Fast Edits

The car is vibrating softly, a muted whhhrrrr fills the small cab as the seat jostles my thighs. The motor runs and I wait in the bright light of mid morning. I am surrounded on both sides of the street by nearly identical three story apartment buildings. Their colors vary…cream, pale blue, golden yellow, white, brown, and so do the materials that compose the sparse balconies, stucco, metal, wood. While I wait, I try to look for other architectural features that diversify the cookie-cutter construction, but the diversity comes from the occupants, not the builders. There are a cluster of satellite dishes clinging to a wooden balcony. A large blanket dries over its edge, painted in the bright colors of a peacock. Telephone poles line the street, an abundance of thick, black wires come from each one like an electric waterfall of plastic tubes. Pigeons line the wires, pigeons perch comfortably on the rooftops, pigeons fly above, coasting low to pick up pieces of food, then back up high, back to the flock. I have sat with this view, with this eternal, unchanging street many times. Usually I sit in silence, preparing for the force about to arrive, but today, I turn on the tiny white Ipod and put on the good morning song, a musical piece of beats and electronic rhythms that always sound so, so good in the morning, when the light is bright and the possibilities of a new day are still silver in their whispered promises.
And the beat starts, the delay of an engine roars into the soundscape…then creeps in the steady boom of bass. A car crosses my line of vision at 25mph, it matches the tempo perfectly. A handful of pigeons take flight and my eyes go to them and then my eyes move back to the perpendicular street ahead of me and another car paints the street red just as the music hits an extended delay and then the beat starts in a little faster and my eyes dart to a patch of grass…my eyes move with the rhythm…a gated door…a window… a man on a telephone… a car goes…one, two, three beats. My eyes conspire with the song, editing the neighborhood in fast cuts and smooth delays. fffuuahhhh, a blue car goes by, precisely when it is needed, the birds take flight again, just as the song begins it crescendo and then I look to the ground, to the birds, to the wires, here comes another car and I hold the stare for 2 beats, then bam, bam, bam, my eyes dart again for every beat…one, the road, two, the pigeons, three, the grass…door, man, balcony, laundry on the line, faded stucco, a trash can on the street, a woman pushing a baby…tap, tap, tap…my eyes continue their edit…..fffuuuuuuu….a blue SUV passes by…tap, tap, tap, tap…the sculpted cypresses of the cemetery, tap, tap, tap…the wire fence, gravestone in the distance, street, pigeon, the elements cycle and the song continues, beautiful in its collaboration with the entire Universe around it.

I Built A Wall Around My Self

A thick wall of mortar and stone and cement and glue, an amalgam of parts and substance, encrusted ideas and fossilized bones. Part wood, part stone, part metal…affixed with barbed wire along the steep edges and stuffed with body parts and memories and the collected refuse of so many lifetimes. Like the builders of the great wall of china, this wall is composed of forgotten flesh and metal hammers and the silenced stories that were swallowed and with a single final breath.
And the wall, it was constructed without plans, without consent or even a crude brainstorm sketched on a crumpled napkin. Its ongoing construction has lasted more than twenty years, the ongoing project that never comes to a close…the workers in orange vests continue to show up, rain or shine, as they have for years, each bearing my face and my dirty hands, yet I have no memory of digging the foundation. There are no pictures that shed light on its beginning, no memories that flutter in my fragmented mind, reminding me why there are piled bricks and shovel handles and femur bones protruding from the great walls.
Its erection must have begun before my first memory congealed, perhaps watching helplessly from my crib as my mother left the room, perhaps when I cried unattended in the shadow of the forgotten moon. This wall began without my direct knowledge, and yet, it was I who built it. These hands who I look at with a stranger’s eye, these rough hands put each piece in place, each stone dug from the ground, each row of brick, each scoop of cement in place, this work was done by me, me alone.
Perhaps each smooth stone was inspired by an event, an interpreted stare, a defeat, an imposed darkness…inspired and then, because I remained asleep at the wheel of this four limbed vehicle, I gathered my stones and I mixed my cement, like a one eyed witch stirring a pot of some foul smelling potion, and I placed those hard rocks firmly in place. With thick resolve, with renewed wrath, with victory playing in my ears, I watched the substance harden by the second, gray mush to thick glue to unconquerable solid strength and, surrounded by stone and brick and metal, I basked in the solitude of my defense, my fortress, my singular city.
I awake for a second from this chamber, and clearing the sleep from my eyes, I see the walls have spawned another life topped with sparkling horns of fire, and a beating heart and they have grown beyond my control, beyond the thickness of my desire, beyond my understanding…I put them here, but I cannot get them down. The walls are so thick, covered in spikes and razor blades and blood-covered thorns and I want them gone, I want to step outside these walls and taste the air of freedom, true freedom from self imposed exile, but I cannot climb them, I cannot scale them, no ladder is tall enough and the helicopters do not come this close.
And then, as I sleep, I retreat into the cave.
Sometimes I am in the middle, wishing for a door, yet finding the bed is all too warm and comfortable. All too familiar in its smell. Which way is right? Is there a wrong way? Is there black or white or red? Or are all these colors merely shades in an illusion of rainbows that peak in the height of my delusion. The walls are thick, and the sounds of music flows through me like a ghost, the heart within me accepts its message and I search for the door once again.

Intentions

The Rabbi looks down upon his followers and says:
“You must build a wall. With this wall that you build, you will separate your altruistic intentions from your selfish intentions, your selfless transcendent center that yearns for God will thus be separated from your ego based desires that only yearn for pleasure and fame and power and sex. By building this wall, you will begin on the path.”
I look around myself, at the wide desert that surrounds my little city of dreams, and I can plainly see that the construction of such a wall is impossible, such as it has been described. For the desert hides its depths, and in its depths there are caves through which the masked inhabitants travel, and there are deep secret rivers full of forgotten beasts, and there are great mythic birds that fly overhead in translucent silence, and there is a heavy burning rain that comes down from the skies every so often, and carries with it news from other lands, and there is an ever evolving sickness that travels through the open mouths of all of those that talk, and finds its way into all those that listen, and there are sounds that no wall can stop, screams from distant places and distant times, anguished screams that still yearn to be heard.
Far from the city, the ancient walled city within which the Rabbi speaks, there are people being killed, people being tortured, people being banished, people being thrown away like yesterday’s garbage, pushed away to find their misbegotten lives among the refuse of a thousand bloody wars. Can it then be said that the city is safe from this, as long as the pain and the screams and the tears and deep lakes of blood don’t touch the city walls? Does the Rabbi not know that the quest begins here, from the heart of the city, but it extends far beyond its gates? If the men that kill and torture come from the streets of this protected city, is the city then safe from their guilt? Are the city’s own intentions not corporealized in the sound wrenching missiles that tear through hot air and mud wall and fleshy membranes? Maybe the Rabbi does not know of this. Maybe he is simply quiet and blind, aloof from the madness around him, centered on the true God above. But if he is, then can he not be blamed for his own blindness? Is it not a self imposed exile that ultimately betrays his own stated intentions?
Why has he chosen to remain quiet in the face of so many atrocities? Why has he chosen to remain ignorant of the pain that travels in bits of dust through storms of pebbles and sand? Are these the altruistic intentions that remain hidden within the city walls? Or are these the other intentions, the ones that have managed to walk past the checkpoints, past the interrogations, past the security police, past the careful eye of the guards, and they have penetrated deep into the heart of the city, ready to unleash chaos with a single flicker of a switch?
I am that I am. I am One. There is no Other. I am the Rabbi. I am the soldier. I am the killer. I am the bomb. I am the baby blown to little red bits.
How can we then build this wall around our inner city, when we can’t truly distinguish the good from the bad, the true from the false, the right from the wrong, the image from the real?
Within each step of my strange robot, the fleshy machine that I currently ride into extinction, lie a million electrical accidents, free in their randomness, wild in their flight. They flash like little lost torch lights in the middle of the desert night. Some of them, in their wild run through my body that is a world, may in fact look up to heaven. Most of them still stare into the bloody heart of the Void, and, as they stare, they yearn for power, they cry for revenge. They are all enmeshed, like spider webs around other spider webs, like the pages that you may read on a network of light, pages like this one, that make no sense in themselves and don’t even have the intention of clear communication. They swirl and they crash, they come to bursting bubbles of orgasmic supernovas and then sink into themselves to become eternal black holes.
Above all, they don't reveal themselves easily. They may look friendly and hide a bomb beneath their coat. They may look righteous but pull out a boy’s fingernails when the lights are down, and the walls are thick.
As above, so below.
As below, so above.
And if they hide from me, these strange wild intentions that roam within the electrical network that makes my fingers move across this keyboard, they will certainly hide in the endless desert of deeply entrenched resentment and hatred. And if they manage to get past a hundred checkpoints, and a thousand vigilant eyes, they will surely get past mine, my single pair of eyes which fall asleep recurrently and only come to a clear place of attention but a few times per day.
To start by building this wall, then, is a path to certain disaster. Or maybe just a path to blindness. The blindness that is willful, the blindness of the eye that can see but can’t rise above the very wall which its own hands have built.
We start from where we are. As evil as our intentions may currently be, they are the only ones we have.

The Rain and the Coffee Shop

The faces of the painfully unhappy keep walking across my line of sight. They stick out their tongues at the part of me that tries to maintain. They wiggle their noses at the friends that try to make me laugh. Little lines have emerged, once hidden in fleshy pink layers that ignited in the sun, now, while the sun hides behind blankets of clouds, they show themselves, peeking out of deep groves visible only in the centimeters above a mirror. They would scream, if only there were a voice and tenor for tears that have no mask. Tears that call themselves by another name. Pain that masks itself in anger and wrinkled brows.
The rain pours in through the roof, in through the latex paint, in through the holes in my muted dreams that dissipate as the drops splash, sending out their frolicking offspring across the cold linoleum floor. They find a playground in the electronics, they find a resting place among the discarded clothes that never made it to a hamper or a drawer. It could have been an easy death, bare wet feet and a space heater turned executioner. It could have been easy, one lone droplet. They might not have known where to find me, mistaking the corpse for a neighborhood barbecue.
But the chess game continues, and I walk away, while the rain pours in, once again disrupting a mild sense of comfort, an easily shaken illusion of stability. And I am thrown once again into the whirlwind, into the past-life habits of constant movement and trash bags of clothes and home always a doorway away.
The refuge of a coffee shop is like walking into a battlefield. The grinding of metal parts crushes the beans dead, deader than they already were. Jazz vocals blare, played too loudly for background music. Hardly a soul is listening. There are a dozen heads with headphones, half a dozen heads in conversation, steam vessels screaming, orders being taken. There is hardly an ear for the music, hardly a drip of attention to feel the earthy voice or the pitch of the wind. Yet it blasts, full tilt, filling the cup past the brim.
First I try to tune out. Then, I try to tune in. I hear a bassy voice on my right. "we’re not like everyone else." They have their bibles open, each of the three men have their glasses on…they look serious with their eyeglasses, getting their hands get dirty in the word of god. Their leader is an obese black man, a man with authority over the other two white men, one of them also obese. I hear their voices come through the headphones every couple of minutes. "a doctor can help postpone a life a couple extra years, we offer eternal life."
I leave to use the bathroom, when I return, the guy sitting at the table behind me asks about the video I am editing on my laptop. He asks to see some videos on YouTube, and almost immediately, as the sounds start and the rhythm kicks in, he starts asking technical questions about the editing software. Later, he shows me his own video. It’s long, nearly seven minutes of him driving at night. I hear the rhythm, I see the light of the city at night, I see the streaks on his windshield. I feel him at the table next to me, he’s uncomfortable. He tries to talk to me as I’m watching his video. Even he does not have enough patience for his own creation. But I smile when he talks, I don’t know what he says, but it seems to be a joke, and I smile and keep watching and it keeps going and he gives up on talking and just fidgets while I watch. I bob my head.
"That’s really great" I say when it’s over. "I like the editing to the music and I like that I could see the streaks in the windshield and I like that you held the camera still at the stoplights, it really feels like I was there with you driving." "thanks for the feedback, I thought the streaks were a blemish." "no, I think they add to it."
I turn back to my project, the woman sharing my table looks at me and smiles. She has a pile of scratcher lotto tickets on the table. "I hope I’m not bothering you," she says. "I just like doing these, I think it helps my mind, it helps me stay alert." She has a special type of lotto ticket that involves some word skill. "If I win," she says with a Russian accent, "I’ll buy you coffee." "Okay," I say and smile, suddenly feeling a rush of unity, a feeling of strangers coming together. I feel the dream of the original coffee shop fulfilled momentarily. Strangers, meeting over coffee, meeting in a warm space, away from the rain, away from their homes, bound within the confines of four walls, eager to find that which lies beyond, finding an excuse to sit together, away from the rain, away from the cold.

Taormina

The sky is a little particle of dust fallen from heaven, just a rainbow colored sprinkle that oozes to life with the press of a child's finger. A tiny little hand that waves from the open window of a train as the countryside passes in and out of our vision, a tan blur of hillsides and bare branched trees. Small flecks of persimmons, bright as the harvest moon wizz by like a blur across a screen. Each panel passes, click, click, click, like fast edited scenes, and my memory captures it like the camera I never had. A woman with laundry in a wicker basket, hanging each item out in the sun pale autumn sun. The bare tree, full of sweet orange ornaments, just waiting for a farmer to harvest it or a poet to transform it. Honor this beauty! This silent gift that will stay, even after the years click on, tick, tick, tick, tick, as fast as the second hand on my pocket watch. It’s just feet from the passing train. The golden hills, the trees lined up in exact patterns, put precisely in their place at birth. Solid rows in each direction, we call them Berta trees.
The man comes for my ticket. I see him twenty feet down the aisle, sending fear through me as I see his official hat and bag filled with empty paper tickets to issue. I look for my ticket, but it’s lost in the red bag and I run to the bathroom, shepherded by the flock of boys who hope to squeeze into my pants. Their attention grows when the official passes and their arms begin to surround me and they keep asking "why, why?" but no, we can not make love in the train bathroom. I will not drop my cargo pants, stained in olive oil or lift my flannel shirt that, in and of itself, is an assault to the dictates of fashion. I see the tracks when I look into the toilet bowl, the gravel covered tracks are a fast moving deposit for our waste and I wonder about the people on either side of the tracks. Do their vegetables grow strong with the fertilizer? Do they sit on their porches in the setting afternoon sun and speculate at the passing people, moving by at 60 miles an hour, passing them forever, never to return.
And I want to talk to them and hang my laundry too and eat their orange fruit. But how can I ever return? There is no sign announcing the place. This is the place in between other places. It is lined by pretty bare trees and the orange fruit of fall and the gray clouds of coming storms that follow me like a welcomed plague. I only have one moment, one second, to freeze them in my mind.
The woman, with her dark blue skirt, large from a lifetime of pasta and pure green olive oil, hangs her laundry on the lines by the train. Will her clothes smell of silent stories and passing lives? Will their fibers hold the encapsulated gazes of those that saw them, just for a second? The white shirts on the line…the little jeans of a child, the long dark skirt of a humble woman.
Frozen in time, for once, the memory is even better than the camera, the camera I do not have. The language I do not posses.
12 hours later, we snake along the coastline, I see a beach so pretty, so tropical, with lush trees and flowers, and out the window is a vision of paradise with blue water and a little island, shaped like a bunt cake and topped with a medieval house like a candle holding the possibility of dreams. I look out the window, enraptured, this place… I have to know its name! Where am I?
I look to my right, out the window, looking for a sign, I smile in the beauty of this colorful land. I grab my paper and pen, ready for a sign, I hold still as the island passes quickly, the vision in my mind, the hope that I can find this place once again. I look up, in the seat across from me is an elderly nun, she smiles and says "Taormina." My eyes widen, I point out the window, I point down, indicating the earth… "Taormina?" I say. She nods and I hand her the paper and pen to right down the name. She smiles softly, her face an orb of kindness, of understanding.
She reads me, like the verses of her bible, she reads me, clear and loud. She knows. I feel warm, good to be known, for a second, good to be read, to be understood, without language, to be read like a book that hasn’t yet faded into oblivion, to be ingested like a landscape that passes so fast by my window that I can only barely grasp it in the tenuous theater of my mind.

The Contradiction

The small little bug landed on my shoulder. It was red and black and looked like something from a nightmare that has yet to get to the darkest pit, yet to leave me tumbling through the air, tasting death as it comes, yet to shock me into wakefulness. It was the news, the stories of rape in the Congo and the dark-as-night-skinned women who adorn their bodies in the colors of rainbows, yet know, with full body awareness, of the brutalizers. It was the pack of seven men that took her down, that ripped into her after taking the breath from her husband, and as bad as it sounds, a part of it, even after several hours and countless other thoughts, it still filled me with the flush of sexual excitement. I had moved to turn down the radio, my brain had recognized her story as something bad, something I would never wish upon myself or another, yet the thought of it, the fantasy, the show of power and domination and the forced submission and the tears and the sexual release the men must have felt by pushing themselves into a woman who had no more tears left, it was that which started the ticking pulse and the search for other images just as brutal and those two realities, the inability to even hear her full story and the vibrational fantasy it invariably created, those two truths despised each other. They were magnets of the same charge. They were shame. They were contradiction.
Modern American women don’t think like that, they don’t like that, they don’t want that, they condemn that…and I do, yet I don’t, yet I do, but I don’t.
And the two colored moths flew around my shoulders, teasing the bare white of my skin with their buzzing and fanatical wing beating. And I wouldn’t want it to happen, but I like it. I wouldn’t wish it upon anyone, but I want to see it. To be held down, forced open, no matter how much it hurts, no matter how much I want to run away. And when it does happen, the small, more harmless variety, I feel like I could follow him to the ends of the earth. I can see myself, wearing torn white rags, stepping across the red horizon as the even redder planets loom like hot air balloons just a short arms reach away. I can feel each step over rough edged gravel and those shiny swords that wait in the distance. I have not reached them yet, but I have seen their cousins in the smaller ponds and they have cut me deep, very deep, and somehow, with bloody feet and salty cheeks, I made it past them and over the barren hillsides. And at the ends of the earth, perhaps only an arms reach away, but necessitating a lifetime of travel, he waits in the crystal castle with a goblet full of foul tasting life and eyes that could warm the night sky if given a chance. The wings flap like a soft lullaby and their colors have become my coat of arms.

Well Done

The day was strange…I was strange. I still held onto the anger from last night. A little bubble that I could not burst. A vague layer of gauze, the almost transparent film of sadness cloaked my inner fibers. I could see through it, a small part of me knew that the sun was shining and I was breathing and my love was strong, but another part of me held onto the small bubble of insecurity and sadness and a little gray cloud lingered over me.
A steady stream of passersby smiled at me as we made eye contact. I sat behind my small booth of incense and soap and sachets. Maybe the fragrance of the forest brought out their smiles. I looked at my cell phone for the time, it was almost 2pm and I still had not eaten, I left the stand unattended, grabbing my phone and tucking it in my back pocket and headed to the Thai food vendor for a couple of vegetarian egg rolls. When I reached the head of the small line, I realized they had sold out, so I ate a small bowl of rice with peanut sauce, and for the first time in my two years of working the farmer’s market, I bought a Thai iced tea. I took a long sip from the straw, the sweet milk and tangy black tea felt wonderful in my mouth, delicious sliding down my throat. I walked through the crowded market, sipping on the tea more slowly now and I let myself be distracted by the many people around me and the colorful vegetables that lined both sides of the street.
Back at my stand, I saw a couple patient customers waiting for me. I put the tea down and started offering samples and making change and offering smiles. But something was different. There had been an internal shift. My voice was louder, my eyes were a bit wider and when I talked, I moved closer to the customers, leaning in on the table that separated us and moving into their space. With this new internal state, I talked without fear or hesitation. Usually, I would sit on the back fender of my truck and try to play the salesman part smoothly, acting as if I didn’t care whether they bought or not, but always hoping they would. In the current state, I talked, and gave suggestions, but I truly did not care if they bought something or walked away. I had become less identified with the result. I knew that I was different, I knew the black tea had brought it on and as it passed through me like a series of waves, I started to feel just a little out of control, like I was swinging my body wildly to an invisible symphony, spinning and spinning and my arms were out and my head was swaying…but I might just hit a wall at any second.
Just then, an old customer who had become a friend came up to me. As we talked, we were interrupted constantly by curious customers who stopped to pick up Douglas fir sachets and tried to smell the packets of incense through the cardboard boxes before I offered them the open packages. I noticed the difference, the more Steven and I talked, the more people came up to the tables and attempted to interact with the scented products, the heat of our linguistic exchange got the atoms bouncing, bringing moths to the flame.
"wow, you’re doing great business!"
"it’s because of you, I was sitting like this all day," and I imitated myself sitting on the car’s fender, watching the crowds pass.
He laughed.
"well, good, I’ll stay."
Another person walked up and I offered a smile and a "hello." The girl smiled as she smelled the soap and I launched into some facts about the soap. She nodded and we fell silent and I looked at Steven, "wow, I’ve only had a couple of sips of the Thai iced tea and I’m all messed up!" I looked at him with wide eyes.
"well, you’re a dancer, things come into you and you’re really sensitive to them and you react."
"yeah, but just a couple of sips!"
"you’re sensitive," he said with a shy smile.
I looked at the red cell phone on the table. "I guess I should start cleaning up, the market is almost over." I turned behind me to the open truck bed and I looked at the long inventory list on the clipboard and my pen that was sitting beside it. I surveyed the contents of my truck bed. There were open cardboard boxes and big empty plastic bags and plastic storage boxes. I looked over my shoulder at the display table, there were baskets of sachets and a rack of incense and soaps and teas and smudge sticks.
My heart started beating, the tea had tapped into my stream. I looked around, slightly disoriented, unsure where to start, how to begin. It was a process I did every Saturday…empty the contents of the car onto a retail friendly table, and then pack it all back up at the end of the day and drive off to the warehouse. But today, the task seemed huge. I felt faint wisps of panic, I heard the silent explosions in my bloodstream.
Then I stopped. Steven had been talking and I had been half listening to him, but he stopped for a minute. I held steady for a moment. I reached out extremely slowly for the black pen, I bent over very, very slowly to write the date on the inventory list, then I put the pen down very, very slowly. I stood up straight, very slowly and looked at Steven, a calm smile on my face.
"well done," he said.
I smiled and said nothing more. He began to talk a little bit and I listened while packing things away. I took no more sips of the tea.