standing

hudled really

against an old courthouse in madras suit

rain pounding against his rickety umbrella

and his hopes and dreams locked away

his life wasted away inside the tiny courtroom within

and his eyes in tears.

And I walked past him in the rain, shivering, shielding my own eyes as the torrential downpour did nothing for the city air but feel it with a warm liquid sense of hope. The temperature lowered, city lights turned on and the warm churgling of water running down the gutter into a vast river beneath ruled the atmosphere. And i kept walking holding tight to the sides of my bright yellow poncho rather than offer a helping hand. I guess we find out more about who we are not when we are under fire but when we are not. In a position of supreme comfort what do you do? What do you wish to do? Who do you wish to do? Some of us keep walking ignoring the splashing cars zooming by in their tiny protected, ambulant cubicles.

So i took it slow and trudged the rest of the way home. Maybe tomorrow I’ll earn more morally redeemable karma points not in the spiritual sense but in the I want to feel slightly better about myself, if only for a little, if only to justify myself as a human being.

The hangover

The early flight

The feeling you get after you slept on your hand and it feels like an extraneous, estranged foreign body that does not belong in that oddly shaped place between your elbow and your shoulder. It flops around helplessly and you marvel at your body’s inability to move. Its almost tragic. To think about how much we dont control.

We dont know when our heart is beating safe for the fact that we stay alive. You breathe with no real conscious thought about it ever crossing your mind. You think without being able to help yourself. Can YOU decided when your hair and nails grow and when they dont? And i’ve yet to see someone control blinking. Is it that our minds are weak or our body’s strong.

I think we’ll never know. But for now, without a plan or agenda, i intend to find out in a ruthless, slow, possibly failure-ridden way. Heres to jumping into the infinite abyss of life (note this is only metaphorical no need to go all concerned parenting on me).

-M. Homais

That is to say, I use floaties and stay near the shallow end.

But I couldnt help picturing myself in the warm embrace of the toxic heat of the caribbean, inhaling the fumes of the tongue-in-cheek (literally) hopefully scantily clad women sipping on pretty colored water while listening to “from 0-60 in 3.5″ as the bar tender hands me a key mischievously. Happy thoughts in other words. The woman beside me, a 55 year old with the body of a 40 year old, the stamina of a 30 year old and the attitude of a 20 year old, would let her leg casually fall revealing taut skin and a toned body. Zing.

My mind, racing ahead of my body would have immortalized the experience in stone (or in a weblog, it’s all relative). But thats not the point my dear reader, what happens to me on the beach before the eyes of a family of seven is none of your business. (though further inquiries are encouraged)

The true horror of the story is the unprotected sunburns, the tan lines highlighting the eternal contrast of white on bright pink or white on black. Like a pair of highlights they stand out in a sinewy land (capital pleasantville) and i wonder hot it got to be that we care more about the tan than the sun. The big gaping whole taking a load in every day as the sun rams its rays harder, farther and deeper than ever before. And all we do is open our gullets wider and wider making room for it, taking pounding after pounding.

Dont get me wrong. Its not about global warming.

Its a problem of global cooling.

But she chattered away, she was careful, she was nice and she had a stud on her nose. Left side I believe. The haircut was fine but the true meat of it, beyond her life story (some of which included the fact that her parents were divorced, both had married, the fact that she had attended state school for a while before deciding that running her fingers through peoples hair was her calling or that she had possibly the coolest hair ive seen) was the management. How does an extremely upscale hair care center (god forbid we call it a hair salon) survive in a barely regentrified neighborhood?

Management.

The moment you walk in the idea is to blast you away with a subtle combination of unfinished surfaces and the latest models of hair driers and what looks like obgyn’s seat doubling as a pedicure throne. But no matter, the importance lies on the details. The little white rocks on the counter, the courteous and pleasant, almoust flirtatious staff reveling about the presence of a heterosexual man in their midst. Thats not to say they behaved like girls at an all girls school where yours truly has had the experience of being oggled and eye-eaten many times. I dont pride myself on my looks but i hope my point is getting across.

The management walks you down the stairs. The management walks you down the stairs. (Is it them caring about me or me suing them in case i strip and dont have a short 100 pound beauty to hang on to. The odds of her supporting my 200 pound fram are slim at best). And with a swift backrub, head massage, look over by the manager (yes, a hair manager) youre done and ready to go. Included in the price is the little tip envelope you may adress and personalize to your hair stylist. A bubbly young woman who had graduated the night before but had nonetheless two more weeks of schooling to go. The main source of concern deriving form this concerned the 5th of July. How to drive back from Maryland shore through Jersey at 630 am on the 5th to make it to class by 830 while possibly still, completely, utterly, redonkoulously black out drunk. Aaaaa the questions. But as a smiled and nodded and said confidently: just dont go to sleep, drink some coffee and lots of water i thought to myself.

The carnival of recks, streaked mascara, untamed hair and baggy eyes that would ensue that day at hair school would be terrifying. No amount of management manages the employees on the fourth. An interesting thought. To the men who give us prohibition heres a toast, a smile and hope that nobody asks us who the founding fathers were (Kennedy? Franklin?) because to that we would reply with a blue collar response: U.S.A.! with our balled up fists to either side of our heads, the drunken haze already blurring our vision.

So heres to a day of foreplay where everyone still pretends that something extraordinary will happen on friday. In truth only the ordinary will. People, merriment, red white and blue and fireworks. Pretty lights distracting us from the fact that the management is about to change, our jobs are on the line and all we can do is look around and hope that those we care about are standing next to us.

-Id like the apple pie please…

-Im sorry sair we ran out of pies today

-Id like a mcflurry

-Im sorry sir, the soft serve machine is not working

-What the f… (his voice began to adopt that treble that only selfrighteous “ballers” have). What desserts CAN you serve?

- None sir, none for at least 15 minutes (Smile on her face. Her eyes gave her away as her hand slipped under the cash register potentially feeling around for the emergency button

-Bullshit!

As the preteen thug turned around I looked down a little concern for my own aesthetic face and soft brown eyes. He started walking away but just as he hit the ketchup stand, reached down his crotch in the most manly of fashions and pulled out a glock (note to the reader: i dont know anything about guns so a glock is a gun not a glock) and started shooting up the place. As my chest hit the ground and everybody scram he finished his clip. Ran out. And my heart rate raced and raced as everybody dusted themselves and kept milling around like nothing was happening.

-M. Homais

in my other life I lived in Mexico for a while. The family I stayed with made me a part of theirs and I never really made them a part of mine. Call it a cultural difference. From the moment I walked into their warm embrace at the airport (i was a complete stranger to them just as they were the oddly curious family willingly housing an unknown individual in their home) I felt differetn. Maybe it was the kiss given to me by the mother, the back thumping that the father pursued or the even slightly more thrilling kiss from their teenage daughter (something i would later discover meant little to nothing about her particular interest in me and more with her own cultural traditions) but I always felt like an observer. In a way thats exactly what I was.

I wore pink.

IN a country of chauvinistic ideals, racism is nonexistent. In a country where wearing pink is considered highly progressive I found myself at constant odds by the contrasting views the mexican people held about americans. We have an image: an institution unto ourselves better described by Anita Loos than anybody else. We are no such thing. In a foreign country, no matter how many lonely planet pages we’ve highlighted, how “well” we may speak the language or how mentally open we are, we are still nothing but foreigners. A curiosity to be regarded both with awe and respect (with subtle inflections of disdain from time to time). Whenever we went to “mercados” or their much more impressive ideas of flea markets where the idea of bargaining is bread and butter i would often find myself short changed. I was american and thus could afford more. No matter that i was trying to get a cheaper price on fake american eagles or lacostes or the latest version of word I was still american. Something was at odds.

The sights did not discriminate however. I often found myself running through the streets trying to suck it all in, listening to the sounds no longer heard in american cities (due mainly to our all pervasive lack of sidewalks) like cursing road rage, smelling it all in, the four day old fat frying an assortment of edibles while at the same time seeing century old cathedrals and centers of culture that seemed to stick out like a white stone in a muddy river. The centro cabanas presented such a revolutionary ideal of humanity that it seemed out of place lying, palace-like, between two of the grimmiest avenues of the city. 4 massive thrones stood before it, dali sculptures that were used more for play than for art. Sculptures rubbed clean in some parts by the countless touristy hands feeling them up and dirtied everywhere else.

I loved Mexico for what it afforded me. Reality. Escaping from an utterly prefabricated world is difficult only when were unwilling to travel.

-M. Homais

I keep a brisk pace.

She looks back and I flip out my cell phone, busy myself with a nonexistent cell phone message and decided halfway that a call is far more believable so as I put the phone up to my ear she turns back around. Crisis averted. My muse continues. Draw the thunderstorm in the background. The kind of thunder storm that preys on Midwestern townies so as to force them in doors in a morose state of mind forcing them to sustain menial conversations about their days, their children and their future (corn?). She goes on.

Her breathing heavies and it is a far cry from the soothing and exciting tones a more shapely woman might make. These are laborious; almost tortuous half screams of pain that rattle their way out long after shes already trying to suck another breath in. It would appear the air in the atmosphere is insufficient for her. It is either that or she is in terrible shape, i cant tell. And I am not a hatter. I used to be monstrous myself as a young child. I look back at portraits of myself 15 years ago and wonder how my back ever tolerated such a constant strain. How my neck could hide those days. I was the biggest fan of button up shirts and loose cargo pants (possibly ahead of my time) because they helped me hide the large amorphous blob i was underneath. but then i changed.

Maybe I started walking, or “running” and as I ran past the jiggling I figured I wanted to be the one behind. Staring quietly and wondering how a person let themselves get like that. Not in front, a person like that.

In another lifetime I lived in philadelphia. Not the E.A.G.L.E.S. kind of philadelphia. Or I should say not the nitty gritty philadelphia styled living with a bear in hand, a sports team jersey on my back, heavy duty timberlands and a red neck moustache. I was a minority within a minority and wondered all the time where I fit in. But this is not a story about a misfit nor is it a coming of age tale. Hell, its not even a story at all.

I must admit. I was always surrounded by opulence. Waltzing in and out of cocktail parties, drinks by the trayfull i liked to keep a quiet profile. Even as I watched the profile of any of the members of the Clintonian ilk or woke up in the morning for my morning walk with my walking stick and my doggie bag for trash I always liked to stop. Take a step. Then stop. Stooping a little everytime, bending over, picking stuff up.

I saw hungry women. Literally. I saw hungry men. Figuratively. And it was always a hope of mine that I could make a platitude out of that. I think ive suceeded.

So picture a cool summer day. Thats a lie, theres no such thing in the muck of humid festering heat that is philadelphia in the summer. Like Card’s Rotterdam philadelphia was a sweltering muck in the summer. Heat waves escaping the streets, the river currents flowing north as the river ran south. A contradiction in actuality not in principle. I think Philadelphia is gorgeous.

It would appear that Philadelphia derives its quaint attitude from its historical beginning. Its business like attitude from its big brother, new york. Its playful attitude from Atlantic city. For a defining metropolis it seems to borrow a lot from its neighbors. Soon it’ll be borrowing from Delaware. My mistake, its thirsty population already sicks solace in Delawares untaxed unregulated liquor stores. Pennsylvania still thinks in prohibition terms. Hanging on to the old? Philadelphia houses some of the world’s leading research facilities, some of which i’m sure reasearch debatable topics on equally failing terms of religion, morals or ethics. But thank God for apathy.

And music. Philadelphia doesnt rely on its warm sense of hospitality or the warm fuzzy feeling of waking up to the chirping birds outside. A city permanently under construction that seems never to have a new anything. So the amorphous eco friendly went up across the building. It has pretty lights. We arent exactly seagulls (though ill admit the resemblance can be uncanny) but its not quite enough. And before you go on and judge this as some random diatribe by a bored housewife whose husband died a year ago and she has to drink and write herself to sleep every night or a 30 something computer geek with nothing better to do i will say right now: it is not. My lack of proper english derives partly from my anger at the english language itself and the insufficiencies it has and stubbornly refuses to make up for and from my true sense of self righteousness. So this isnt political. or maybe it is. but this is not about your poltics or mine.

Philadelphia the city of romance. (If you can still string a thought along then bear with me. Im not talking about tom hanks here or the soon to be transformers 2 (by the way michael….PRINCETON DOESNT HAVE FRATERNITIES…just a little heads up))but in all the sense of the word the city was made to be romantic. A place where you can get mugged and be the protector of your girlfriends, a place where the opportunity to take your jacket off and place it over a muddy puddle so your date can walk over is perennial or a place with so many doors to open your right arm gets stiff is truly a city of romance. It has rivers (albeit dirty ones). It has skyscrapers (albeit functional ones). It has restaurants, it has south philly, it has the square and a myriad of little things that make hearing about the drive by shooting in west philly or the new baby shops opening in the gayborhood equally pleasing.

Smell it in. The city of brotherly love.

-I left around 12.

I believe I come from a distant planet and belong to a distant species that unlike humans have some sort of self restraint. There are few of us left. Most of us are incarcerated in what you people call universities; some of us have found a haven in lower level schools where we manage to transmit our ideas to your young in hopes of saving even a marginally small fraction of your world and still others have escaped and are called radically liberal by your people. Though most of what I believe seems to come from what your society disbelieves and not from factual evidence of my home planet I still think it forms an important part of the intrinsic values we follow at home. On my home planet, Sanity, we believe the following:

-We believe in equal opportunity for men and women. Studies, as well as simple observation have shown us that women can perform as well as men in perhaps all areas. Of the past four Sanity presidents three have been women. We share responsibility with them in all aspects of life, though we still have to find a way to share the experience of pregnancy fully. I am not worried; our best scientists are hard at work to find how. You might say we are a utopia in the equality of sexes though I assure you this is not true. There is no perfect distribution of opportunity between men and women; and yet we try. We do not perform in Help the Women events nor do we pretend to encourage their voice while making sure that no one hears them. We at least, are true in this.

-We believe in peace, not war. Though admittedly we have fought wars, our idealist train of thought developed much in the same fashion as your hippy years without the excessive pot smoking and rampant promiscuity (though we may have indulged a bit here and there). Your whole concept- si vis pacem para bellum – makes as much sense as a cat riding a dog riding a horse. You must begin to understand that economic and military war is not the best way to solve issues between nations. It is only a way to leave issues unresolved until future wars. Do you really want another after- WWI scenario? Do you really want an embittered country hungry for revenge?

We believe in our history. We tend to study it to avoid calamities instead of repeating them. Is it perhaps you did not notice how the way history, your history especially, has patterns. Every two hundred years one of your great civilizations loses super-power status and still you take no measures to prevent this. Have you given up? Do you see it as unstoppable? Then England’s system broke down and now the US is letting its system break down. And before them it was the Romans and the Egyptians and the Persians (must I go on?). I can only give you one piece of advice: practice what you preach. You have politicians and other big-shot nobodies claiming that history is an important subject because it helps us avoid previous mistakes and yet, it is usually the subject that gets the least attention. It is the subject that fewer undergraduates study. Why? You create your own despair and yet you are surprised by what happens. How could racism go wrong? Wasn’t apartheid right? It seems you haven’t realized that you are the masters of your own ill written faith. History means something and though I am sure you can’t really tell what the difference between Neanderthal and cave men is, I can tell you this: History is important. Get it through your head, or it will.

-We believe in altruism. This is to say, we believe in helping each other not out of social compromise or public relations reasons but because it is right. How do we determine what’s right? By seeing your wrongs. We host no fancy galas where people dine on geese and pheasant and pate de foie while deciding whether to feed beans or rice to orphans. We have no hypocritical self-named stars that contribute money just to get their pictures taken. We have problems: hunger, orphans, tsunamis, earthquakes and hurricanes. We are not impervious to damage or catastrophe and I would lie if I said that we are close to solving all these problems, but at least we do not waste hundreds of millions of dollars a year on bureaucrats that try to solve our problems. Oddly, you pay these bureaucrats to draw up solutions and when they arrive to them you disregard them completely saying either: the time is not right or, it is too expensive. Funny how it isn’t “too expensive” to support a 10 billion dollar institution a year but when it comes to listening to this institution it is. Why do you do this? Because this way, it looks like you are doing something, like you care for the starved in the sub-Saharan region.

I write this to you, the leader of the free world, because I believe you will do what is right for your race. You will read some meaning into these words and use it to right your wrongs although, in true human fashion I expect you to disregard this letter and pass it along to some sort of office assistant that will no doubt, after skimming it, send it in a chain email or shred it thoroughly in his brand new Dell shredder. I ask you to do some soul searching; look for common sense. Trust me it works. The citizens of sanity use it and it has the annoying habit of making us live better lives. I sincerely hope this provides you with some insight as to what my planet does and what yours failed miserably to do. I wish to stress the importance of this letter; you must consider this a warning. We are a peaceful planet and we wish you no harm. The destruction of your planet (something you’ll achieve in about fifty years either to massive flooding in the polar ice caps or nuclear holocaust) will leave the universe out of balance. Like any ecosystem the universe needs a balance and it would seek it in some creatures much like yourselves. Then, we’ll have to worry about a new set of thought developing primates that think they own the world and are gods(whoever he is) of to the universe.

Yours truly,

An inhabitant of Sanity

P.S. Love the music

***

The headlines yelled: “Author Kurt Vonnegut dead at 84.” An honest mistake. This was not an author who died. It wasn’t a friend leaving his friends. HE would have been the first to admit that. There comes a point in a man’s life when he stands above his fellow men with a vision granted only to those with a different understanding of the workings of the world.

***

It was a vision. It was not a vision in the prophetic sort of way that would-be messiah’s claim to see things but a vision of understanding or misunderstanding. He understood there was confusion in the world. He did not see how. He was already a step ahead of most of us. He tried to show us the chaos. His work was not fiction but an alternate non-fiction. He was not a subtle man. Or he was a subtle man in a way we can’t see. We know he talked about chaos and the convergence of random events in his novels. What we cannot understand is why he refused to write things as the rest of us saw it. It has something to do with his eyes I think.

***

(Brief dabbing of the eyes)

The man never received the Nobel Prize we knew was coming. Perhaps its best to do without the “Nobel” year. Kurt would not have enjoyed that. Better to be known for your works than for your prizes. Of course the large financial compensation that comes with the prize would have spared Kurt from driving his Saab agency into bankruptcy. Something about that just smells of Swedish conspiracy. I can see him smiling.

Kurt was a mentor to most of us. He guided me through my travels in Europe, teaching me the 12 step program as though they were his original idea of life lessons. I never knew the difference until now. Interesting how things happen don’t you think? He would not have wanted me to make this a story with a moral. He would have wanted me to point out the things wrong with myself and decry the mistakes of others. He would have wanted me to smoke (takes out cigar and lights it). Remember, smoke cigars not cigarettes. Cigars are good for you.

***

Dead at 84. Vonnegut liked to stand out. He was a curious soul. Dying a soldier’s death would not have befitted him. The idea of having his body lying face downward with a hole through his chest and his arm bent at an odd angle would have been perfect for a scene in one of his stories but not for his life. Only stupid men die for their country. Smart men fight for their country.

***

And now, to quote Kurt in his piece of work: “Thank you for paying attention, I’m outta here.”

-Sincerely,

Kilgore Trout