know,” and motioned its height with my hands. “Two wheels. Not too big. Kind of blue, kind of dark blue.” She narrowed her eyes, nodded subtly, and said, “Yeah.”

Getting home from the MSP airport was worse, I think. Not only were the roads mined with staggering drunks and staggeringly drunk drivers—this had been St. Patrick’s—but the cabbie displayed a flagrant lack of understanding of the basic vehicular control one hopes to find in a driver, at least for the duration of one’s ride. Of course, there was no seatbelt for me. Sigh.



We were driving without lights as we merged onto Highway 5. I said, cautiously, "Are our lights on?" and he said, "Huh?" and I said, "The headlights." This is good: He turned on the interior light. It was right above my head. "Bright as they get," he said. I said, "The FRONT lights." "Huh?" "The lights in front of the car," I said. Meanwhile, there we were swerving our way towards Fort Snelling, the Mississippi River, bridge abutments. He had his hands at 3 and 9 and was white-knucklin’ it. "I don't drive at night," he said. (Thank god! I thought.) Finally, he reached down and pulled a switch. POOF! The road lit up!! Practically magic.

“Thank you, buddy,” he said. “Thank you, thank you. Better, okay?”

Better. Yes. Home for two Guinness and a dream-rich sleep.

At 6:15 this evening, a kooky driver with a heavily dented car showed with my rolly, kind-of-blue suitcase. The A-squad underwear’s there. The engineering handbook is there. My black, seven-year-old, low-top Chucks are there. My new toothbrush is there too, but I feel a little strange about ever using it again. I just don’t know what it was my luggage went through. Looks like the toothbrush is a casualty.



The luggage driver said to me, “I just hope I can make it to Andover.” “Where the hell’s Andover?” I asked. He told me. I promptly forgot. He wore wrap-around shades and kept shifting his weight. He was a rumpled character but full of life. He seemed on the verge of shouting Woooooooooo!!! I was out there, barefoot on the icy walk, just kind of taking in the day and how much I like the winter here. Florida was, by most measurements, a long ways off (though all ye Peggses and Costas remain high in my thoughts, please know).

It became apparent the driver wouldn’t leave until I picked up the suitcase. He looked between me and it, shifted weight, shifted weight, and finally asked, “Well ain’t you gonna take it, man?” I did.
-cK  ¶ 11:57 PM

  Escapists! Dream of Tulipan! I am in the West Palm Beach International Airport (PBI), and I am thinking of two things: snow in Minnesota and Tulipan. Ah, my heart is torn.

It's Saint Patrick's Day and I'll be in the safest place in the country: the air. But I am thinking of Tulipan.



On the corner of Georgia and Belvedere here in West Palm, there’s a little Latin bakery called Tulipan in which many dialects of Spanish and English are spoken. This is my second work trip to this low-rise, sun-soaked neighborhood (my employer’s office is a block away) and I am in love with the bakery, its employees, and its patrons.

Less than a week ago I was sitting outside the pub (Lake Street Garage) in Minneapolis with a couple smokers. We were happy it was 40 degrees. We were so happy, we sat outside for a spell, not just because smokers must go outside but because we were really happy to be able to sit outdoors. It’s winter, after all. Now I’m back for another week in south Florida, breathing the air of the Atlantic Coast and marveling at its flattened landscape and melted fauna—the dropsy-headed palms, the twisted banyans. Everything looks exhausted from centuries of relentless heat.



(Note: In the 24 hours following my flight from Minnesota, Mother Nature uncorked a ten-inch snowturd on the Twin Cities. I got out. Jonah was a hack!)



I’ve been asked if I want to move here, and really I don’t. I won’t. But I feel a definite pull. I feel the dream of a move. Tulipan, with its multiple tongues, cases of fresh pastries, gigantic ham and pork sandwiches, regular working patrons and out-the-door line is partially to blame.

Yes, Florida is a land in which one can always find a verdant green leaf (outdoors), but early in the year the true dream of Florida blooms. The winds are cool and the humidity is low (for here). The sun is plentiful but carries only a fraction of the heat it wields in, say, July. I pretend I live here. I sit out on Lara and Ray’s porch and listen to night insects. I watch the waver of light in the pool. In the morning, I walk to Tulipan for two gifts from the gods: con leche and guava-cheese pastries.



Con leche is a Latin coffee. Basically, it’s a latte with sugar and/or sugar cane juice mixed into the espresso. Too many of these would undoubtedly risk the onset of diabetes. They are addicting. The women at Tulipan make so many of these in the morning that they never stop pouring espresso. Steamed milk jets into the silver-bottomed pots one might find holding coffee in a diner.

Oh, guava-cheese pastries. (My heart!) The cream cheese and guava blossom inside the browned, flaky empanada shell to create a selfishly intoxicating moment. I eat these things without a hint of self-respect. I hide to eat them.

Apt: Lara and Ray, those great souls, have at times used the word “Tulipan” as a code word for escape. “What time is it?” one might ask the other at a party. “Quarter to Tulipan,” the other might say, meaning, “I need to go.” Once, while subjected to the gesticulating fury of an ebullient conversationalist, Ray was asked “What college did you go to?” to which he answered with flat but unmistakable urgency, “The University of Tulipan.”

It is an escape, indeed. I miss the snow up north (seriously). I’ve received a number of really beautiful anecdotes from friends describing how they took advantage of it, how their streets look, how being snowed in felt good just this week. I long for home, true. I long for my neighborhood.

But the guava is a sorceress. She’s got great powers. She’s doing something to my brain. When I wander in from the warm, white light and bite into the pastry, I start thinking crazy things like, “Well maybe I could rent a house here…just for a month.” I look for wedding rings on the fingers of the Tulipan women who, each day, work behind the counter in their white shirts with the pink stripes. I swear this is the year I will learn Spanish, yes, of course.

And I think that when I walk in for the fourth day in a row, all the people I recognize also recognize me; that their knowing glances harbor the same message the wind whispers through palm fronds each night: You belong here.
-cK  ¶ 3:59 PM

  Ghana, 1957 While bellied at the bar in Carbondale, Illinois, one late afternoon that rapidly became a full evening, Vaughn and I played the video trivia and shot the bull. A drink and think, you know? It was early enough that the whole zoo of regulars was still crowing: Beagle, Tuna, Squirrel (that’s me), et al. Someone told a story of the night Pedro left the bar and returned promptly with a broken jaw after falling on his bike. Everyone had an outrageous description of how literally unhinged his face had looked. No fun to live through it, I bet, but good times to talk of these things.



We were feeling good.

McCready (noted in Jen’s 10 March 2006 entry “McCready”) sat next to me. I’d never really talked to him. On this night, he wore a green blanket on his shoulders, and as the place became more crowded he seemed to hunch a little more. He’d transitioned into the point of the night during which a personal sort of darkness descends. He mumbled things to himself. Out of fear of a lengthy conversation, I did not ask what.

So Vaughn and I are talking and the trivia’s flying past. On the screen comes the question, “What was the first West African nation liberated from Great Britain?” We looked at the multiple-choice answers and Vaughn said, “Oh, it’s got to be Ghana.”



We punched in our answer. McCready shifted in his seat. I could see it in my peripheral. He was agitated. The answer popped up: Ghana. The factoid: 1957.

“What the fuck do you know,” McCready snapped. “You fucking punks. You weren’t there. You don’t know, you fucking punks.”

We continued the game. He kept mumbling.

Though we drank and thank [sic] much more, my buzz was checked by the not-so-subtle attention I gave to McCready. I tried to keep watch on him without looking at him. My neck began to cramp. I wouldn’t turn my head for anyone to my right, not even Dawn, the angel who ranged the bar and kept the conversation light as she refilled our drafts and spirits.
-cK  ¶ 9:00 AM

  The Accidental Spring-Break Tourist Never fly during spring break unless you are going on spring break. Security is grumpier. It’s a refugee situation: Snoring college students sleep in terminal hallways, against garbage cans, outside of bathrooms (because they just couldn’t wait for their friend to finish). The airport fills with youth who narrate their every move and thought to one another. A young couple so sensitive that, apparently, they cannot read at the same time takes a seat near me, and the girl turns to the boy and sighs and says in their couple’s voice “Can you tell me what they have?” (Literally blinded by love?) He proceeds to read the giant sandwich board, items and prices. It’s a breakfast hour. She crinkles her nose. “I’m more lunchy,” she says.




A clean-faced girl in cigarette jeans, push-up bra and a stretched thin, form-hugging, military brown t-shirt bops past on some mission: a magazine, a 24-ounce coffee, a right fine piss. The socially worrisome declaration I ♥ FRAT BOYS jubbers upon her chest. Her 50s' ponytail snaps with each step.



So there I am, writing at the bar of a terminal restaurant. They’re serving pre-packaged egg and meat panini sandwiches that the immigrant clerk (Ethiopian? Turkish?) tosses in the microwave, then a toaster oven. She’s wearing a wet lipstick so wet her mouth looks like something made of porcelain. Something about her hair and thin, silver-hoop earrings reminds me of the ‘80s. We talk a bit and it’s pleasant, though I’m sipping coffee that is perhaps as flavorful as graywater. Perhaps.

A young man in what seems to be his first straw cowboy hat—the airport is in Minnesota—sits awkwardly at the bar, slouching in a way that emphasizes his crotch. He orders a beer. It’s Sunday, 8:30 a.m.

The clerk informs him that the bartender isn’t there yet. “Can’t do it,” she says.

“I know,” the cowboy says plaintively. He adds, quite irritated, “Fuck. The bartender was here just a few days ago.”



“Bartender not here,” she says. She shrugs. “Maybe he lazy.”

“I don’t know, man,” the cowboy says.

I turn my head towards him but keep my pen on the paper. “Have an egg,” I tell him without much enthusiasm.

Now the cowboy walks off. As he passes, he says to me, “Fuck you, buddy.”

I break up laughing and the clerk, who’s overheard this, looks at me with a scandal’s amusement.

“Think he’s cute?” I ask her. She blushes and goes about cleaning a counter surface. The cowboy has moseyed off towards the gate and has slumped into a chair, defeated. The clerk returns to me with that smooth stone grin. She says, “I think he thinks he’s cute.”
-cK  ¶ 8:29 AM

  Hands Late out of the blocks from the previous night's rollick, I found myself among a different crowd at the coffeeshop in which I almost always put in the first hour's work. This was another piece of the neighborhood's face, and it proved to contain a lonely young man who holds conversations with himself, polite-like, even waiting his turn.

It seems he tries to fight it. His fingers begin to twitch not long after he's seated and has looked around and perhaps taken in the noise. His head snaps a touch, as if trying to shake off whatever it is he's thinking about. He gives in. He shifts in his seat to face his invisible speaker or speakers, and he begins to talk.



To listen is to hear just one side of it.

I'm so small and innocuous-looking that strangers tell me their tales. Why not impose? Really, they must sense I'll listen. I'll be annoyed at first, but then I'll listen. A man once told me he'd had sex just once in his life and had a daughter for it. She was 13 at the time of the telling, and he was trying to be a good father, he said. Another man gave me and Jen (the Crush's other writer) what he called "felony feathers"--eagle feathers he'd found on the road. He was an unemployed coal miner. He had a teenage son he hoped very much to send to college, but he thought the boy was starting to go bad in the ways he had. The catalog of these encounters is long.



So when I met eyes with this young man as he sat, I looked away too quickly. I was afraid he wanted to talk. Others I would have nodded to, then looked away. It's just polite. But I'd seen him there once before, it had been a similar hour, and he was deep in conversation. Now, I thought it was him in my peripheral, so I looked. He was looking. I felt, as I sat there staring at my computer screen, trying to force myself to do the research I'd intended to do, that he was really watching, wanting me to look again; and if I did he would begin speaking to me.

I've always been kinder to the wild card in a bar, perhaps because I can chalk it up to alcohol. In a coffeeshop, I tend to think it's extreme loneliness or mental illness, two things I wish so dearly to cure that I'm afraid to confront them, even hesitant to be basically kind, because I know I haven't a fucking chance.

I need to be better about this.

Annoyance, fear, guilt, yeah yeah. Soon, that gives way to fascination. It's the predatory instinct in writing, I think. So this young man sits, and I wait, and I realize that we aren't going to talk. So I begin to watch as discreetly as I can.



Around us, the coffeeshop's conversations are loud, the laughter plenty. It's a full house, overly full. Art students have yanked themselves [out of bed] and are sitting against walls. A thin girl from behind the counter struggles with a bustub of dirty dishes. Her arms shake. The tendons on her neck stand out.

The young man goes through his routine: the twitching fingers, the head snaps, setting himself for conversation. And then he speaks. Ever polite, he waits his turn.
-cK  ¶ 5:11 PM

  Are you kidding!? While reading up on root barrier fabrics (pursuant to an article, I swear), I watched Days of Our Lives, per usual.

I am now officially a Salem agnositc! I cannot believe that Austin and Sami are about to do the horizontal bop! I cannot believe that Carrie and Lucas are swallowing one another's faces!



Unfortunately, I can believe I'm being subjected to another John and Marlena tryst. What Salem needs is a good housecleaning, Twin Peaks style.

-cK  ¶ 1:05 PM

  Paramours! Wear Mittens! With all the pre-winter hype about how heating costs were going to cornhole those of us in the Midwest and Northeast, it was easy to see how apartment managers here in Minnesota were bound to be a little conservative with providing heat. After all, for us renters, at least here in the lovely little hamlet known as St. Paul, the provision of heat is required by law (Agreed: Great law) and almost always built into the rent. It’s up to the apartment managers to reserve the cash to cover the heating costs. In an old building like mine, that can’t be easy. The aged window frames fit loosely, the interior window locks are too old and warped to be effective, and the floorboards (badly in need of refinishing or out-right replacement) are slowly and not-amicably divorcing the wall.

I get fresh air whether I want it or not. Most of the time, I appreciate it.



The winter’s been mild, a touch colder at times than the last few winters, but overall quite manageable, only rarely requiring the deep-winter coats. It’s been, in fact, a total pisser for snowboarders, skiers, and the rest of the winter-industry ilk. The city’s winter carnival, which had been haunted a year or two ago by prohibitively sub-zero temperatures, had trouble hosting wintry events--It was too warm.

But this winter has not been without incident. We had a true snap recently, and during that series of sub-zero days, I discovered my heat sort of wasn’t working. Only 2 of the living room’s 19 radiator coils warmed. Same in the bedroom. The bathroom and dining room radiators were cold. No amount of monkeying helped.

So I piled on the woolies and blankets, got comfortable in my sniffles, and took frequent trips to warmer joints, such as the Liffey bar (which is often like imbibing in a boiler room, only better looking).

Also, I took to fogging up the bathroom with steam and hiding in those sauna-like showers. They were tremendously helpful in elevating the body’s thermostat, the effects of which lasted long after the steamings. I can see why the Scandinavians have sworn by them for so long.



So after a few frigid days, the radiators started to work. They spat and huffed like histrionic children. They went about their business with a rage. Abruptly, my little ice palace became a desiccated zone. If you put a piece of white bread in a tin with hard cookies, the cookies will absorb the bread’s moisture and soften a bit. My apartment became like that. Suddenly, I was the only object in the place with a bit of water in me, and the overly heated apartment wanted it.

I couldn’t get the radiators to stop. I closed them but they raged on. I slept without covers. My skin hurt. My back, which I’d already made a touch sensitive through that sauna-like bathing heat, felt flayed.

But all the suffering passed. Or so I thought.

A week or so later, just a couple days since, I’d stepped from a normal-heat shower and toweled off. I was listening to a mix, and it was concluding with Belle & Sebastian’s “Lazy Line Painter Jane,” and they were crooning about who I’d have tonight on the last bus out of town, and it was such a spirited tune. Hell, perhaps I was ready to up and run away.

I must have danced as I listened. I know I did! A little booty shakin’, you know?, in the privacy of one’s own home. Yoko Ono was right about naked men: We keep life funny.



I finished by toweling my back, which I think is always how I finish. One has one’s habits. I did sort of a “chow-chow-chow” kind of thing, for those of you who might recall the old Purina Cat Chow commercials. I brought the towel forward. It was streaked, terribly, with blood.

Gross.

I reached back again: Blood. So now I’m freaked out. The mirror’s too fogged to see anything, so I head in search of a full-length mirror (even funnier, of course). I’d just set one in the kitchen, intending to take the mirror to the storage room. Here I am, nude, water-beaded, my hair standing in shocks, in my kitchen and holding a bloody towel, turning over each shoulder, repeatedly, in search of the source.

(Note to self: Get back to running SOON and work on the buns.)

There, low between my shoulder blades, is a dark streaky blot of blood. I dab at it best I can. It doesn’t hurt. I feel no sign of a cut or even a zit. Nothing. Blood forms again. I dab. This is repeated a few times. When it finally stops, I don’t even find a coagulated cut. No scab, no nothing.

For the life of me, I don’t know where that blood came from. It was plentiful. It ruined the towel (a white towel, no less). I recall Jerry Seinfeld talking about detergents that boast of getting blood out, and how stupid that is since if your laundry’s bloodied up you’ve undoubtedly got other things to worry about. I did.

True, I’d given myself a bit of stigmata on the palm the other day trying out some Segal-like knife moves while gourd-bored on a Saturday (Seriously), but this seemingly immaculate and bloody mess between my shoulder blades, I don’t know what it was. Was it just a providential reminder to exercise? I’ll take a wake-up call next time, thanks.



If I begin to walk on water, I’ll let you know. I’d feel awful if I was actually the Second Comin’, and me not having known all these. I’d hate to fuck up everyone’s day like that. I’m just not into destruction.

Dear paramours: Please wear mittens.
-cK  ¶ 10:44 AM