On crabs, and parties. (1)

On Halloween I dressed as a kat boi, with ears and a tail, and a collar with a bell. I had girls tugging on my tail at a bar where I drank heavily. The colors of the lights behind the bar started off discrete and singular, and then all the lights began to bleed into one another and I realized that I was drunk. It was the middle of the evening, and I was drunk again. Life is a pattern that always folds neatly down the middle - the beginnings and ends are always the same no matter where we cut the cloth.

The next day I went to a crab feast north of Baltimore, where I drove for hours on 695 as I was lost. The road was an ocean and each partition of concrete thumped under my tires like waves. I began to think about driving like I do about swimming. My car ignored my thoughts and pushed onwards, leaning into the journey like trees lean into the wind and rain...Claire sat next to me and made my time passable. I wanted to throw up but did not, and that by itself was somewhat admirable.

The house where we finally arrived was small and cozy, and simple. It stood with little fanfare and I appreciated that - when we walked in I knew that this was a home and not simply a residence. We too often rent things spiritually, and never let our lives place roots out of fear. There was nothing to fear in this house except the scent of pumpkin pies, covered in obscene drawings done with shaking hands, a tremulous fork. I laughed as I ate cookies shaped like animals and doritos that vaguely nudged my Mexican memories before their taste vanished across the length of my throat.

-Rich

where the grain meets the heft of your skin

Poem.

The harsh salt spray becomes wind again
and taps against the end of my nose,
rubs against the mercury of my lips
and I cough from the advent of evening.
There are no soldiers here but we salute anyways
when girls parade past us
their arms trimmed golden by the glow of every sun
that has ever set over the east coast
on their way out west.
I round a corner and then
and then the bricks change course below my feet
where a pattern comes undone from effort
from overweight tenacity,
from diligent hunger that gnaws nightly
from finger to finger along the railings of our well defined lives.

-Rich
too much for you to remember

Songbirds in Eulogy

After a while life becomes a routine that we follow without realizing it. Even after we have realized it is a routine, we can never shake it. We may change the way we do things for a while but eventually our existence finds its own equilibrium, it's own level space. I wonder if perhaps I am in one now, or whether I have changed something just a tiny amount.

If I think of my life as a physical shape, it is flat. It is dry there, and in the distance I can see the faint shadow of mountains and foothills. I am certain that they exist, but I am afraid to extend my hand out past my body, for fear that I will hit a piece of paper. I live in that flat space where there is not even a grain of sand...fear keeps me from searching for one beyond what I can see. The sun rises and sets with variable times - it never seems to come up when I expect it to, and it sets when I am still cursing the sweat that stains my collars grey. My sweat stains grey and never brown. Brown is the color of the earth and perhaps a person has to feel connected to the earth to have that color. These days I look up and I know that the stars are lumped together into groups that make mathematical sense, that fall neatly into columns on worksheets. I have become a routine, a program that runs in futility. The air is dry and when I breathe in at night I know that I am tasting faint laughter that falls behind those mountains like a fugue of raindrops.

I have a textbook in front of me but nothing is coercing me to read it. Knowledge does not seem worth the effort to gain it. By the time a person learns something it is already meaningless - it has become less than nothing because you replaced something you knew with it. You replaced something you knew, that you knew! Truth is peeled away like the skin of an apple, and our innocence is held by the ridge of our father's thumb, where the blade rests and scrapes it away in spirals. After everything there is nothing but an empty striated shell and that is what we are now. That is what is left, that is what remains and I am certain that it is what we are now. A wind blows and I stretch like an accordion to sing with it - how sad that humanity has come to this, that we are only reactions to an impulse...

In the winter, snow will fall and cover everything. It will be like a Greek rite of mysteries, where phallic cults would sacrifice the King-twin, the tanist, and in that way preserve his innocence and his manhood. When the snow melts a wave of birds wil blanket those once empty spaces with song and we might even notice the butterflies returning, if we ever lift our faces away from the screens of computers. The earth will be renewed and it is a terrible thing that we will not. There is no spring for us...there is only this soft winter, this bleached existence, this wavering plane where sunlight dully shivers.

-Rich

you weren't looking for an answer so much as a song

Travel.

I am sitting in my room right now and it is early or it is late. Time becomes meaningless after enough sleep is lost. I have sheep that never needed counting, whose wooly heads adorn fake cashmere sweaters in open air markets.

I have returned from traveling and it is sometimes enough for me to look around and realize that and sometimes it is not. I feel like shit, as I ate fairly unhealthy food the entire time I was there, so this week it looks like I am basically doing a detox programme. I like spelling certain words in the British sense - it gives them a more fair sense of dignity, like those words died for freedom and for the world to know that freedom was worth dying for, once. Maybe it was beyond the stark grey trees that bloom wherever men congregate, maybe it was before everything we loved became an epithet.

I am listening to a dashboard confessional song and it is moving me and that fact makes me want to never listen to music again.

I talked to Sarah last night and everything in me wanted to stretch across states until it could wrap itself around her and keep her safe from everything. I don't know that she needs to be kept safe from herself but I would do it anyways, I would let her hate me if it meant she stopped hating parts of herself. Every movement is a celebration, every song is another votive candle.

I cannot sleep. I cannot sleep. I cannot have any more thoughts. They sting and bite so deeply, and sometimes I wonder what it would be like if I stopped thinking entirely, if my body simply took over and lived as it wanted to live, if it fucked like it wanted to fuck and sang with every animal's death song.

-Rich
we were against the windowpanes

Interlude.

There are trees in the distance that look like they were painted onto the mountain. The mountain looks like a sheet of paper and I have a growing urge to put my hand out and crumple everything I see into a ball. I want to tear the corners off of my view and unfold it again to find that everything has changed - that the trees are all around me and the room I am sitting in is far away, across the sea.

I have been lax in writing on my blog and much of it has to do with a sense of accomplishment with my last blog. Much of it has to do with how busy I am - and that bothers me. Writing has always been something for myself more than anyone else. I hate to think that I am starting to care less and less about myself, even if that is what appears to be happening.

I went shopping today and was startled by prices for just about everything. I am not a thrifty soul - far from it - but I have no desire to pay upwards of 600 dollars for a sweater. I'd rather just freeze my pretty little ass off instead. I am going to finish this take home final and then go back out for more shopping in the afternoon. There is no reason to be hasty about anything, anymore.

When I return I will call everyone I have missed so dearly and I will e-mail everyone that has sent me a missive. There is something about my home country that doesn't feel like home anymore, and once I noticed it I found that it wasn't my home country anymore. Perhaps that part of my life was folded up once or twice and rearranged where love touched love, where reality became thinner and gauze-like across the flesh of memory.

-Rich
me and you only in this heaven only here

Korea day 3, part 2.

The airshow drew to a close in the afternoon and I felt nothing but exhaustion. We walked out past the security gate and tried to hail a taxi with no luck for almost an hour - Admiral Bae saw us as he drove by and picked us up instead. We arrived back at the hotel and I stumbled upstairs where I fell onto my bed face first and slept, still wearing my suit.

When I woke up it was about 8 pm, and my brother was ironing his fatigues in the middle of the hotel room. I walked into the bathroom and looked at myself, a long and sallow look that meant nothing to him and nothing to me. I washed my face and went back out into the room to change into my normal clothes, stripping of the wrinkled suit that I knew I would have to iron the next morning. My nametag was still on and I threw it onto the desk along with my tie. My brother looked up from his ironing job and continued what he was doing. Ouside the sun had faded to a bluish grey recollection and the city lit up like votive candles in a church.

My brother called his friend who was stationed in the area, and we met him outside to eat dinner and get a drink. He showed us the hill of hookers as we passed by - phillipino women standing with restless eyes and all of them hidden by the scent of smoke. We walked on towards the international part of the city, where English was more than just a breakfast tea.

Dinner consisted of a meal had facing each other across a faux wood table. There was an omelette with rice, a tonkatsu, some ramen. We laughed and it sounded real enough when it came back to us in echoes. Everything that echoes is real enough. The bill for three people was less that sixteen dollars and I was fairly amazed by that fact - in a city where opulence is the norm, one could still eat like a pauper but dine like a prince. The world is a thing that only makes sense when everything is placed side by side, matching green bowls and the color of flavors iridescent dew overhead.

After dinner we headed into the city and found a small bar. It was a Tuesday and the normal tuesday crowd was present...we did not mingle with them but instead headed up onto the rooftop where we watched foot traffic underneath us. My brother ordered a giant blood dark beer and Bickford ordered a light beer and I ordered a diet coke because we all have to be healthy. It made sense under that cloaked sea of stars and we laughed and pointed out beautiful women, but all women are beautiful somehow so we pointed at all of them.

Eventually the night ran out and we yawned with the effort of swaying upright. Bickford walked back with us part of the way until we saw him off - a wave and he vanished down a side road towards his condo. My brother and I shuffled back into the hotel with the changing of the guard and sleep carried us up in velvety quiet elevators.

-Rich
we use our mobile mobiles to sing of stars

Korea day 3.(part 1)

The Air show began early for us - we left the hotel to go to the Seoul Airfield at 6 in the morning. I was wearing a suit and a tie and I felt strange enough that when I stood in front of the mirror it did not seem like me. I waved my hand back and forth and watched my reflection do the same, but in a more snide manner.

The taxi let us out in front of the back gate and we walked the hundred meters or so to the show entrance. Our breath coiled sibilant around us in the cold morning air and my throat hurt from the dry atmosphere. It smelled a little of shit and of stale water from the river beside us and I looked at the shiny planes and helicopters in front of us and nothing really seemed to make sense. We walked through security and I headed towards our booth to help set up.

Our booth was surrounded on all sides by monsters - Northrop Grumann, G&E, etc. Companies that could swallow our company whole, even knowing how much we were really worth. Their booths were gigantic affairs with custom made everything - ours was just a little thing with a single device represented. I quailed in the shadow of giants. I set up the Blue Force Tracker according to instructions hastily read on our way through the gates, and loaded everything up. It was freezing cold in the gigantic tent that housed our booth and I walked outside to let the sun flay the cold from my body. Thick tendrils of sleep fell to the ground and lay belly up against the sun. I was awake with the country around me and I watched helicopters fly into the base in lines like ants following the scent of honey through a nautilus shell. Oh, Icarus you flew high but your real curse was not vanity but improper science - science wins, now, and God is dead and I wonder if we are all better off for it. I walked back inside and waited for something to happen.

The conference started off slowly - there were few people trickling through the show, so I went and viewed all the other booths. There was one beautiful booth babe whose picture I took and whose picture is at the top of this blog. Her name is Kim Ji Ae, and she gave me her information and told me to contact her. I am a beautiful boy I think I think I am when I'm not.

All around me were inplements of destruction and death and I knew that I was a part of all of it and it did not bother me. It did not bother me at all, and once again I remembered that everything comes with a price attached, even prices have prices and they are terrible and lean, like wolves through the fir trees. I went back to the booth and stood to greet people. I was a booth babe and suddenly everything was full circle and I was resplendent with meaning, a peacock feather soul.

The President of Korea showed up around noon and I went outside to take a picture of him. I was ushered back inside by security men and women with grey toothless smiles and I went back to the booth with my camera. Conversations were altered by the sounds of planes passing overhead and eventually sentences stopped completely. I watched the crowd pass and mentally compared every woman against the girl I had met and they meant nothing at all, less than sand at the bottom of the sea, colored pink and grey by fish bellies and semen from sewers.

Suddenly there was an ocean of security and the President of Korea was walking through the area with his wife. This is the man that I could have had dinner with and did not and I understood that his gravity was heavy because his position was heavy. I felt pity for him and I wondered if he felt pity for me - even if he ever saw me with that straightforward gaze. After the President left I went outside to the food court and ate a lunch with soldiers and security, models, CEOs, everyone who was at the show. I sat alone and munched on fish cakes and ate my jigae. The booth was waiting for me so I went back in afterwards with a cup of coffee, the rest of the day resplendent behind me.

-Rich
bottle poppin what's he droppin?
(I will upload the picture later...blogger in Korea sucks)

interluded.

The weather is cold, and my thoughts are as cold. I will write more tomorrow perhaps - at the moment I am starving and tired. I took pictures of planes in flight today and I thought, for a moment, that I could have been like that once, before I knew what lips are like.

-Rich

korea day 2.

In the morning I went out to the cafe on our floor and sat facing the windows that overlooked the city. I ate a brioche with a bit of butter and some strange cured buffalo meat. The morning had not broken yet so everything was quiet and muted - the cappucino makers hummed a lively tune and as I spread a pat of butter on my brioche and absentmindedly looked across the river towards the high tech part of Seoul.

We went to see my Grandfather in the hospital. He was recovering from a stroke and had been moved to a recovery hospital. The train station was a bustling mess and at first I was a bit confused by all the people walking around, everyone with shiny black hair and clothes that leaped off the front page of an H&M catalogue. Apparently, style does not come hand in hand with burgeoning wealth. There were full length mirrors all over the station and wherever I looked I saw girls fixing their hair or their outfits, staring with hard bored glances towards themselves. It made me feel a little sad to be there, a little embarassed to know that I could have been the same way. Thank God I was not.

The train ride was long and I fell asleep on our way to the small town in which my Grandfather was staying. I woke a few times to the sound of raucous laughter, to someone singing amazing grace in korean, and to the flashes of light off of mirrored buildings, sheathed in glass. It was a desperate thing to wake up to and I immediately sought the comfort of sleep afterwards.

The town that we stopped in was a strange mix of suburban and urban, of european and american styles in architecture. We took a taxi to the hospital and asked around to find the right building. We entered my grandfather's room to find that he was not there - it was a large room with six beds, and three were occupied by people whose grip on this world was tenuous to say the least. It was a terrifying thing and I was scared of the sick, immediately feeling terrible about being scared in the first place.

The hospital was grungy and small, not like the one where my grandfather was placed initially. This was a hospital for physical therapy and recovery - the worst had passed, and the long road to recovery was just beginning. At least, that was the sentiment which was not mirrored in the dirty floor, the lackluster service, the smell of preservation and forced cleanliness. This was the last station before death and the doors were not going to open. I was nauseated, and felt a chill roll through my body. I did not want to be here, not in this place where life was already spent, and no-one would understand what I was saying.

We went downstairs to the physical therapy ward and I finally saw my Grandfather. It was a strange moment- I have never been able to speak to him because I do not speak Korean and I never learned, and he does not speak English. Yet we have always had a very strong bond - one forged by blood, and by the similarities in our character. He was the one who taught me zippo tricks when I was fifteen or so, standing behind his house overlooking his farm, showing me how to light the zippo in a variety of ways until my mother stopped him. He looked up at us and for a moment I was afraid he would not know what I was, he would not recognize me. Instead he reached out his one good hand and I gripped it in mine. We stood like that for a few minutes while people talked, and I felt the beat of his pulse through his small and leathery fingers. The sun stood through the window and peered across a mountain range somewhere, and I felt the same way.

We left the physical therapy area and went back upstairs to wait. I sat next to my Grandfather's bed and looked at all the different things placed around him - teas and decaffeinated coffees, humidifiers, etc. Across the room a man vomited in pain and began to weep softly, a thin humming moan escaping from his mouth. I stood up and felt sea green, and walked outside where I ran into my cousin, literally. She is a middleschooler but taller than me - 5'11 or so. It was difficult to imagine that we were related.

When my Grandfather was wheeled back into his room a large group of our family was waiting. I had never really spent time with anyone outside of my immediate family before, and I was to learn why later in the day. My family history is complicated, and everything hangs upon the fact that my Grandfather is wealthy as hell. His farm and various properties are valued somewhere in the range of fifteen million, and all the heirs in Korea are fighting over the money like dogs. My family declined to be considered in the inheritance - why should we be when we don't even live in Korea? My father was proud the day that he decided that we would refuse anything, hoping that it would be a solution to bring together the other members of his family, his brothers and sisters. It did not work. Greed is a terrible thing, and as my father told me the backstory behind ths, I could see the pain that this caused him in the way he looked off to the side, as if seeing an old friend from a sepia toned memory. I did not ask him more, I simply sat by my grandfather and held his paralyzed hand, where fingertips flexed quietly.

Korea, day 1.

I arrived half a day ago, carrying over a slight illness from the States but still avoiding the quarantine line. There is something so terrible about the clinical approach to sickness - not only are you sick but you are alone as well, in a country that perhaps you do not understand, and it is deafening. To die somewhere strange is not so bad, but to do so alone when there is life all around you is horrible. I hold in my sniffles and move on.

While on the bus to Seoul my father points out various places and how they are significant to him, to his history. He doesn't give a shit about the rest of the world and one wonders if it is ever really possible to do so when your own life is staring you down, when your own memories ressurect themselves through a smoky pane of glass. I nod and listen and I wonder whether I should take pictures. I do not - the windows produce too much glare for a lens. Machinery can't see what we see, and sometimes we have to help things along with gentle cooing, subtle coaxing.

The hotel is very large and it sits on a hill overlooking the city center. My windows have a view of all of Seoul and what strikes me the most is the number of red neon crosses that seemingly hang in the sky, suspended from the tallest buildings. Christianity grasped such a firm foothold here when the missionaries came and I wonder if I would be Christian as well, if I had been raised here. I tell myself that I wouldn't have been - but I know that is merely hope and I know, I know that my God right now is on the other side of a mirror.

It is five in the morning or so, and I cannot sleep. I will write more about Seoul and Korea and whatnot - in the meantime, there is a fairly delicious looking asian pear on a table next to me that requires some attention.

-Rich
never remember never remember what'll you say

Forget.

I am walking next to the water and when I look to the side I can see the reflection of everything around me but somehow upside down and colored differently. They aren't negatives - it isn't a picture that I am looking at, but the colors are different and that somehow makes it more real to me, it makes it seem as if the world behind that sloughing sheet is better than this one. Even me, even us, we shed skins and the new us that arrives with eyes closed is more perfect and more beautiful and more meaningful that the us that stepped out of the shower last night. The morning bakes and hardens our spirits until all we shed anymore is red clay in our footsteps - you can see the hard, flinty centers of our eyes when we laugh these days, and laughter means less and weighs less than ever. This is the future and we are choking on it.

I try to remember her face and I remember the eyes first, always the eyes first. They are luminous and a color in between blue and grey, and when she looked at me I thought for a moment that storm was coming inside of her, and I was always right. It never mattered what we said or did, the storm always came and soaked both of us to the core. I never loved her but I said I did, I said it because I knew she needed to hear it, and I have not regretted doing so, not even now when I can barely remember her startling blonde hair, that shock of frozen lightning that wavered over her eyes when she looked from behind a cascading waterfall of light. I can't remember anything else about her, not her taste or the shape of her lips, or the curve of her back, but I can always remember her eyes and they mean something to me, I just don't remember what.

There is a stone shelf at the end of the canal and I sit on it with a cigarette and a homeless man digging through a trash can near me on the street corner. I watch him and he watches me, both of us suspicious, both of us hungry for something and then I turn back to the canal. The water is rising from the runoff, and with the water comes litter in all shapes and sizes. There are milk cartons like paper icebergs, bobbing up and down in the water. I watch a crab maneuver between two soda bottles, plastic the easiest way for us to assert that humanity matters in some way to all of us. I flick the cigarette into the water and it is gone before the smoke rises far enough into the sky for me to lose sight of it. The homeless man sits on the stone shelf near me and eats from an opened styrofoam container. We throw away life, we are so fucking rich that we throw life into the trash can for others to find, and I am okay with that. I am okay with that! I almost want to cry for us, for all of us, but I don't - it would disrespect the choices made by those before us, soldiers wearing fatalistic grey and singing songs in monotones.

Tomorrow the sun will rise high enough for me to watch it burn the clouds, and nothing will change except I will still not be in love with anything but myself, and you will be in love with me and that is everything. Corn will still taste like corn, and water will still drench our spirits in stalls, and mercury still coats us in fascinating colors when we cough. But I am not in love. I am not in love.

-Rich

something this way fell apart

It has been a few days since my last post. Things have come and gone. A terrible weekend was had, and a dolorous stroke avoided by observing dolphins. Let it be known that the greatest cure for any ailment is watching dolphins jump through the water to tap a ball suspended over a pool some ten feet above the surface. I crowed and cooed like all the children in the crowd and for a moment I felt that perhaps I was not too different from them.

Tonight I am driving to Philly for various reasons - that is all I really think is necessary to write about that.

Last night instead of going to class I went to a friend's house. I had not seen him in a while, and when I first pulled up his driveway I looked around at the dilapidated walkway and felt slight apprehension. Why is it that in the absence of honest reality, we always assume the worst about things? Human nature is just that, it is human, and it falls more easily that it rises.

Yet the evening was normal. We talked about various things that had little to do with our lives, and then we talked about things that had much to do with them. There is a cycle of conversation that every meeting follows, no matter whether the conversation is long or short. Even a sentence can follow in the footsteps of noun adjective verb noun. Suffix and prefixes fix tenses. All problems are tense to begin with. We are all laughing soldiers, painted green by brass age, and smelling of ball-bearings under pressure. After a while the evening drew on and other people showed up at the house - people that I did not know, and did not particularly care to know. I left and drove home in the darkening night, highbeams on in protest. Every yellow line that passed me by was filled with a word, and the car wrote sentences that danced behind me in the red glow of stopsigns.

This weekend there are things that I have to take care of, and I am sure that I will fail miserably at some of them. It is responsibility that shaves so close to the skin, it is expectations that drag so heavily at the feet, and in the end we are all dead under polaris, under the only thing that never changes.

-Rich

as if we weren't enough for you