Buying Seersucker

My wife, my brother-in-law, and I were at the mall over the weekend, and ran across a rack of seersucker suit coats. They were that sort of white-and-almost-black-stripe pattern, with the stripes so numerous and narrow that it creates a dizzying optical illusion. Having not moved all summer, they were priced to vanish at approximately $7 each (the original price tag, if it is to be believed, reads $140).

Well... it's not something I would normally wear, unless I were intent upon being mistaken for Don Johnson. However, it did seem just right for a costume piece--I've decided that to emcee my annual scavenger hunt* I should don ye olde garb of a cheesey gameshow host, complete with mini-microphone and helmet hair. Let's make a deal, you know?

So I returned to the department store this evening, selected from the five remaining jackets one that fit me (approximately), making sure to share with the clerk that I would not be wearing this to the club, no siree, this was for a costume. A costume, you got that? However, when the clerk rang up this little beauty we discovered that it was not on sale for about $7.

It had been placed on "ludicrous clearance" (my term, not theirs) for the laughter-inducing grand total of $2.57! And because the planets had aligned just-so, I happened to have $3 cash in my wallet.

I am now the owner of one loud seersucker jacket, and I'm sorely tempted to go back and pick up the others for my best friends, for no other reason than to see how far this joke can go.


*Sorry, the scavenger hunt is just for family and those few people to whom I've sworn a blood-oath.

Hip to the Bean

I have become a coffee drinker. There was no clear line that I crossed, no seductive espresso experience in an alleyway with a lighter and a silver spoon. It started with a cup here, a cup there, a little social drinking. At family gatherings when the question was asked "Does anybody want coffee?" I suddenly found myself with something to say. Peer pressure, obviously. Then I began working in an office, one that provided coffee to its employees in the breakroom, free of charge, and some mornings I just needed a warm drink with a little jolt of caffeine. Now, it's merely the jolt of caffeine I'm after (though not to be unfair to the coffee, the flavor and warmth are certainly attractive features, however it takes two sugars and a lot of cream to make it palatable--a practice my father would shake his head at, having admonished me in my youth that I should "learn to drink it black"). Now I think of Harvey Keitel's suave and indelible character from Pulp Fiction, who could take his coffee with "lots of cream, lots of sugar" and no one would dare question his mettle.

Note to all--the Chicory Cafe does a sinfully delicious cafe mocha. It's like cheating, hardly coffee at all...

Of Tattoos and Cryptozoologists

My voice cracked three times tonight as I interjected my meager commentary among the conversations of the writer's guild. Maybe they didn't notice--I certainly didn't say aloud, "bah! I sound like a thirteen-year-old!" Of course, Charmi is probably reading this now, smirking a much-deserved smirk. They were all wonderful people to meet and I'm glad I decided to attend. At their urging I'm reprinting, here, some of the poetry I brought with me to the meeting. For the non-poetry-enthusiasts reading this (you know who you are, my friends) I promise this will not become "verse central" as my Livejournal (which I'm almost certain you don't visit) has become. No, indeed, I intend to put as much prose here as I can squeeze out of my thick skull. In the meantime...


Notes From The Hospital Room

I.

We are running in new circles
Alien to the spirals and circuits of the last century
Which still keep time for us
Yet familiar as Shakespeare, that old horse
Standing by to draw the fire engine
Should we all catch Hell.

II.

A coin is a coin is a coin
Flipping, once minted and worn through passage is
No less worth the exchange
No longer bitten as proof
So we take in trade these furlongs
These fathoms and miles in the patterned
Grain of body hair, the folds of skin
And brain
Folding and unfolding
A time into a time, into now
Into the moment I understand everything
Has come before, and I am circulated.

III.

The spell is the greatest human invention
Its breaking our grip on the inevitable
But when it takes us the end does not matter
We have left our astounding
Ripples in the polished stone.
In a spell I pour out a torrent of words
And when it breaks, a torrent of words
Soaks the hems of the women's skirts
As they come and go.



[Before you know it]

Before you know it
You have lost the luxury of trying
Something new
Without breaking the whole
Spine supporting everything you count
As your life
And each fresh unbroken face
Peeks and smiles at you from the tapestry
Robing the doorway
You cannot pass
The complex embroidery of truce
Beyond which glimpsed
Young beauty guides a garment down
The concourse of the perfect calf
And tucks something behind one ear
Or beckons, perhaps.

This Circus

Many walk the tightrope, and hope there hides a net somewhere,
miles below, resting under the fog. Others expect nothing more
than an end, and walk without care for the crash.

Yet both of these acrobats, in the absence of balance,
in the face of the fall, find their first instinct
is to clutch at the rope. They reach, unthinking.

That tells me something
about the nature of existence. Our bodies know:
It is worth the stay.
The end of the show will always be there another day.

New Casablanca

Time passes because we need it to pass. If any one of us could be content to remain exactly and perfectly the same forever, Time would stop like a lake freezing overnight. No human being, even the most sedentary among us, remains precisely identical to who they are. We are ourselves for years, then one day our eyes open again, and we see that it was an illusion--who we are stands miles away holding up one last signal light, as if waiting for a plane to land. And the moment we realize this--that who we are now resides like a statue on the horizon--we begin to call it Who We Were and resist the urge to trek back. This is difficult, because the statues of our past gain mass with every passing second, and the gravity they exert cannot be ignored; you would sooner slip away from Jupiter's bed at dawn. High above, winking in the cold, dark morning sky, serene planes with warmly-lit cabins dangle the possible tomorrows within reach.

Accomplishment

We moved Katie into her new apartment--well, most of the way. There was a valiant struggle with a television, but we, as intelligent primates, used our abstract imaginations and conquered the force of gravity. I saw many strange things today... an early 20th century school building turned into a dentist office that reeked of the 1970's... a pink stuffed centipede, at least six feet long... a house of evil dolls and one quite amiable collie. Earlier in the day I had called upon the power of Tetris to pack a Pontiac full of boxes, no two of which matched. To maintain our strength we drank water purified by reverse osmosis and shared Twix cookie bars. One of us fell early (the plague, I'm afraid) but she was with us in spirit. By nightfall the apartment was in beautiful disarray, stuffed with antiques and possibly 3 million spiders biding their time in the bottoms of boxes. That, however, is a challenge for another day... the point is, independence has been declared, and standing between her and reclamation by the Motherland is one massively cumbersome television.

Transcendence

Every time I step into an elevator, I think of chance. If it's a very short elevator, like the one I have at work that goes between the upstairs and the downstairs, I wonder what I would get away with should it break. A broken ankle, a concussion maybe? This does not stop me from using elevators. I am recklessly willing to climb into them, although today when I thought about going to the Schurz Library, I thought: I will take the stairs. The climb will be good for me, and I won't have that nagging, compulsory imagination. Then I arrived, after work, and climbed into the elevator anyway. The doors whisked closed and I could hear its creakiness--no more or less creaky than usual, or than any other elevator's creakiness. Still, I thought of the four stories below me, and of velocity, and how my feet might rise up in the freefall, and that the sudden electric sensation in the pit of my stomach would take my breath and my voice away. The choice of complaining about my fate would be taken away--whether I wanted to or not, I would plummet and float like a dandelion fluff, silently within the little cabin of the elevator, then crumple onto the floor like a paper cup. But then again, maybe four stories is not enough time to transform into something weightless.

As the elevator came to a stop I was finishing these thoughts, and then it gave that one final dip that tells you you've arrived; but of course, I was not expecting this, and as my stomach fell out from under me, for that briefest instant, I faced the chance head-on.

At the end of this trip was the fifth floor, and on that floor were poems and drawings by Naoko Fujimoto, who I became aware of via the open mic nights. She had placed them in second-hand frames, garage-sale frames (or, so they seemed--perhaps they were family heirlooms, though). The drawings were very colorful with delicate black lines forming the main images. Some of the images went with the poems, which were on plain white paper and pressed between two sheets of glass in a frame. Every frame hung on a long, long thin wire that was hooked around skinny piping that traveled the upper part of the wall. From a distance it looked as though some very strange and sensitive spider had gone around capturing artwork in its web.

I do not say this lightly when I say: Naoko's work is pure brilliance. She will be published someday, it's only a matter of time. Reading and viewing her work tonight, I was moved. When I left (taking the stairs, enjoying each solid step) something was changed in me, a pebble tossed into a pond. By tomorrow morning the water will be still again, but the pebble will remain there, under the surface, changing how light enters and exits me. I did not want to leave, really, but the library was closing.

Now I have to go tend to the dog, who is barking a tantrum in the backyard. C'est la vie.

Eh Hee

This might be the first real taste of autumn around here. As I crested the Eddy Street bridge the sky presented an unusually even distribution of cloud strata, like lines on a notebook page. It's cool out there, and going to be cooler tomorrow while we're helping Katie move into her new apartment (Viva la revolutione!). Summer's not gone yet; it never goes quietly. There will be another flare or two before we reach autumn proper.

I was going to title this post "Office Boy" and give the rundown on my cubist existence, but instead, a song got stuck in my head. Nevertheless, office life continues grinding onward, a blur of numbers and deadlines and Excel spreadsheets expanding through my day. And anyway, how could I call it "Office Boy" when I'm closing down on birthday número veintinueve?

Am I always going to default to feeling like a kid inside? Am I going to be Robin Williams? I don't know if I like that...

So, my company brought in a masseuse the other day. They're funny like that. Yes, I know, I am fabulously lucky to be employed there--but I digress. It was a chair massage, and as I'm chatting with the masseuse something in my memory is firing off little flashes of recognition. Following a hunch I quizzed my mother later in the day, and it turns out that the masseuse was actually someone who used to babysit me when I was just a small child. (Had I been a large child, I'm sure that wouldn't have made any difference.) The point is, for having all the trappings of a "city", I am living in a town, and am reminded of it regularly. Not really a criticism, though. I enjoy the security of living someplace that is relatively unimportant and (better yet) non-strategic to the big, dangerous minds of the world.

Now if only we weren't downwind of Chicago...

Beginning

The metaphoric image of a panther in the snow is one given to me, not one I invented. I did, however, write a poem around it, and at the outset of this new blog I believe it is fitting to print that here.


Panther

Black bellies of bare branches
Snake through the silent forest
Under hay bales and hillocks of pure
White snow.
The air sharpens
The honey-lemon cough drop
Down my white throat.
Dusk stalks from the wood.
A form glides onto my path
Like ink pooling in the eye.
A great cat traces
Ice-laden lines of old bamboo
Looking for seclusion.
High China, winter.
Everything out of place:
The black panther,
The snow,
My eye.