mealypotatoes

differences

My torn jeans are evidently noticeable, that they are ripped and rolled up and puffy and dirty, and that my shoes are clunky old running sneakers. The man beside me is wearing a black coat and black pants and is talking with a woman I can’t see about cell phones and people at work. He bounces now and again when he laughs, and he has a rough and slow Boston accent that he can’t hide (trying?) although he doesn’t say much. I don’t think he actually is listening to the woman. She is blathering and he punctuates pauses with a ‘yep’ that sounds deeply bored. I am bored by both of them.

My left arm, next to which this man is sitting, has rhythmic pains from a bike crash two days ago when I landed on the street, shoulder-first. There is a circle there growing with many shades of blue and green.

In this same crash I ripped my jeans at the knee, and I haven’t changed out of them since.

The man is gone now; he arose from his seat sluggish (I see him better now and he is older than I thought, with no hair) a few stops after the woman had left. In the two train stop interval during which I sat next to this man and he next to me and not saying anything (as his friends had left) I wondered the world he inhabits and his eyes that glanced at me, once — not knowing whether it was prompted by disdain or interest — and perhaps I was not bored by him; in fact I seem to have spent most of this time thinking about him, and even writing this, here, partly as he sat next to me. What could possibly be interesting here?

Sometimes everyone on the train moving under Boston seems nervous but holding it in; the train bumps and swerves and jostles us whose faces are calm but sway unsteadily, an eery unison, weakened of our individual power to control ourselves. Relative to an observer from the building we are nothing but the blur of the train; relative to a poor family in Bolivia we are all rich Americans; to the birds we are dots moving in patterns, at times getting in and out of bigger dots.

engaged

My life is busy. I am becoming engaged with things. I have a set of schedules to follow. I am interested in my work. I am in love. I am trying to get the most out of the time I spend. I love the books I am reading. I love the weather; I love the chill air now and the hot humid air a week before. I love the dead leaves on the ground. I enjoy beyond my wildest expectations riding my bike. It is freeing in many senses and it allows me to flow the parts of my day together without disjoint. I crave speed, the frenzy of traffic, the battle for space. I am pushed on by the rush of green past me, the experience of a car from the outside traveling at its speed. Perspective warps around me like a road into the distance, my mind is a flashlight, a set of expanding beams, providing, causing movement, ahead of itself, catching itself in a fall, running and moving legs so that it catches itself in a fall. I am happy. I am listening to beautiful music. To the cello. The cello is so striking, so poignant and emotional. The sound brings me news, brings me tears and sadness, and faith.

I wish I could write. I would write about everything. The way the grass feels on my legs as I run through the arboretum. The way a dog moves and how its owner walks and talks and how the kid is riding his skateboard, the sound it makes on the pavement, the way the fence looks, the dark black fence, and its elegant lines. The way the hill looks, running up it, and the way it looks from the top looking down, down over the trees and over Boston, up to the clouds that move through the city and skyscrapers, past windows and planes and fiery suns. I wish I could write the way a painter paints the scene as the sun hits a low fog bank and explodes in fiery white. The way a pine cone smells, the way a fungus looks, or a different fungus… the way a squirrel moves along a swaying branch, searching for nuts, wrapping its tail in on itself. The way an oak tree looks. The impressiveness of it all. The sounds of distance cars which I ignore and listen instead to the insects, the ones that sound like bicycle wheels slowly spinning backward. The way a person’s face has lowered to look at the ripped hole in my jeans. The way a nervous fat man reads a book and shifts his seat on the T. The way a young woman kneels by her bikes, as I enter the liquor store, and is still there when I return. The way a desperate crazed man in a wheelchair in the center of the road has turned his head to rest his wide desperate crazed eyes on me. The way a dead cat looks in the road. The way it feels. The way everyone’s faces looks, those people who look so busy, who don’t look up or nod or smile or say Hi, the countless busy people and their faces drawn into some concentrated field of work and life and clutching, throttling narrative. The way the coffee grounds smell as I pour them out of the french press. The way we can laugh about the silly food that we make, the creations that combust from the hunger and rapid-fire of our minds. The way a car honks at another car. The way a man waters his plants and pays no attention to me. The way I can play guitar, the things that I think about then. The way my hands can move over a keyboard or with a knife or a pen or a camera or how they move through hair and skin and how they pick up chicken bones. The way the sun looks at 11:19am falling on a tree that is half-fallen over. The way the woman giving a history tour is looking at her notes. The way a white cat prowls behind a black cat prowling at night. The way my CDs from the library tend to stack up. The way a CFL lightbulb feels. The way a book in my hands feel, the way the pages flip and the way my eyes move.

I would like to write all of this because it interests me, it moves me, it is the world I feel and live in and care about and the world as it presents itself to me. I would like to be open to these experiences, and all others, and part of this openness is a kind of articulation of them, a putting-to-words of the things that happen, the flashes of light and noise and color and movement. Sometimes I feel good about these things. Sometimes I am curling into a ball and cannot look, cannot feel the world any more. Sometimes everything hurts. The bike stands on the porch ready to embark, ready to charge the road and embrace distance, to bring me along, a certain perspective from which to see a world fly by. That is what I want: a certain perspective. I want a certain world, too; but almost anything can be recast as another. There is light and shadows, no things to see or touch or feel. It is all dead; nothing is here; nothing will comfort me now.

crazy at the library

The library is a quiet place. It is also a mental echo chamber. The smallest repetitive sound, nervous tick, coughing, whispering, clicking of pens, amplifies exponentially over time. It all oozes in from perception’s periphery and demands attention. We become annoyed, then hostile (but unwilling to get up and yell), and feel a great discord in our environment, as though a revolution were taking place, our minds now revolting at the obliviousness, sociopathy, ungraciousness (we are trying to be quiet) and (at worse) will even venture to identify with the source of the irritation, to understand the person we have decided is crazy.

There is a man behind me now who is opening and closing cd cases. That is all he is doing, and he has been doing it for the past hour. He is listening to something too — maybe, he is wearing headphones, barely attached to his bobbing head — and emitting a sort of stoner’s laugh (an expression of a mind turned into itself) every few minutes. And now he is grunting as well: perhaps the cd cases are not cooperating as he hoped. The cases he opens and closes are creaking like a door. I am hearing what sounds like a door open and close over and over repeatedly, although no one walks by, no one talks, there is no bustle or other noise to accompany it. It is not regular or rhythmic; it is not caused by some natural force like the wind which I could forgive. It is a grown man sitting behind me. Why is he so obsessed? Does he realize the sound he’s making, with his headphones on? Does he know his headphones are falling off? Can anyone say what this man does or doesn’t know? Is knowing the same for him as it is for me?

And soon I am asking myself: Do I really know any of the things I know?

The other day, a woman was here, at a computer, tapping furiously one key on they keyboard. tap tap tap tap. Very loud. Every thirty taps or so she would laugh gleefully. She was playing some stupid pinball game. tap tap tap. I begin to feel for the keyboard itself, I feel the patrons around her turn their minds inside out. I feel the librarians tired and hardened, unable to bring themselves to confront this woman. tap tap tap. Gleeful, blissful, entirely library-inappropriate laughter. O that poor keyboard. The waste! The waste of time and everyone’s mental effort on this stupid sound.

We all boil, silently. I could touch the mental pressure in the room. (It is something like a pressure cooker.) I know that we are here, and she is there.

Uncomfortable

A job is your life. This a time of opportunity: if you don’t feel comfortable in your job now, leave! Find a new one!

A job is not your life. You are young and need to save up. Stick it out.

—

The kind of job you’re in now is not what you want to be doing later. You aren’t learning anything important; even a job that pays much less can be far more valuable in terms of what it teaches.

Your job is educational precisely because it’s uncomfortable, and you’re dealing with people who you will need to deal with later to be successful and happy.

—

A job is never worth making your life more miserable. This job is making your life more miserable.

People have been miserable at work for ages. What makes you so entitled? Besides, it isn’t so bad.

—

Your character is the most important thing. Doing anything just for the money takes away from that. You are better than that.

You can keep your character just fine. Separate your life from your work a little bit.

—

You shouldn’t treat your job as means to an end. Too many people already do that. It should be rewarding in itself.

You need to learn to compromise; you’ll always need means to ends in life. You’ll be happier the sooner you can acknowledge this.

—

You feel uncomfortable. You should do something about it.

You feel uncomfortable. Do something; but nothing too rash.

I wish…

I could write in the car. I mean while driving. Alone. Not just words, an essay. Write an entire essay, edited and all, while driving alone in my car. I don’t mean a high school essay, where I start with a topic sentence and end with its synonym, a real essay, one with rhythm and time and that wanders a bit, stops here and there, each paragraph is a rest or a go, with a real destination, but it’s not in sight until nearly the end, where the arrival time is just an estimate… where I start with a rough map, in my head it’s a few arguments or phrases or ideas, but the actual words coming out are something else, take on life, each word is another map… where a word might be misleading and I’m off course and going back in my head for the wrong turn and recreating the steps and finding new words and signs and a different route…

Well, I wish I could write, too.