a galloping snippet

Thursday, August 14, 2008

Faces

She had little to do in her summer afternoons so She’d taken to studying murder cases and when She got too self-conscious about the librarians following her down the stacks She took up studying man-eaters. She had made it her summer goal to collect as many books on man-eaters as she could. She would walk into bookstores and say, “Man-eaters” instead of “Hello! Good afternoon! I like your shirt!” Tigers, sharks, obscenely large snakes; anything that Disney made evil She was rip-roaring to investigate. She especially liked large pictured books because then she would force herself to look at the attack photos. Spider bites were good ones because they tended to have a lot of puffy redness. They transformed the human body into something else, skin became gooey and limbs bloated and venom-logged.
She was aware of the horror, She wasn’t desensitized to it, in fact She felt it very much, the slight turn of the stomach, the hair on end, the dry mouth because it’d been open too long. When She was reading and looking at these books She would get lost and forget what time it was and if She were wearing shoes. Man-eaters. It sounded like a bad all-girl eighties band name, but She didn’t care. She had long since overhauled that perception of the word and now all that came to mind was misshapen body limbs and cropped out faces.
That struck her immediately. There were never any faces. It seemed that in all the pictures the faces of the victims would always be cropped out and there would just be their severed leg or stumpy bloody arm. She speculated there were no faces because they made it too personal. You would be able to see the tears running down their cheeks, the horror struck twitches and you would feel sorry for them. No, She wasn’t a sick freak like the librarian mildly and, in truth, indifferently suspected, She wanted to see the faces, more than the muscles and blood and strings of flesh, She wanted to see the faces.
Her goal for August was to find a book that didn’t show the injuries at all, just the faces of eaten men.

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Ameeerica: Why I Come Home to You

I recently returned home to the US and then I was even more recently researching on how to get back out again and I found this great concise description of America on a Teaching English as a Foreign Language website. I feel this every time I pass through customs- this and a pang for tacos and friends.

"About The USA

The US claims to be the greatest success story of the modern world - a nation fashioned from an incredibly disparate population who, with little in common apart from a desire to choose their own paths to wealth or heaven, rallied around the ennobling ideals of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence to forge the richest, most inventive and most powerful country on earth.

Despite polemicists who justly cite the destruction of Native American cultures, racism and imperialism at the top of a long list of wrongdoings, half the world remains in love with the idea of America. This is, after all, the country that introduced the world to the right to the pursuit of happiness, free speech, electric light, airplanes, assembly-line automobiles, the space shuttle, computers, blues, jazz, rock & roll and movies that climax at the high-school prom.

On a short trip, it can be hard work dismantling your preconceptions. So much of the country has been filmed, photographed, painted and written about that you need to peel back layers of representation to stop it from looking like a stage setting. This worldwide representation can make the country seem strangely familiar when you first encounter novelties like 24-hour shopping, bottomless cups of coffee, 'Have a nice day,' drive-thru banks, TV evangelists, cheap gasoline and newspapers tossed onto lawns. But you'd be foolish to read too much into this surface familiarity, since you only have to watch Oprah for half an hour to realize that the rituals and currents of American life are as complex, seductive and bewildering as the most alien of cultures.

Come prepared to explore the USA's unique brand of 'foreignness' rather than stay in the comfort zone of the familiar. You'll discover several of the world's most exciting cities, some truly mind-blowing landscapes, a strong sense of regionalism, a trenchant mythology, more history than the country gives itself credit for and, arguably, some of the most approachable natives in the world."





Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Family

"So Mar and I did shrooms at the Beach Club."
"Really? The Beach Club?"
"Did you use the public grill?" my mother asks.

Monday, August 11, 2008

Segway

Two Segways roll by on the boardwalk and my brother and I are silent. They are rolling, there is nothing that can be said until they stop to rest.
"I think we should take a family trip. I think we should segwey cross country." I tell him.
"We would need a cause. No one traverses this great country of ours without a cause."
"Cancer?"
"No, umm... Glory. We should do Glory."
The Segways begin to roll again and my brother says he been watching a lot of the Olympics.

Sunday, August 10, 2008

Bukowski Notes



"Please close your robe!"
"There, " I said, " You see?"
"I know I see. That's why I asked you to close it."
"All right. Shit."
I very reluctantly threw the robe over my genitals. Anybody can expose their genitals at night. At two p.m. in the afternoon it took some balls.

Bukowski "Nut Ward Just East of Hollywood"

Sunday, August 3, 2008

Notes from the Albion

Today in the bookstore, a man named Javier called me Yessie and wanted to see the Bible in the window. I think he was very lonely because he came back an hour later and still didn't buy anything. I didn't mind, because this city can be lonely sometimes and I understood. I think it's because of the mountains so close by, they tend to separate us and strike us with a silent awe not very conducive to social undertakings. Javier thought it was because of his accented and punctured English.

Thoughts on Home: Brigadoon

My mother when she lived in the outskirts of town would take the freeway through a divot in the San Diego hills and fall down the highway into La Jolla. Her friends and her, as the car gained momentum would whisper over the dashboard, "Brigadoon", as if they were reading an unseen road sign that marked the city limit. The Scottish town is said to only appear once every hundred years, but for all they could do, my mother and her friends could never make La Jolla disappear. Every morning the marine layer would burn off and La Jolla would still be there, shining like the quintessential jewel, or pot, depending on your translation of the Spanish.

a galloping snippet