| chanterelles |
[Sep. 19th, 2004|07:15 pm] |
Chanterelles
If it rains in September, that’s a good time to start looking for chanterelles. They come up like fleshy tulips, lifting pine needles sticks, pushing up to strike a pageant pose. A mutilated, grotesque pose, but still graceful, like the smell of mushrooms is rotten and classy at the same time.
The part of the chanterelle we eat, the mushroom, is only the sex organ of the fungus. The mycelia spread white threads underground, searching out dead plant matter to decompose. That’s why if you find one chanterelle, there’s probably another nearby, connected to the same mother mycelium. When I bend down and pick one, another usually catches my eye, so I walk or crawl to that one, than another glimmer of orange. Viewed from above, my path would look like a crazed dog following some phantom rabbit.
Soon, I am very lost in the not-so-big patch of woods I thought I knew flawlessly. People talk about how the Indians gave thanks for taking the life of a deer, or even a fairy-like chanterelle. I realize that that is not a religious duty, not a mystical devotion, but a sincere thank you, like to your best friend. |
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| On X-copteil, Yucatan, Mexico. |
[Apr. 4th, 2004|05:08 pm] |
Reflections on climate change and X-copteil
**
In one of these town meetings, one of the old timers stopped joking in Mayan and looked at me. He switched to Spanish: “Where do you come from?”
“California”
“Where is that?”
“In the United States”
“Lejísima” he whistled and gestured over his shoulder, “That far away. Which direction is that?”
“Which way’s north?” I asked. They all pointed. I pointed northwest, and they said something in Mayan.
The old farmer looked back at me. “Is that where all the other countries are?”
**
In school I have learned concepts and terms that refer to them, like “biodiversity” and “management of non-crop species.” Walking back from Esteban Un Pat’s milpa, I mentioned that the biodiversidad in his corn patch was impressive and that it is really amazing, from our monoculture paradigm of agriculture that leads us to kill anything that we didn’t plant on purpose, that there are so many useful wild plants managed in with the planted crops.
This he understood immediately. “This plant, for instance,” he said pulling down a sapling, “you can take the resin and put it on any wound, and (whistling) it dries out fast. And this, you can make a tea out of the flowers when your stomach is swollen feeling, and drink it three times a day.”
He showed me plants high in protein for feeding cattle, a wild bean that’s delicious when its green, and some plants that he said they left to grow in the milpa because they “added to the soil.”
Esteban probably hadn’t heard the term biodiversidad before, but he instantly knew what it meant, and in a deep way that is not in the dictionary. He clearly has an ecological understanding of the environment he interacts with every day- ecological in the sense that it sees the whole system with each component being important and the relationships between each component being important as well. This is a way of looking at nature that we are starting to develop in modern science.
I told him this, that I think that his knowledge about agriculture is probably very important to developing more sustainable systems in places where agriculture is industrialized .
“Yes, yes it is,” he responded, not surprised.”
**
Sentamos en la sombra, al lado de la casita llena de elotes recién cosechados. Le pregunté a Estaban Un Pat sobre los jóvenes que salen de X-copteil para trabajar. Me contestó:
“Sí hay muchos que se van a trabajar. Más que la mitad se van. No les gusta el trabajo del campo. Mi nieta por ejemplo, la hermana de José, estudió hotelería y se fue a trabajar en un hotel en Cancún. Así estudió.
“Pero todos regresan para la fiesta. Para la fiesta de nuestro patrono, lo que conociste, regresaron todos. Los que están en Cancún, regresan. Los que están en Mérida, regresan. Los de Valladolid, igual. Pero ya se fueron.”
Le pregunté: “¿En cincuenta años, si todos se van, se van a acabar las milpas? ¿Como va a ser el ejido?”
“Va a seguir, como que no. Hay algunos que se quedan. Van a hacer milpa. Así pescamos la vida.”
*
We sat in the shade beside the shed full of recently harvested ears of corn. I asked Esteban Un Pat about the young people that leave X-copteil to work. He answered:
“Yes, many leave to work. They don’t like country work. My granddaughter, for example, the sister of José, studied hotels and went to work in a hotel in Cancun. That’s what she studied.
“But they all come back for the parties. For our patron saint’s party, the party you saw, they all came back. The ones that live in Cancun came back. The ones that live in Mérida came back. The ones in Valladolid, the same. But by now they’ve left.”
I asked “In fifty years, if everyone leaves, are the milpas going to come to an end? ¿What will happen to the ejido?
“Of course the milpas will continue, how could they not. Some stay, and they’ll have milpas. This is how we search out a living.”
**
Esteban Un Pat dijo:
“Antes, sembramos caña, chile, papayas, piñas, camote, yuca, una planta que decimos ma’cal – no sé como se llama en español, chile verde, jícama, fueron varios. Y sí daban. Habrían muchos pero hoy solo sembramos el maíz, unos frijoles, y a veces unas pepitas, unas calabazas y ya.”
“¿Por qué no los siembran?” pregunté.
“No dan. No aguantan”
“¿Por qué no dan?”
“Porque si no lluvia, mueran. Antes la lluvia calló entre los fines de mayo y noviembre. Podía ser tres, o cuatro días sin lluvia, pero luego sí llovía. Y ahora, no llueve ocho días y las plantas empiezan a morir. Puede dejar de llover dos semanas. Así mueran las plantas.
“Y antes fueron montes altas, montes de cincuenta años, no puro hub’che como hoy. No necesitaban ni fertilizantes ni nada. Sembrabas tu semilla y sí daba.
“Yo empecé hacer milpa con mi papá cuando tenía diez años. Había un tiempo cuando podía tumbar cuatros mecates en un día, de monte alta, árboles gruesos. Tumbaba, tomaba mi pozolito, tumbaba más, y dormía en la milpa. Pero ya no. Tumbo poco a poco.” Abrió su mano derecha y me la mostró la palma. “Y como cansan mis manos, así cansa la tierra.”
*
Esteban Un Pat said:
“Before, we would plant sugarcane, chili peppers, papayas, pineapples, yams, yucca, a plant we call ma’cal – I don’t know what it’s called in Spanish, green peppers, jicamas, there were many of them. And they produced. There were many crops in the milpa, but now we just plant corn, some beans, and sometimes some seed gourds, some squash, and that’s it.”
“Why don’t you plant them anymore?” I asked.
“They don’t give anything. They don’t last.”
“Why not?”
“Because if it doesn’t rain, they die. Before the rain fell from the end of May through November. There could be tree, four days without rain, but then it would fall. But now, it won’t rain for eight days, and the plants start to die. It can stay dry for two weeks. That’s how the plants die.
“And back then we had high jungle. Jungles of fifty years of growth, not just hub’che like we have now. You didn’t need fertilizers, you didn’t need anything. You planted your seed and you knew it would give.
“I started planting the milpa with my father when I was ten years old. There was a time when I could chop four mecates in a day, of tall jungle, with thick trees. I would chop, drink my pozole, chop some more, and sleep in the milpa. But now I chop little by little.” He opened his right hand and showed the palm to me. “But as my hands have gotten tired, so has the earth.”
**
Dije a Esteban Un Pat, “Entonces es por la falta de montes altas y la falta de lluvia.”
“Sí” me afirmó, “Sí, el suelo no aguante y la lluvia no calle como antes.”
“Y porque no calle la lluvia?” intenté.
“Pues, ¿quién sabe?”
*
I said to Esteban Un Pat, “Then it’s because of lack of tall jungle and lack of rain.”
“Yes,” he affirmed, “Yes, the ground doesn’t support the crops and the rain doesn’t fall like it used to.”
“And why don’t the rains fall?” I tried.
“Well, who knows?”
**
What Mr. Un Pat, and many others, described is crop failure due to climate change in addition to lack of sufficient fallows. I can think of three explanations for disturbance in rain patterns. I suspect that all of them are true to some extent:
1. Farmers everywhere are notorious for idealizing the past. “Things have never been this bad” a common way of talking about the weather, as well as taxes and kid’s attitudes. This may hold some truth- there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the climate really is changing, but at least part of it is forgetting the bad things in the past. I have found some support for this hypothesis by asking every farmer I interview in various towns if the rains are any different now, and how long ago they changed. Either everyone in a town will say they have changed in the last five to twenty years, or everyone will shrug and say nothing’s changed. This suggests that this perception comes from conversations with other farmers in the same town, and is not universally noticed. But of course this does not prove or disprove that the climate is really changing.
2. It has been demonstrated that in the Yucatan, evapotranspiration from plants exceeds the rate of evaporation from surface waters like the ocean. Thus, the air gets more and more wet it moves inland. As there is less and less vegetation due to widespread disforestation , there will be less to evapotranspiration. With less moisture in the air, it makes sense that it would rain less, and less predictably. In this way the issues of not enough fallow period and not enough rain may be related as cause and effect.
3. It has long been predicted that global warming due to the spike in atmospheric carbon dioxide will manifest itself in the tropics as disturbances in rain patterns much more than the rise in temperatures expected in cooler climates.
It is theorized that disforestation-induced drought, along with the crop failures and political repercussions of widespread hunger that it caused (a peasant uprising), lead to the fall of the prehispanic city of Teotihuacán near present day Mexico city. There is also plenty of evidence (such as radioactive oxygen levels in gastropods fossilized at the bottom of cenotes) that the fall of the classical Mayan cities was associated with climate change.
Certainly it is possible that climate change caused by CO2 levels or deforestation, or most likely both, is again causing crop failures, and will again cause profound changes in Mayan civilization. Everyone I have interviewed has told me that this November and December they harvested the first crop of corn in three years: the 2002 crop was devastated by drought and the 2003 crop by a hurricane. After two consecutive years or just barely surviving on savings (in the form of money and animals) and government aid, many milperos realized that they cant depend on the milpa alone for subsistence. Their children have left to work in maquiladoras or, if they’re have a high school diploma, the tourism industry.
Although Esteban and all the old farmers I have talked to say that the milpa will continue to be a way of Mayan life forever, Esteban’s grandson José, a 26 year old milpero, disagrees. “Honestly, I think it will disappear,” he told me.
**
There is a deep sadness emerging in my research. I am studying an agriculture (and a culture) that although profoundly valuable to the world, is not valued. No one should have to make the choice between nusrishing yourself physically and nourishing yourself culturally and spiritually.
In one town I visited they told me that they only leave the hub’che, the secondary vegitation, just three or four years to grow before they slash and burn it again. A good minimum fallow should be twenty years, but there’s just not enough land with the growing number of ejido members as their children join. The fields hardly produce, they say, even with the fertilizers and herbicides they have to buy to compensate for the insufficient fallow.
In another town, everyone seems to leave the land for twenty or twenty five years. There’s no need for fertilizers, they say, the ashes are the fertilizer. Weeds are easily kept under control with a machete. The crop this year was good.
The question I have too investigate seemed simple: what makes the second town’s agriculture so much more successful than the first’s? But then
I can hardly imagine the choice: I’ve grown up working alongside my father in the milpa from the age of ten. I went to school and learned about a world my grandfater has only a vague idea of, but the milpa remains the most important chore, place, and religious devotion in the life of a man. It is said that during the Caste War, when the Yucatecos were winning a lot of battles and had driven the henequen plantation owners nearly to the sea, they saw the flies swarming. This was the sign that it was time to prepare a milpa, so they turned around an went home. The milpa is the creation of life because it is the creation of corn. A milpero penetrates the earth and it gives the staple food of his family. It is a carfuly balanced comprimise with nature, a skillful conversation, a dance, a coaxing to give a crop.
“When we harvest, we have to give an offering,” José told me, “we dig a hole like this and put rocks on the bottom and light a fire. When the fire dies down but the rocks are still glowing hot, we cover them with green leaves and then the ears of corn. Then we burry it. We do this at night. In the morning, we uncover it and we invite everyone to come eat it. Relitives come from all over to eat the corn with us. We invite anyone we see in the town. We don’t charge for this, because its an offering, to give thanks for the harvest. This is the best way to prepare corn.”
But when two years in a row there is no harvest, the corn we have planted is destroyed first by drought then by a hurricane, my whole family begins to think that we need some other way to search out a living. To pescar la vida. |
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| Manejo de cuchillo, parte 1 |
[Mar. 26th, 2004|05:20 pm] |
March 14, 2004
El maestro de Aikido me invitó a una restaurante yucateca “para que la pruebas antes de que vayas a Mérida.” Con nosotros vino un piloto francés que había pasado por el dojo durante la clase y que se enteres entrenar aquí entre vuelos a todos partes del mundo.
Hablemos de Aikido en todos partes del mundo. Este es típico de personas que han estudiado liquido muchos años: todavía les fascina el arte y les encanta hablar de varios maestros que les han impresionado. “Y Shibata sensai se camina y come como un samauri,” dijo mi maestro, golpeando la mesa con su tenedor y haciendo la cara de un guerrillero. Sea posible estudiar todo tú vida sin aburrirse. Es un arte altamente complejo con elementos físicos y espirituales en que tratas a defenderse y cuidar a lo que te ataca al mismo tiempo. Te dijo esto para que entiendas como me sorprendió el siguiente.
“Tenemos una clase de puertos cerrados,” dijo mi maestro, demostrando con sus manos la cierra de unas puertas, “de manejo de cuchillo. El maestro que tenemos estudió en las Filipinas, y cuando enseña este clase en Los Ángeles el gobierno requiere que todos los alumnos se registren sus huellas digitales. Es un arte muy feo. Un corte en la muñeca y te mueras en sesenta segundos. Aquí por este vena, cuarenta segundos, por la axila treinta segundos, y por el yugular veinte. Es muy feo.” Se sonrío, y sacó un cuchillo pequeño de su cinturón. “Tiene una forma triangula para que abra las venas. No es Aikido. La clase empieza a las siete este noche.” Guardó su cuchillo. “¿Puedes venir?”
“No hacemos calentamientos, solo empezamos,” Dijo el maestro de cuchillo. Era joven, no tuviera más que 10 años que yo. Hablaba como nos estuviera entrenando para desarmar una bomba, como cualquier equivocación de sus instrucciones pudiera matarnos. “En las Filipinas, cuando fueron invadido, necesitaron aprender luchar rápidamente. Este nos es deporte. Es guerra. Y no quiero estudiantes. Quiero maestros. Carlos, ven y abre los brazos, y Alex, enséñanos los puntos para matar”
Carlos, quien tuve bastantes años para aparecer frágil, abrió sus brazos flacos. Alex, un poco nervioso ante los cinco otros estudiantes y el maestro, cortó el lado adentro del muñeca de Carlos con su cuchillo de madera. “Cuarenta segundos”
“Más o menos un minuto,” le corrigió el maestro.
“Perdón.” Alex respiró y continuó señalando las venas importantes de Carlos. “Sesenta segundos, cuarenta, treinta, veinte.”
“Bien. Estudian.”
(Proxemente: 23 maneras de matar a alguien) |
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| happy birthday chelsea |
[Mar. 26th, 2004|05:02 pm] |
Beware of the birth of a girl
When it’s hot like here I sweat
Of course so does everybody else
But that’s easy to forget.
In this fever I thought I heard an angel
Or it could have been an old man, whisper
“beware of the birth of a girl.”
To climb out of this sweat
That is to look at my own shiny body
And maybe yours, from far away
Eventually I had to learn how to dance that,
And the old man had to forget that “beware” means
“I told you so” but in advance.
I even read that sweat is salty
In the same proportions as the Primal Ooze and there
Life-pieces met by chance inevitably. |
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| Bus ride |
[Mar. 13th, 2004|10:48 pm] |
I left México city at three pm on the bus and got in to Mérida at ten in the morning. The bus was much more comfortable than a greyhound; I only got through three pages of Canek before I fell asleep, or asleep most of the way.
My friends ran with me to the bus station. David wore the purple backpack and held one handle of my duffle bag and the plant with the yellow spotted kidney shaped flowers I gave him in the other hand, I had the other handle and my backpack. We dodged people in the metro and asked directions for the buses. Alina’s backpack broke and when I looked back for her she was picking up her CDs with the help of some metro rider. It turns out I had ten minutes to spare, David just thought the bus left at 2:30 when I said I had to get my ticket at two thirty, and I assumed that he knew that Mexican busses were more punctual than Mexican anything else. But running like that, two gangly white fools attached by a bulging duffle bag, sealed something in our friendship. A kiss on the cheek for Alina, a hand slap and pound then pound the chest and then the air and hug, and laugh, for David, then the lady at the gate tells me to get in line to check my bags. Then we do it all again. David and his plant, Alina and her broken backpack. Estamos en contacto.
I woke up a quarter of the way into X Men dubbed en Español. Wolverine gave Dr. Jean Grey a knowing, longing look, then put a cigar out in palm and the burn healed up. Out the window Popocapetl was on the left an his sleeping lover was in the right, covered with snow. Big mountains deserve legends.
I didn’t know the Ultrasonicas were such rock stars. Everyone knew the words to all of their songs. Ali blew snot out her nose and left it there on her face the whole time she played guitar and sang. Her eyes are the same as her sisters, who I don’t know, but she’s on the front of Que! magazine and on billboards at bus stations all over the city. Jen gave me a beer and I hung out with her and her Germen boyfriend. We talked about how he has a van in San Francisco but he can’t go back because last time he let his visa expire when he was there. Alina walked backstage, or at least past the security guard and the rope like a star, she likes that kind of stuff. I stuck out read headed above the crowd and wished I knew all the words and was proud of them I’m not sure why. Some of my classmates were still there at the end of the night. I saw them dancing, even on stage once, hiding swigs of something in a little bottle. “Where’s the afterparty? Ask her what their doing after.” They were going home to sleep. The base player is pregnant and Ali has a cold. Jen is stoned and tired from beating on the drums. “Fueron rock stars,” Alina said, they used to be on the TV. Ali wiped the snot off of her nose.
The bus was driving over a mountain on fire. I tried to see through the thick white smoke and only got glimpses of bus stops and people walking around or washing clothes or leaning against posts. It must not be smoke. Maybe the wind erosion is that bad in the desert, it seems to be lifting up from the ground. A new movie started, this time Steven Segal gets involved with the Italian mafia and the CIA, subtitled in Spanish. I decided the white stuff was really thick fog on the mountain pass. It was cold on the bus and I tried to guess what it was like outside. People had t-shirts on, but then I saw a guy with a leather jacket.
Carlos sensai invited me and the French pilot who came to the México city aikido class out to lunch in a yucatec resteraunt. “Oye, este ste joven va a Mérida el domingo,” he told the waiter, “para que prueba la comida yucateca.” I’m getting a sampling of food before I go. This is characteristic of Mexico city, I’ve found. “Oye, ¿no tienes musica yucateca?” An old man opens the juke box with a key and selects songs carefully. Their romanticas with lots of shaking beats, maybe Mayan maybe Cuban influence. All of the food has eggs. An omelet with an eggy sauce, tortillas rolled around crumbled hard boiled eggs, Poached eggs on crispy tortillas crossing drizzles of different colored sauces. This is Habañero sauce. Be careful, its not Jalapeños.
Sensei talked about aikido teachers all over the world. The French pilot didn’t speak much Spanish so we spoke English sometimes too, and they both asked me words like that part of the foot opposite the toes, and when you don’t do anything but just sit there and don’t think, like zen. He asked us if we knew all these important senseis and sometimes I lied and said yes I had heard of them. He walks and eats like this, he said, pounding the table with his fork, Like a Samauri. This is typical of Aikido people that have studied a long time, their still dazzled by it and the way people practice it and stories they’ve heard about the way people do aikido. “This is supposed to be secret” I’ve heard someone say, “But I when my sensei went to Tokio he went out to drink sake with some students from the home dojo. He asked if it was true that O’sensei could extend his energy all the way across the room. After a few drinks, one of them said that one time he saw a student stand up to attack him and o’sensei turned around and glared at him. He staggered a little then sat fell backwards. When he asked about it the next day, the students looked around and whispered Where did you hear that?”
I left with craps of paper with addresses of Aikido dojos all around the world. You can go anywhere and practice aikido. Its really important, I told him, in this global political climate that were all practicing this way of dealing with problems with absolute peace. Its very important for Mexico, Sensei said. We definitely have a lot to learn about peace in the United States, I said. Also in France, the French pilot said.
Steven Segal grabbed the CIA agents hand that was holding the gun and twisted it into a neat nikkio. Then he kicked him in the head. Its going through the movements of Aikido without even making an attempt at practicing it. The shame of Aikido, the shame of the being a gringo. The bus was almost empty. I tried a different way of curling up on the seats.
So my best friend here México city is named David. We have a band that has never played and may never play called Alta Tensión, and hanging out always leads me to something very Mexican. A party in the French kids’ apartment that lasted until ten in the morning, band practice on the roof of Alex the drummer’s moms house with two girls he brought along watching us, singing with drunks in the middle of the street way after a party, passing our bags through the x ray machine to get into the office building where he teaches English, big rooftop gardens with fountains and reflection pools and marble .
I didn’t hear from him for a week or a little more, but today he called me. Dos Gauchos en México, or maybe The Biggest City in the World, or Amor y Fronteras; the camera would watch me come down the metro stairs and meet David under the clock. Help him up, ride the metro one stop. “How’s things been going?” we ask each other. “Lots of school work,” I said, “I’m old and bald,” he said. I think he means his twenty-eighth birthday and his do it yourself haircut. The doors open and as we’re leaving the station he says “there’s a reason I haven’t been calling you.”
Turns out he’s been mad at me for flirting with his kind of girlfriend, and telling her that he made out with that other girl in the trunk of the car after that one party, and Tai is mad about telling her friend who he likes that he had a girlfriend, with whom he has now broken up because he liked that girl. I’m not making this up. So much to worry about. I apologized. The camera followed us down the street. We went and played pool for an hour, David won three times.
David and I looked around in the Wal-Mart dumpster and found nothing. We walked through an almost empty Suburbia department store, where everything is washed-out bright. We took three escalators to the Cinemex. The same guy owns all those stores, and Vips restaurants and TelCel, he’s the richest man in México. We snuck into a movie about 20 minutes after it had started. Turns out it was based on a videogame. These kids go to a rave on an uninhabited island in Puget sound, and all of a sudden these zombies attack them and kill almost all of them. Some escape, regroup, and try to fight off the zombies. Some of their friends come back to life as living dead. They get the help a park ranger, and then a smuggling ship captain, who has a chest full of all sorts of guns. There are way too many zombies and slowly everyone is killed off except the med student and the girl he likes, even though she takes a sward wound to the heart in the final battle scene. She was fighting the 17th century scientist who created a mutant blood that allowed him to live forever and create the zombies. We missed the beginning, but it seemed like the med student had something to do with starting the whole zombie mess, but it wasn’t on purpose.
I woke up and the land going by was very flat and rocky and covered in low canopy humid jungle. We were on the Yucatán peninsula. It slowly comes out of the Gulf of México , a big sedimentary rock slab. The meteor that killed the dinosaurs crashed here. The soil is so rocky that you can’t rototill it in ninety five percent of the land, so people still cut the forest and burn it to prepare the soil, then poke holes with a stick to plant corn. Six or seven seeds per hole, because the birds are entitled to some. It’s a way of looking at agriculture and our relationship with nature that is very different than that which has now spread all over the world, at least to all parts that can be worked with big machines. This is what I am studying, how is this tradition of burning and planting changing in a globalizing world? Because leaving those extra seeds for the birds is an example of a sophisticated understanding of ecology, that even aperent pests have ecosystem functions that are important to our the crops, even if we don’t know what those functions are. Maybe when the Mayans made there famous mathematical and scientific discoveries Agroecology was a part of it. The bus stopped in Mérida. It wasn’t as hot as I expected. |
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| mexico city slang |
[Feb. 5th, 2004|10:47 pm] |
México city slang:
México: the Districto Federal, Mexico city
La Republica: the United States of México
Fresa: yuppie
Naco: opposite of fresa, someone who doesn’t care about school/money/manors
Güey (pronounced “way”): Dude
Cuate: Guy
Cabrón: friend, but vulgar
chavo/a: guy/girl
vieja: babe
¿Que honda? What’s up
ni moda: whatever
por si las moscas: just in case
hasta la casa de la chingada: really far away
a huevos: go for it, all the way
orale: exclamation of a good surprise
hijole: exclamation of a bad surprise |
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| Metro death |
[Jan. 30th, 2004|10:46 pm] |
I saw my first dead person last night. He looked about forty something, and I imagine he got involved with something dangerous in México. He was riding the metro to meet someone about a deal, or just home to his family, maybe, and someone was looking for him and found him, and they were very sure they wanted to kill him.
He was mostly covered by a hospital-blue plastic blanket, but his feet stuck out and so did one hand and his forehead, where the bullet hole was. There wasn’t much blood anywhere that I could see, just a bad bruise with a hole in the center.
To whomever might be concerned about me, México city is not full of people shoot make holes in foreheads in subway stations. People are very nice here, strangers welcome me and take care of me, give me directions to the museum or the library, ask me about what I’m studying, show me around the city. Don’t worry. Most of the city is no more dangerous than anywhere else, its just that in a city of nineteen million, chances are higher that someone will die in the metro.
Two policemen stood over him, leaned against the subway wall, just at the bottom of the first flight of stairs. He didn’t make it to the turnstiles. He would have put the two peso ticket in a little slot that sucks it up, then pushed through the three pronged bar with his waist and walked down more steps to the trains. He could have taken the train north to the Zocalo or south to the university, or transferred from line to line and traveled the underground web all over the city that used to be a lake. Underneath Aztec pyramids and Catholic churches, and at one point, both at once. He could have ridden underneath malls with lots glass where he could have bought tight jeans and makeup and Italian shoes, and under wood and plastic stall markets where he could have bout guns and prostitutes and mystery tacos and drugs, and lots of less movieworthy things. |
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| She's a poet |
[Jan. 8th, 2004|11:47 pm] |
She's a poet
G - D C
She’s a poet and revisits every moment that
tore a piece of youth away that came down hard on a little girl
and sitting in a café now with older eyes and a woman’s hands
closes fingers around jewels of child hood pain
A - C F#
a dazzling display of sensitivity
E F# A
the imagery is hers exclusively
a pure whites swan circles endlessly
in a pond of a reflected memory
G - D C
She writes to cheat the laws of time
to throw her hard earned wisdom into
the blood of that little girl who knew so little so long ago
but meanwhile, she gets older
G - E F#
when the world is hard like a diamond
you might as well crystallize your tears
A - C F#
a sensitive display of maturity
E F# A
her long neck arches introspectively
the reflections ripple perfectly
while the rest of the world spins |
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| new songs |
[Jan. 8th, 2004|11:46 pm] |
Like any loser who’s been dumped, he started writing stupid poetry and songs about it. That’s why there’s so many She Dumped Me songs, it makes sense at the time. Record companies must make fortunes on heartbreak, but that’s just the ones they can sell. Millions of these losers are probably making a giant heartbreak symphony right now.
He wrote songs, and of course they were about her. He wrote one about how he couldn’t stand her poetry, and one about the clay heart he made for Spanish class, with labels: ventriculo derecho, aeorta izquierda. He painted it painstakingly while she was off with some guy. A metaphor, and a sappy song.
A sappy song that people might listen to. The artist gets the last word, that was part of his motivation.
A sappy song that could get him attention. Show her. That was part of it.
But like I said before, one of the worst parts of getting dumped is that she’s your only really close friends. He didn’t know anyone who wanted to be in a stupid sappy band with him, except maybe her. So they played a few songs, him playing guitar and her singing. The bathroom had the perfect echo. They played “suspicious minds” and it vibrated the mirror, the toilet, the towel racks. It vibrated sinks and faucets and showers above them and below them, and probably to the left and right. It occurred to him that somewhere a tired Elvis impersonator was probably singing the same song.
They played “hanging on the telephone” and the pipes rattled, water going up and going down.
It felt, for the first time in a long time, like that sunny day in the meadow. I mean it was totally different, but it smelled the same, sweat.
They other people’s sappy songs until he got the courage to show her the ones he had written. Promise not to take it personally.
She understood. She sang these lyrics about her, or about him or whatever and understood every word of it, every motivation for every word, and loved him and hated him for it.
The stain proof linoleum rattled.
They played these songs again and again, losing track of time, it was intoxicating.
Their toothbrushes rattled.
The guitar chords and the vocal notes knew just how to touch each other.
Facewash and eye liner remover shook and fell off of their shelf.
He tossed her head around singing like a star. He stood wide and strummed like god. Once in a while when they didn’t know what came next, they looked at each other right in the eyes, silently, or not so silently, depending how you look at it, decide what to do next.
Someone knocked on the door. He answered. A stream of sweat ran down his temple.
“Can you turn it down a little? It rattles all over the apartment.” The neighbor wore a UCSC sweatshirt.
“It’s really that loud? Sorry.”
“The floor in these apartments are paper fucking thin, man, they built these boxes so cheaply.”
“Ok will just do it acoustically”
Another neighbor opened a door and looked. She had red hair. “Was that you playing?”
“Yeah.”
“You starting a band?”
“Yeah.” That second yeah wasn’t me, it was her, the singer. |
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| just playing |
[Jan. 8th, 2004|03:29 pm] |
Two streams of sweat ran down the little boy’s temple. His arms flew out, he took a step forward, stamped, arms crossed, and flew out again. Veins swelled up his neck and above his ear. His determined little boy smile had deep smokers wrinkles. The arms went out and in, and he smiled closer and closer to me and my family. Pink foundation dripped with the sweat.
A long time ago, I remember my dad peeling off a sweat soaked costume backstage. I was too young to understand his plays, except that in some of his plays he acted out the part of his father his father. He would look up, talk to the ceiling, and tie his shoe, write on an overhead projector, and people watched him. They laughed sometimes, but mostly just crossed their legs and watched. Then he would come back stage and mop himself off with a towel, inflated veins pumping blood everywhere.
The little boy, despite his best effort, despite all that blood pumping to his brain, was obviously a professional. In that second he was clearly an actor. He probably mopped himself off backstage after everyone had clapped and left. In theater you assume that the audience has a “reasonable suspension of disbelief.” People don’t expect cinematography. They’re willing to believe in the world you create, within reason. This second was a little hole in my suspension of disbelief. I could see the actor.
He went back to being a little boy for most of the play. I suspended my disbelief until he took a bow and everyone clapped, including me and my family. The lights came up.
“Is that the Sampson Family?” This happens often when we go out to a play. Both of my parents used to be professional actors, and they have plenty of actor friends who remember me as a knee high tag along at my dad’s shows. But I recognize this girl, she’s my age, red hair that’s a little bit wavy and a soft face. I think the last time I saw her she had pigtails. We ate ice cream and she got mad when the phone rang and she yelled “got it” but her parents picked it up anyway. We were just starting to get mad at our parents then.
“Minnesota actually, Macalister,” she answered questions from my mom, “English, and minoring in biology, I don’t know why. It’s just good to mix things up I think.” Standing in the theater, words obviously were obviously very easy for her. “in Ghana this spring. Yes, I’m ready for a change, you know, a different perspective.”
I couldn’t say anything. I should have told her what I was thinking, about the pigtails and the phone call. Paralysis.
“Well I’d better get back to the people who bought me the ticket. So I feel like we should hug, since I hugged your parents.” I leaned over some black microphone chords and hugged her awkwardly. For some reason I always play an awkward character in situations like that. |
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