Archive for February 2008
My neck is acting up today. I wake up feeling my neck stiff and pained up. It’s a result of some whiplash—due to the presence of a bird in my room. Two weeks ago, I woke up to a shuffling noise in my room. As I opened my eyes, a thing flew over me, a blur I couldn’t really discern as I was still foggy. Regardless, I freaked. I fell off my bed, knocking over my space heater and slammed into the door, somehow managing to shout “Fuck!” at the same time. I spent the next hour trying to cajole the poor creature to get the hell out of my room, reinforcing the opinion that animals really aren’t that smart. Some might be, but this bird certainly wasn’t. I wonder how a person could explain the concept of glass to a creature who’s daily life consists of eating crap and crapping on things.
I spent most of the day in Chinatown, experiencing another one of those rainy days. I’m riding on my bicycle, which is now creaking magnificently, and I enjoy the wet drops seeping through my trucker hat as I enjoy the inner vista of Washington D.C. I go to Urban Outfitters—my latest treasure trove for interesting mental fodder—and pickup two books. I’ve been reading with a monstrous appetite lately. Since the start of the year I’ve read eight books:
Think and Grow Rich, The Game, The Road, Spook, Fast Food Nation, I’m Dreaming of Gwen Stefani, Working Stiff, 22 Jamaican Stories and Brave New World.
I pickup Secrets of a Model Dorm and Rules of Attraction. This is my stilted form of research into sharpening my writing craft. I’ve written a lot, and lately I feel the need to do more non-fiction than a bunch of fast-paced thrillers. The more I read non-fiction (especially those with lots of sex, introspection and random scenarios) is the more I know I can tell a GREAT story for example, this happened today:
February 18, 2008:
I’m sitting in my room, watching Tony Soprano eat ice cream. I think to myself it would be great to do something sexual with his wife Carmela. She has that constant look of stress and sexual tension built into her so well it seems she’s just dying to get laid, multiple times. My phone rings and I don’t recognize the area code. I answer.
“Hello.”
A woman speaks to me. Her voice sounds like the voice you hear in any elevator; computerized, young and hot.
“This is IP Relay.” She says.”Someone is calling you using their computer to communicate with you.”
I raise an eyebrow.
“Uhm.. who is this person?” I say, playing along.
“I am not allowed to tell you who the person is, but I can initiate a conversation.”
I smile for a second. The woman really sounds like a robot.
“What is this?” I ask. I am genuinely confused.
“IP Relay allows someone to talk to you while they are using an online service. They will type something, and I will read it to you while they type. You can respond, then you must say “Go Ahead” then I will type your response to the person.”
“Okay…” I reply.
“Is that a Go Ahead?”
“No….wait, I mean, Okay to you, I still don’t know who that person is.”
“Are you going to initiate the chat?”
“Sure.”
“Is that a go ahead.”
“Yeah, Go ahead.”
I hear furious clicking of keys in the background. I wonder if she’s really typing. She has a flat monotone that doesn’t’ sound human. It is perfectly practiced and whatever questions I ask don’t seem to stimulate her emotionally. I wonder if she’s a new prototype from Japan.
“The conversation has been initiated. You may begin speaking.”
“Who is this?”
“Is that a go ahead?”
“Whoops, yes, Go ahead.”
More clicking. What would come next would be disturbing and also fascinating. The lady begins speaking.
“What do you mean you don’t know who this is? I let you come all over my face this weekend. How many deaf guys do you know?”
I froze. For two reasons. One, the lady said it with ZERO emotion but managed to make it sound like a person was speaking. Two, Cum on who’s face?
“Okay, I get it. This is some kind of weird prank. What is this?” I say.
“Is that a go ahead?”
“No this is not a ‘Go Ahead’ I’m talking to you.”
“I’m sorry sir, I’m not allowed to speak to anyone while the chat is in session.”
“Well if you don’t tell me what this is then I’m hanging up. What is this?”
Silence.
I hang up, and look at the phone. This really is America, I think to myself. I pause my Sopranos episode on my computer and grab my bag, the day awaits.
End of daily log
We’ll see what happens. As the days go by and my scenarios get more bizarre, I also have to grow and change as a person… y’know, so the story can have meaning and what not. I just watched this film called 4 Months. It won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Now that was a film. Ballsy.
I wonder If that lady is going to call me back.
“Is that Paris Hilton on your shirt?” A guy says to me. I’m looking straight down into a urinal, watching dark yellow liquid escape my body through a convenient route. Without raising my head, I say “No, its just a random blonde chick.” “Oh,” he continues (he himself relieving his body of fluids as well), “I just came back from the Las Vegas Porn convention and I might have met that little chick who’s on your shirt.”
This was in the men’s bathroom at Local 16, a bar on U St. It was weird enough that I had “urinal-side” conversation, but what are the odds that the guy beside me just happened to come from the city of Sin?
During the night, my shirt had been light conversational fodder, and I do mean light. Its a thin yellow shirt with an image printed on it. In full colour, it is a picture of an attractive blonde woman eating a half-finished donut. She is wearing a white shirt that reads “GIANT CUM” in large black letters. The shirt has been siting idle in my wardrobe for about three months as I couldn’t really decide where to wear it. I toyed with the idea of wearing it when I was at home in Jamaica but decided strongly against it. A guy wearing a shirt that said those words, girl or not, would probably be taken as gay and promptly dispatched.
It’s Friday, and its my friend’s birthday. I receive a long text message somewhere between six and seven p.m telling me to come to Saint Ex, a bar off 14th St. I fiddle with the idea of going (I am very tired from spending the entire day shuffling coffee and doing grunt work in Farragut North) and then I play an intense game of indoor soccer. A crushing defeat, a few wasted curses, one of which was “Fucking drop man! Mark you man! Come on! Come on!” which I blurted out three seconds before the end of the game.
When I arrived home, a warm, smelly mixture of sweat and raging hormones, I received a call from my friend Allison.
“Heyyy…” she says.
Her voice always sounds like she’s smiling, if that makes any sense. She says she and some people are traipsing about U st, and they were seeing what I was up to. “Give me a few hours to rest and then I’ll meet up with you guys wherever you are.” I eat a massive meal and try to sleep immediately afterwards. I spent thirty minutes staring at my curtain, realizing sleep will be impossible. I laugh to myself and play some music. This is a part of my Friday ritual—the wanton eruption of music from my speakers—and it fulfills two key things: One, it gets me in a good mood, no matter how boring or lackluster my week was. Two, it gets me a in a good mood, no matter how boring of lackluster my week was.
My track selections are based primarily on my moods from whatever events transpired during the week. I feel a sense of overwhelming Melancholy because some girl I liked pull the ol’ flakeroo on me again, I might start out with some touchy-feely Sugar Ray, segue into some disturbing yet pleasing Flyleaf then go ballistic and listen to some hyper-violent Dancehall music. At that point I am so charged that I am ready to run to the hills and have ten babies with a group of six-foot mountain women.
This never happens, but more often than not, I end up at bars talking to women in a five-foot four to five-foot eight range who are less than willing to be man handled in post-Mavado coitus.
So, like any Friday, I started playing some dancehall music. My mood during the week was somewhat flat. There was no crescendo, no up, no down. It was merely there. As such, a quick dose of dancehall always does the trick. After a few songs played and I heard “Boy get shot inna face”, “Boy get shot inna head”, “My gun…”, “Body on the ground”, Over and over in different songs, I turn it off. Hyper-violent music really does have its own time and place. I switch to the Garden State sound track and listen to some Shins. I felt much better. By no measure of the imagination was I in an excitable mood, but I put on my Giant Cum shirt anyways.
I hop onto my bike, a wobbly dangerous piece of Architecture and head out. I’ve been frequenting U St more it seems. Before it was almost foreign, merely that in between place from destination to destination. Saint Ex is where everyone is. As soon as I walk in, my friends try to zip up my shirt.
“Wow, your shirt says “Giant Cum”.” Allison says. Her friend, Christina, reaches over and attempts to zip up the jersey I’m wearing over the shirt. I laugh.
The conversation runs the gamut, from my non-fiction writing aspirations, using a journal as a tool to cross-examine one’s self with, a rotating story of how a friend spilled beer on someone’s shoes and other things. Downstairs, they are playing old-school hip-hop, which I do not enjoy. Allison and Christina make good fun of it, dancing in tune to the beats. I barely dance these days, much less to old hip-hop that I can’t relate to. Each time I hear “Engine Engine number nine, on the New York Transit line….” I cringe.
Not really because the song annoys me, but I’m in a bar with mostly preppy white guys who raise their hands as the songs come one, as if to say “Dude, that’s my joint!”. After a little while, my Serbian friend strolls in, tall and resolute with a swishy head of hair. I give her a perfunctory happy birthday kiss on the cheek and introduce her to my friends.
The night goes on like this for a while longer. A few people smile and point at my Giant Cum shirt, and I smile back.
We head to another bar, Local 16 briefly. They are playing house music, the kind I really love. I am however, insanely tired and my knees hurt. I won’t be the tall, sexy Euro-dancing Jamaican guy tonight. We sit at a table downstairs. There was a moment when I almost fell into conversation with the ladies about my current track record with meeting “qualified” women. After a few stops and starts, I successfully dodged the conversation,
Not before a few items slipped.
“Have you even been in love?” Christina asked.
“Of course.” I responded with gusto.
“Was she someone you knew?” she says.
“Yes, I knew her from school.”
“Ah…”
Allison interjects.
“That is SO true! I remember when I was in love it was someone I had known for a long time before. He was a friend before I loved him.”
Allison goes on to mention a survey done by National Geographic about cities with the most singles, citing DC and New York as having some of the highest numbers. We chatted on the topic a little more, with me trying not to speak about certain flagging aspects of my life in a bar of all places, Allison no doubt reminiscing about her possibly current love, and Christina looking at me in a way that suggest that if I were to continue speaking, she would probably feel pity for me. I made sure to dodge the rest of the conversation.
“Listen ladies,” I said, straightening up.
“It’s nice to talk about these things if they are a prevailing thought in your mind. For me they aren’t. I don’t want to start chatting about these sappy situations and then you all have good reason to pity me and feel all sorry-like.”
They both reacted at the same time, like a set of Birds being startled in a cage.
“Oh no, No!” they said.
“This is nothing,” Christina started. ”We girls talk about these things all the time.”
“In fact, just before we headed out we were talking about a similar subject.” Allison added. I nodded for a second, then completely switched the conversation. A few minutes later, it was Ben’s Chili Bowl time.
Christina somehow gets served in three minutes behind a line of twenty people. She brings a large, disgusting-looking bowl of fries over. It looks like a cat threw up and then took a large, runny dump on a set of large fries. I was offered.
“I’ll pass.” I said. After some more light conversation, it was time to go.
By now the temperature had dropped at least fifteen degrees, and again I regret my Alfie-isms. I have no gloves and I’m riding my bike back home. I follow the ladies a few blocks from their house and jet home. Inside, I wolf down a donut I bought at 7-Eleven just before I reached home and sip on some soda. Friday was OK.
I flop into bed and wonder if I should watch a movie on Saturday, or walk idly around Chinatown watching out for some of those President’s day sales. No matter, I say, wrapping the covers around me, watching the word disappear under my closing eyelids.
It’s Valentine’s day, and i’ve received three phone calls to commemorate this day of self-loathing or particularly kinky-sex, chocolate laced underwear and looking at the phone, wishing it were a little cat or some animal that would reciprocate your need for affection.
The first call was from my mother. Apparently, the father of my friend who was my roommate in my freshman year died from some strange complications after doing light surgery. The other two calls were both from one of my best friends. The first explaining to me his need to grab a drink after work, the second to mention being rejected by a girl who he wasn’t even trying to talk to.
I think each Valentine’s day leads us to think of the previous one. I’m no hopeless romantic, but I like these little days we give ourselves to be more loving, more considerate and more creative in the range of gifts we give. (I’ve never given any girl a rose…. EVER).
Last year this time, I got a text message from a girl I didn’t know liked me. “Do you have a valentine?” it said. I smirked as I read the message, and didn’t reply. In two days, she gave me a grisly account of having sex with the guy she chose to be her valentine in her shower. “Ah, ” I said to myself. “Maybe there is something to Valentine’s day after all.”
To celebrate this Valentine’s day, 2008, I got myself a copy of Love Actually and bought a footlong Tuna sandwich from subway. Yeah, its weird, but they don’t have gourmet cheese and a bottle of wine at Subway. I chose this film, because it makes me feel good. Honestly, I have no desire to feel extremely lonely on this day of days, and in actuality, today is meaningless. Its a day like any other, with a label of love. I remember watching Love Actually in a theatre in Jamaica by myself. In Jamaica we have intermission, and I tell you, when the lights came on, every couple in the house was arm in arm, longingly staring at one another. I had to cough and act like my seat was a buxom brunette, ready to hug me with her slim arms and laugh in a way that tickled my neck.
Either way, I chose this movie because its one of those broader, more expansive love stories. I can either pick the adorable antics of the English writer and his Portuguese love interest, the weird “best-friend-loves-your-wife” situation with Keira Knightley and Hubby, or the very odd love found between two softcore porn stars. I like the soundtrack of the movie and how they shot England. After I watched this movie in Christmas 2003, I was ready to travel to England and live there permanently.
Now, watching the film for the second time, I can say that it stilled moved me in some ways. I like the screen shots showing people meeting each other. I have very fond memories of either meeting people, or being met at the airport. The montage of fathers hugging sons, friends and lovers made me feel like there just might be something left in humanity after all.
So, another day ends and this blog isn’t really necessary, but I promised myself I had to write something for Valentine’s day, after I watched my movie. The long weekend looms ahead and I feel like I just might take it easy. Watch a movie, eat another sandwich, and try to sleep blissfully, imaging that future moment that someone comes running up to me in the airport and plants a big wet one on my lips, for the world to see.
Dream?
I’m Tony Soprano, a middle-aged man with a gravelly chest of hair, pummeling the life out of a Indian man in the middle of a jungle that seems vaguely familiar after having a massive ninja fight with four Thai girly men searching for the gay cast member of an odd reality show I’ve found myself in the midst of, when everything erupts into chaos as thousands of Chinese men in full grey overalls start attacking the Thai boys, which is after a brutal cycle of eating spaghetti in a place that seems like something straight out of the Jungle Book, being chased by a very rotund woman who runs like a cheetah, and smiling as my henchman (who happens to be Russian ) prepares to help me beat the life out of the aforementioned Indian man.
That was my dream, or at least what I can remember of it.
I know exactly why the dream was an odd mix of weird images and random circumstances. I’ve been reading this interesting book called Working Stiff, which chronicles the sexual escapades of a late-blooming brit named Grant Stoddard. I ate a large bowl of spaghetti just before my midday nap, was watching bit pieces of The Secret (a movie filled with scenery from everywhere) and listening to Erupt’s “Click My Finger” song, which explains the continuous feeling of a need to dance throughout the entire dream. What I cannot explain is a ninja fight with four girly-men, me suddenly morphing into Tony Soprano, the Chinese riot, or how the dream began.
I remember the last part vividly. After I started to dispatch of the four highly trained girly-men, a door blasts open, and a stream of Chinese guys rush in. Not tens, not hundreds, but thousands. The area (which is a hillside in some foreign country) is filled to the brim with men in gray overalls. Somewhere over a loudspeaker, I hear a voice say that the men are “free” (whatever that means), and as I’m looking at the crowd breakup, someone pinches my wallet. I curse myself, saying “Dude, this isn’t a movie!” because one of the thousandsof similarly dressed men took my wallet. I then begin chasing a very suspicious Asian man with Shang Tsung-long hair wearing a green dress-thingy. It looks like he is a lost marauder from that band of desert-roaming pirates in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. I chase this guy (who is probably just the best representation my mind can make of a Chinese thief based on popular media) and it he leaps over a wall and I accost him. This is when I turn into Tony Soprano, beat him up, then hold on to the Indian guy, who was trying to steal my credit cards, business cards and whatever else was in my wallet, as I pummeled the thief. What was weird, almost hilarious, was when Soprano (or me) gets that tell-tale look of satisfaction that comes just before metering out a lot of punishment to someone “deserving” of it before they die, a massive Lithuanian looking fellow with icy blond hair in an Army guys’ crew cut appears from the underbrush, ready to dispatch the guy with me. This makes no sense—Tony Soprano is racist and doesn’t interact with blondes, unless they are prostitutes or his wife—and it is at point I wake up, wondering where I am, and what the hell I was dreaming about.
The last few weeks have felt like this. A bit chaotic, a bit confusing and a little off. I’ve been patrolling the city a lot, watching people, and getting inspired to write. I find it annoying that I am most inspired to create insightful prose when I’m far away from home. I rarely write anything in my room, which is a labyrinthine representation of packaged isolation. I feel like describing moments when I’m in Chinatown, blindly going from bar to bar in Adam’s morgan, riding my bike and fearing it will crash, or most recently, attending a sex-themed party (complete with pornography on the walls, sex candies and condoms in large dishes) and feeling disappointed the crowd was a bit stuffy. (Stuffy could be replaced with “tight-assed” if you wish).
An aspect of my confusion most likely lies in the fact that I am not inspired to write much, and this is fueled by many things. In fact, I have been hesitant to blog any of my thoughts because I’m beginning to see it as a pointless venture. Like much of my writing, it feels empty; a representation of other emptiness around me. Which faceless people read my blog? In what order? Of what nationality?
I have no idea. No tengo idea. Wakarima-freaking-sen.
But this doesn’t really bother me I realize. I just can’t bother to open up. I secretly planned to keep another blog, a private one that could keep an accurate record of my “deepesht, darrrkesssht, thoughts” but I decided not to. I could just buy a journal and call it a day.
This dream was wacky enough to prompt the ever-interesting-and-always-enjoyable bird blog, but there is more to tell, lots more. Tales of rejection, woe, the throes of the work force, racism, animal-based rejection (yes, this is true, even I couldn’t believe it) among other things.
A lot has happened in a few weeks, mostly good, some bad, somethings I can’t label yet. I think I’ll try and go back into the mindset I was in when I started this blog six months ago. It is an outlet for my thoughts to enter the Universe of the internet, where unlike going to a mountain top saying “God, are you there?” and probably hearing a bird squawk somewhere in the distance, I ge to see things like:
I want to go on adventures with you.
Oct 11, 9:14 PM
or
Is not nuh candy corn, ah di oil inna yuh back! Stop wid dis I’m-too-aloof-and pinky-finger-stiffened-and-gots-near-unattainable-standards-to-give the-bourgeois-the-time-of-day and kill off a ting! Time fi tear up bed sheet and ting.
Nov 9, 5:33 PM
Or maybe
See, we Asians are perpetually perplexed too–Asian girls we think are hella ugly always manage to be considered pretty. So maybe REALLY what is happening is that the average-looking white guys are getting the average-looking Asian girls (for Asians anyway), but you on the outside think that she’s a prize!
Maybe?
Oct 9, 6:37 AM
Either way, the blog will continue. I’ll have to gear up, get recharged and work some stuff out, but a writer needs to write. Alas I will blog anon.
Mind of Marcus 