Moses supposes his toeses are Roses,
But Moses supposes Erroneously,
Moses he knowses his toeses aren’t roses,
As Moses supposes his toeses to be!
I guess I learned it the hard way: by never learning at all.
I never got this need I’ve always so desperately urged to feed, this need for words, for talks and a particularly intellectually stimulating exchange with others; I simply thought it to be a human thing.
I guess it’s not only human as it is inherent in any living thing, i.e. any sort of thing/object/animal that is an active part of an environment or a system needs to be in constant exchange.
I finally see that exchange is the stuff of life.
I guess.
This absolutely unnerving need to discourse about whatever until I’ve exhausted any and every possibility to understand it drives me insane. What is it? This depression I experience every time I feel I’m being under inspired by the lack of interest I so dreadfully despise in others and yet engage in embracing the same attitude fully as if everybody else’s need for exchange was just a laughable attempt to seem smart enough to hang around me…
Oh lord! What was that?
I answer: just another lovely and frustrating day in the land of tinsel.
My mom is an eternal fountain of encouragements. She believes in me with all of her. She believes in my brother and sister with each beat of her heart. She believes in the world in all its grandeur and knows that we will always strive to do well by it. My mother has taught me that I can do anything; that the world is mine as it is yours.
And because I can do anything it is hard to do, to practice, to be any just one thing. It is hard to say that I will dedicate my life to just one cause—one place—one dream. And when people ask me what I plan to do with this one crazy life, how do I put that down into words? How do I tell them that because I can do anything, I will attempt everything?
We are here. We are here only for a short time. The days are ticking and I still haven’t been a novelist, an activist—I’m on the verge of being an anarchist—the days, they are adding up and I haven’t begun my career as a painter or a philosopher.
Why be just one thing when you can attempt everything? Why not take from this life all that you can?
We are creatures of habit. We shy away and often refuse to acknowledge the unfamiliar~steadfastly & stubbornly clinging to something that no longer exists. I keep opening the bathroom drawer for a hairbrush even though I moved it across the room over two months ago. And I keep expecting the life I had in LA to suddenly materialize whenever I go back there. People have moved. The dynamics have shifted, my sister’s and I’s perfect little Hollywood apartment is no longer ours, no longer filled with our eclectic knick~knacks & loud music and I know this.
Yet I still live my life as if someday I will return to that apartment, that time, that place, even though it is no longer there. The building still stands, the city still throbs, but that essence we created, that niche we had valiantly carved out, has been flitted away on the winds of change. Who I became then, my LA self, is still very much who I am now-though I often forget that when I’m vacuuming up pizza crusts and wiping off dirty little faces. On a clear dark night though, when I’m driving down an empty highway 9 and I can see the twinkling city lights ahead of me, I turn up the radio, roll down the window and I’m LA again.
They look back in wonder as if they never set foot in the past, as if the time that has (mistakenly) been robbed from them was the Buddha’s belly of prosperity, Santa Claus’ bag of spite or even a lucky charm taken from the shallow margins of the Ganges in India.
The past is a word seldom used with the lightness it deserves: time is a concept turned into a commodity. We learned to value it too much. Placing things or others on a pedestal was never the best way to keep them close and cherish the presence of the love you feel for them.
Anything we hold too dear, too precious and too frail may soon turn out to be wasted without being used, like the time one could say I wasted putting these words down onto a blank screen. The past is what we make of it, just like our future.
Anyway, without getting too deep into the philosophy of time past, I’d like to share yet another silly rambling related to a memory (from my past) that remains close to my heart. Are you ready for this? I’d like to talk about a…
film. No joke!
In the past, when I was a kid, ~ or a girl, or whatever ~ I grew up watching films. Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, John Cusack, Jack Nicholson, Morgan Freeman, Johnny Depp, Tom Cruise… no. Nope. None of the previously mentioned stars appeared in the films I grew up watching.
My stars were quite different, indeed. I was raised with a type of freedom that allowed me to not want to do what I was… allowed to do (thanks mom! Thanks dad!). I wanted to embrace the freedom of not indulging in it and thriving in a type of cinema I still find quite fascinating to this day: the underrated.
I don’t say this and take pride in what I now rationalize and believe to be a tremendously bold choice for such a young mind. I rather speak of this fact with a deep knowledge that I would have never learned English or learned to love film or care for music and letters if I hadn’t watched a simple and completely forgotten, existentially boring, mind blowing etc etc etc classic of the 90s alternative (read NERD) scene: Mindwalk (thank you physics teacher!).
Mindwalk set the tone and the rhythm I faithfully danced to throughout my early teenage years. It molded and folded and forged who I am now. It gave me something other films could have never given to me: a necessity to question even those certainties a suicidal man carries like heavy rocks in his pockets as he walks into the lake…
So when I think of the past and I hope to see it in a bright shade of pink, I rather not; I see it fuzzy and grey, but full.
Once Ted was held at gunpoint. His limp, dried up body lay draped across the dewy ground—ever so gracefully, entirely innocently. The policemen had been called. They’d responded quickly to a distressed young lady who had spotted a tall dark shadow lurking on her back porch. The Shadow had run, had hidden and left the young lady with an ever-growing fear that spread thru her little heart. He’d been tormenting her—watching her. The Shadow hung around, tucking behind trees & bushes and always running at the opportune time. He haunted her. This was the third time the policemen had been called to capture the Shadow in just a month. He had eluded them. He escaped. He continued to cling to the dark corners of Fourth Street, watching the young lady.
The police officers came on a mission. The Shadow was beginning to burden them with humiliation. A small town’s dark corners are always clean and he was a crumb—a little scape of filth that just couldn’t be swept away.
The house was alight and the young lady stood clutching the phone when the policemen arrived. A few words were exchanged and the men in blue split, circling the big glowing house. The anticipation hung in the crisp autumn night; even the wind quieted to listen in. The men shuffled around the house, searching for the Shadow. They held their guns high as their eyes darted from tree to tree.
And then, there he was! Fourth Street burst with commotion as the officers shouted at the Shadow to get up, to put his hands up—to give up! The Shadow had been caught; the guns were drawn and pointed directly at him. The men, in their beaming pride, had finally caught him. This was their moment of glory. This was the moment that they could look back upon with their heads high, noses pointed slightly upward. And just as their self-satisfaction was seeing them receive great honors & delicate kisses, it occurred to the men that the Shadow was not giving up. His arms had not been raised. In fact, he was not responding to their orders at all. The policemen cocked their guns, angry, giving the Shadow one last opportunity to respond. Still he sat, unmoved. The men rushed the Shadow. They charged at his body with a shamed force. Their heavy booted feet hit the ground in a fury as they ran to apprehend this man who had tormented them; this man who had crept into this young lady’s life and filled her dreams with nightmares. They reached him quickly and when the policemen’s hands shot out to grab him, he sank to the ground, lifelessly.
He lay motionless; cold and exposed. The officers could finally see that it was not the Shadow at all, it was merely Ted, who had been brought out from the cellar, separated from the other Halloween decorations, to have a proper airing, to let the bugs free from his limbs that were filled with plastic bags and crunchy orange leaves. Had the policemen not been so embarrassed, so worked up—had the disgrace not eeked thru them like a virus, they may have laughed. Instead they slowly walked back around the big house defeated. They met the young lady on the front stoop who had excitedly listened in on the commotion that had taken place at the back of her house. But the officers held no Shadow locked in their grasp; they held only the story of the limp body of Ted who swung from the tree every Halloween.
The Shadow was never apprehended; his face was never seen but Ted grew in notoriety that day—The day that Ted was held at gunpoint.
Ever since I can remember, my dad has made jelly rolls for Christmas Eve. He would spend all day in the kitchen making them, one for each of his brothers and though we were never given one to eat ourselves, we often fantasized about how wonderful they must taste. Now, the making of these delicious rounds of goodness is no easy feat, as anyone who’s ever stood for 10 minutes beating the eggs into a lemony frothiness can attest too. And considering my Dad is no cook, he once asked me how to make spaghetti noodles, his annual dive into powered sugar & measuring spoons seems a bit of an oxymoron.
Yet, for those who know & those of us who have inherited his sweetooth, my Dad’s joy in baking is infectious & something all six of his children indulge in. We grew up hearing stories of his state fair chocolate chip cookie victory at the tender age of 5 even though it was often hard to juxtapose the image of our dad, the baker, with our dad the quiet and reserved construction man. Yet, when he steps into the kitchen, we all know that something magical is happening, and we converge in chatty chaos as we watch him patiently flip through the tattered Betty Crocker book, searching out his recipe. As with any sojourn into a slightly unfamiliar world, there have been missteps, such as the infamous bacon grease doughnuts, which understandably, did not win any awards. Still, my dad bakes on, making an apple pie for thanksgiving or a batch of cookies for the hell of it and yet the jelly rolls are still our favorites. And this year, in an era of new change, he made us kids one and as I’m sure he always feared, it was gone in seconds.
