the absurd
I have been in Memphis for a couple weeks now and I have had plenty of time to think...
Man...Vegas was absurd. I could tell you stories...hell, I could write books...but one incident I thinks best illustrates how just plain silly things were.
There was a moment where I found myself in a kitchen, alone, with a chef-who was the source of my ire, and I was coming unglued. That alone wouldn't have been of note, but he was eating a peanut butter sandwich. So I am yelling at this guy and he is smirking into his peanut butter.
It was one of those life affirming situations...where the point was as pointless as goo slapped between bread...and somewhere on the tail end of my rant it all came clear...
and as I slinked away and he finished his sandwich I said
"The only place I like to be humilated is in bed"
he laughed. and I blushed into my apron.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Friday, September 19, 2008
dixie land delight
so tonight I called my country boy, the boy I met in guatemala, the boy I moved here for...
I asked him if he would help me get my driver's license, to which he replied
" Are you drunk? Let's go now and just drive off a bridge in Arkansas".
and for a second, I wanted to.
I love it here.
I asked him if he would help me get my driver's license, to which he replied
" Are you drunk? Let's go now and just drive off a bridge in Arkansas".
and for a second, I wanted to.
I love it here.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Cum grano salis
There is so much you just can't understand about me...and not for the reasons you may think...
I am just a grain of salt. I am a part of something bigger.
We move around the country. We give our employers fake addresses. In most cities we live together in a single house or houses. We tell our friends fake reasons for why we are where we are...and we disappear into the fabric of wherever we are. We are your friends and co-workers...we laugh with you and sometimes touch you...but you'll never get too close...no matter how close you get.
I would leave work and go to work. Clandestine meetings, mapping...strategy...
and I would love to tell you...but the first rule of business is that there is no such thing...The biggest fear we have is that someone will write a book...so we all vow to keep an oral history...pass on anecdotes whenever we meet...
and I wish I could tell you how much I risked out there in the desert, how I broke protocol and almost lost it all...How you took me to the edge
and I got too close, no matter how close we weren't...
ultimately, who are you to me? No one. Just a shadow.
I collect shadows, I suppose
Mostly because I am one.
I am just a grain of salt. I am a part of something bigger.
We move around the country. We give our employers fake addresses. In most cities we live together in a single house or houses. We tell our friends fake reasons for why we are where we are...and we disappear into the fabric of wherever we are. We are your friends and co-workers...we laugh with you and sometimes touch you...but you'll never get too close...no matter how close you get.
I would leave work and go to work. Clandestine meetings, mapping...strategy...
and I would love to tell you...but the first rule of business is that there is no such thing...The biggest fear we have is that someone will write a book...so we all vow to keep an oral history...pass on anecdotes whenever we meet...
and I wish I could tell you how much I risked out there in the desert, how I broke protocol and almost lost it all...How you took me to the edge
and I got too close, no matter how close we weren't...
ultimately, who are you to me? No one. Just a shadow.
I collect shadows, I suppose
Mostly because I am one.
Saturday, September 6, 2008
For my grandfather
My grandfather
passed on
when I was
Eleven years old,
An insominac,I stayed awake
playing in nocturne,
Long enough that night,
that
I Heard the phone ring,
then heard my father's crying
As he shook,
he told me, in my stillness,
that everything would be
Alright
A week later
we burned his body,
then took it to the
Ocean
said that once he was
free to leave his body
he was freeto clear the land
And I stared
out the window
of my grandfather's big American truck
at someone's hands
holding the plain cardboard box
which contained his ashes
-My mother turned to meand whispered
"We don't amount to much
In the end"
Willie Nelson was playing
On the radio
as my grandmother cried
Even then,
Just a child,I understood that death
Was a multi-faceted
and unifying experience,
That it was not simply
death instead of dreaming,
Asleep or awake-
And when a woman friend of the family,
Pulled me aside
to tell me that my
"grandpa was in a better place,now"
Something in her voice,
I knew she didn't wholly
Believe it was true,
that she was scared too,
As she watched my father
pour his father
into the sea...Amen
-2:28pm sept 12th
passed on
when I was
Eleven years old,
An insominac,I stayed awake
playing in nocturne,
Long enough that night,
that
I Heard the phone ring,
then heard my father's crying
As he shook,
he told me, in my stillness,
that everything would be
Alright
A week later
we burned his body,
then took it to the
Ocean
said that once he was
free to leave his body
he was freeto clear the land
And I stared
out the window
of my grandfather's big American truck
at someone's hands
holding the plain cardboard box
which contained his ashes
-My mother turned to meand whispered
"We don't amount to much
In the end"
Willie Nelson was playing
On the radio
as my grandmother cried
Even then,
Just a child,I understood that death
Was a multi-faceted
and unifying experience,
That it was not simply
death instead of dreaming,
Asleep or awake-
And when a woman friend of the family,
Pulled me aside
to tell me that my
"grandpa was in a better place,now"
Something in her voice,
I knew she didn't wholly
Believe it was true,
that she was scared too,
As she watched my father
pour his father
into the sea...Amen
-2:28pm sept 12th
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Taking a bite of the apple
Finally. After years of rambling and fumbling through various countries,states,jobs...men...I am officially becoming official. I got the position I have wanted for the last decade...
Fuck Yeah!
That said, I have had an amazing go at this whole life thing. I haven't played by the rules or lived conventionally-but in the end, the road less travelled has led to the path my heart desires...a life with purpose.
And I believe that things happen for a reason. People, places have come to me, moved through me...and those experiences have been the best education I could ever have.
There is this whole idea about a glass ceiling...I think that has more to do with the limitations we place on ourselves. We draw boundaries based on class or civics...But what happens when step outside of that?
I
am formally educated, good with languages...but I have only flirted with jobs in my field since I left college. I have been a copy editor, done translations, sold leather jackets while in Italy...worked in kitchens,restaurants all over...I worked in a black cosmetics factory, screwing tops on jheri curl juice..I have done what I do in Vegas off and on for years...
Breaking up with the service industry is crazy to me. It has been there with me through it all. For 15 years, I have done everything from cut tomatoes to running a joint. There is a whole dialect that you learn working in restaurants...and a lifestyle that follows.
There are things that most people will just never experience. Restaurant folk have not only experienced it, they have written the book. I have been offered 3,000 in 100 dollar bills to walk out of my job and get into a limo headed for Tunica...I have watched a priest, collar and all, drunk late on a sunday afternoon, with his tongue down a girls throat. All I could muster was "atleast its a chick...and she's legal even" I have seen more cocaine than any human should being funnelled through bars and kitchens in amounts that dwarfed scenes in "Scarface". I have seen rookies sent out for "meatglue" and buckets of steam...I have gotten high in a walk-in cooler in the Haight...In a fit of rage, I booted cooks off the line and jumped in, in the middle of dinner service, with my owner in the building. I have dumped out my tip jar after a busy night behind the bar and found six hundred dollars in tips and about four hundred dollars worth of blow. My lasagna got me backstage for a broadway show...
And there have been life affirming moments. There was a kitchen in Italy that I worked in...The owner was sketchy on a good day and one night there was a buy-out by a group from Cutro. Cutro is a N'drangheta (La Mafia Calabrese) stronghold, and Chef left me in the kitchen alone with the flu and about 15 Bistecce Fiorentine on the grill...and they were to be cooked at different temps, they weren't all "al sangue".I was seeing double at one point. I had this vision of me stroking out right there, with all that heat and meat, my last moments spent covered in sweat and grease with an obscene amount of beef...as I began to float away, I could hear voices in the wine cellar, and the repetitive thud of a body hitting the wall...My boss was delivering some vigilante justice in the cellar...
That doesn't happen in cubicles.
And Vegas has been like war. I am an honest person, almost to a fault...and I haven't been able to be that person here. Also, living with the fear that I will be discovered, and that all of what I have accomplished here will be in vain.
I came to Vegas with secrets, and I will leave with an additional one...
Man. Life is kooky.
Fuck Yeah!
That said, I have had an amazing go at this whole life thing. I haven't played by the rules or lived conventionally-but in the end, the road less travelled has led to the path my heart desires...a life with purpose.
And I believe that things happen for a reason. People, places have come to me, moved through me...and those experiences have been the best education I could ever have.
There is this whole idea about a glass ceiling...I think that has more to do with the limitations we place on ourselves. We draw boundaries based on class or civics...But what happens when step outside of that?
I
am formally educated, good with languages...but I have only flirted with jobs in my field since I left college. I have been a copy editor, done translations, sold leather jackets while in Italy...worked in kitchens,restaurants all over...I worked in a black cosmetics factory, screwing tops on jheri curl juice..I have done what I do in Vegas off and on for years...
Breaking up with the service industry is crazy to me. It has been there with me through it all. For 15 years, I have done everything from cut tomatoes to running a joint. There is a whole dialect that you learn working in restaurants...and a lifestyle that follows.
There are things that most people will just never experience. Restaurant folk have not only experienced it, they have written the book. I have been offered 3,000 in 100 dollar bills to walk out of my job and get into a limo headed for Tunica...I have watched a priest, collar and all, drunk late on a sunday afternoon, with his tongue down a girls throat. All I could muster was "atleast its a chick...and she's legal even" I have seen more cocaine than any human should being funnelled through bars and kitchens in amounts that dwarfed scenes in "Scarface". I have seen rookies sent out for "meatglue" and buckets of steam...I have gotten high in a walk-in cooler in the Haight...In a fit of rage, I booted cooks off the line and jumped in, in the middle of dinner service, with my owner in the building. I have dumped out my tip jar after a busy night behind the bar and found six hundred dollars in tips and about four hundred dollars worth of blow. My lasagna got me backstage for a broadway show...
And there have been life affirming moments. There was a kitchen in Italy that I worked in...The owner was sketchy on a good day and one night there was a buy-out by a group from Cutro. Cutro is a N'drangheta (La Mafia Calabrese) stronghold, and Chef left me in the kitchen alone with the flu and about 15 Bistecce Fiorentine on the grill...and they were to be cooked at different temps, they weren't all "al sangue".I was seeing double at one point. I had this vision of me stroking out right there, with all that heat and meat, my last moments spent covered in sweat and grease with an obscene amount of beef...as I began to float away, I could hear voices in the wine cellar, and the repetitive thud of a body hitting the wall...My boss was delivering some vigilante justice in the cellar...
That doesn't happen in cubicles.
And Vegas has been like war. I am an honest person, almost to a fault...and I haven't been able to be that person here. Also, living with the fear that I will be discovered, and that all of what I have accomplished here will be in vain.
I came to Vegas with secrets, and I will leave with an additional one...
Man. Life is kooky.
Friday, August 15, 2008
Pane e Circus
Open letter with a built in retraction.
Imperfection is its own kind of perfection. Slipping on different skins, travelling through people and places. Making mistakes. Owning those mistakes. Taking risks results in motion, evolution, destruction and rebirth. Sisyphus forever pushes that boulder up the mountain accomplishing nothing...but prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man-and forever changed the path of mankind. But if there is one thing sisyphus understood, it was motion. Motion trumps inertion. Inertion is decay.
I love guns but hate war.
I don't rationalize what I do. I just do. It isn't about some objective sense of morality or some particular qualified goal or reason. People come in many forms, I like to enjoy what they enjoy about themselves. Sometimes I just get a glimmer, sometimes a pound of flesh. Love, Lust, Hate...Id, Ego, Superego...Fight, Fuck and flee...the senses...maybe that is it. I take my life to be sensual. Fingers moving over skin. Wine rolling over the tongue...the warmth of a body breathing next to me...the space someone leaves when they are gone or when I disappear.
Identity without indemnity. Sensuality is sweetness and the raw....
I am a starry eyed cynic.
I am not the other woman. I am just another human. Super fucking human. I am not a dumb whore that just spreads her legs for any caveman.So fuck you. I am not a victim. It is symbiosis. Not all riddles are solved with logic. The body has its own riddles. I love men.their curves and angles. I love wit heavy with sarcasm. And I take what I want, leave when it is necessary and don't pretend to understand either. The sum of an individual is a measurement of their actions, admirable and deplorable. I love hard and have carried people with me for years...That deep sense of love outweighs bouts with ego and selfishness. The occasional mindfuck or midnight desperation...the weakness of two bodies in the dark...
Has it ever crossed your mind that what he takes from me, I take from him?
I don't judge you. Any of you. I have opinions, sure. I can't pretend to know what happens in your minds and beds. No one can fully understand the width of two people, even the two people involved. Monogamy, adultery, promises before god and chinese whispers...it is all relative...People suffer tradition and expectation because it is easier than thinking outside the box. Society isn't the archetype, but the shadow on the wall.
I find people who salt their food before tasting abhorrent. Okay, so I am a bit judgemental.
But you have to make a decision. Either agree that ignorance is bliss and construct your glasshouse...or choose to engage. Depression doesn't dictate your life, but fear. You accuse me of rationalizing my indiscretions, but what about you? You have taken one step forward since we met-moving from Lexington. You wallow in your own weakness. You hate everything he stands for because you are like bizarro him. He is cocky, ubermasculine and can fuck any woman he wants. He has charisma. People gravitate to him. He leads. Pane e Circus-that's him. You can cling to your platonic ideals, but ultimately-you lose. Not in his alphamale game, but in life. You are frozen in yourself. I believe that you think you are better because you aren't base. That you dominate from the neck up. Balance is key. Plato called for state sanctioned orgies, for man to engage in the basest behaviour possible-and after the body is sated, the spirit is free to find its pleasure.
I am working on it.
Life is big small important meaningless and mine.
So fuck you.
Imperfection is its own kind of perfection. Slipping on different skins, travelling through people and places. Making mistakes. Owning those mistakes. Taking risks results in motion, evolution, destruction and rebirth. Sisyphus forever pushes that boulder up the mountain accomplishing nothing...but prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man-and forever changed the path of mankind. But if there is one thing sisyphus understood, it was motion. Motion trumps inertion. Inertion is decay.
I love guns but hate war.
I don't rationalize what I do. I just do. It isn't about some objective sense of morality or some particular qualified goal or reason. People come in many forms, I like to enjoy what they enjoy about themselves. Sometimes I just get a glimmer, sometimes a pound of flesh. Love, Lust, Hate...Id, Ego, Superego...Fight, Fuck and flee...the senses...maybe that is it. I take my life to be sensual. Fingers moving over skin. Wine rolling over the tongue...the warmth of a body breathing next to me...the space someone leaves when they are gone or when I disappear.
Identity without indemnity. Sensuality is sweetness and the raw....
I am a starry eyed cynic.
I am not the other woman. I am just another human. Super fucking human. I am not a dumb whore that just spreads her legs for any caveman.So fuck you. I am not a victim. It is symbiosis. Not all riddles are solved with logic. The body has its own riddles. I love men.their curves and angles. I love wit heavy with sarcasm. And I take what I want, leave when it is necessary and don't pretend to understand either. The sum of an individual is a measurement of their actions, admirable and deplorable. I love hard and have carried people with me for years...That deep sense of love outweighs bouts with ego and selfishness. The occasional mindfuck or midnight desperation...the weakness of two bodies in the dark...
Has it ever crossed your mind that what he takes from me, I take from him?
I don't judge you. Any of you. I have opinions, sure. I can't pretend to know what happens in your minds and beds. No one can fully understand the width of two people, even the two people involved. Monogamy, adultery, promises before god and chinese whispers...it is all relative...People suffer tradition and expectation because it is easier than thinking outside the box. Society isn't the archetype, but the shadow on the wall.
I find people who salt their food before tasting abhorrent. Okay, so I am a bit judgemental.
But you have to make a decision. Either agree that ignorance is bliss and construct your glasshouse...or choose to engage. Depression doesn't dictate your life, but fear. You accuse me of rationalizing my indiscretions, but what about you? You have taken one step forward since we met-moving from Lexington. You wallow in your own weakness. You hate everything he stands for because you are like bizarro him. He is cocky, ubermasculine and can fuck any woman he wants. He has charisma. People gravitate to him. He leads. Pane e Circus-that's him. You can cling to your platonic ideals, but ultimately-you lose. Not in his alphamale game, but in life. You are frozen in yourself. I believe that you think you are better because you aren't base. That you dominate from the neck up. Balance is key. Plato called for state sanctioned orgies, for man to engage in the basest behaviour possible-and after the body is sated, the spirit is free to find its pleasure.
I am working on it.
Life is big small important meaningless and mine.
So fuck you.
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