Growing Awareness of History

Public school door knob

I recently did a research writing unit with my students, in which they explored the history of their school building and neighborhood through an interview with our school janitor, on-line web searching, and a trip to the public library across the street. Our janitor, who has been in the building for over 20 years, told us that our school was 126 years old (I don’t know how accurate that figure is, but I have no reason to doubt him). We learned that our building used to be connected with the firehouse next door. The firehouse part of the building was a church, while the school part used to be a psychiatric hospital for children. Also, we learned that our cafeteria used to house a pool!

We weren’t able to find much on-line. I hadn’t realized how complex and difficult finding out the history of any given building in NYC was. So I then expanded the scope of our research to our neighborhood.

The library across the street has also been around for a hundred years, one of the original Carnegie libraries. The librarian showed us historical pictures of East Tremont, and we discussed pictures of the old police precinct headquarters, which looked like a mansion, and pictures of Italian immigrants dressed in hats and formal attire, all lined up to get into the library. Pictures of farmland and fences. A Texaco gas station with gas for 11 cents a gallon. At first, the students said they didn’t see much of anything in the pictures. Then as we began discussing it, the history opened up before them in all of the little details, the old cars along the side of the road, the cobblestones in the streets, the pigtails the girls wore, the way their dresses were cut.

Richman (Echo) Park

It opened up history for me as well.

I’ve begun paying more attention to the sights around me as I walk from the subway station at Grand Concourse down the hill. The glaciated rocks at Richman Park. The Tremont Baptist Church perched on the winding hill above the chaotic traffic circle of Webster Ave and East Tremont. The stone masonry at the base of some buildings that seems to denote historical longevity. It has made me begin to appreciate the Bronx in a new context. I don’t just see urban decay anymore (though my growing awareness of the impact of the Cross Bronx Expressway has set a context for that as well). I see a community of newer immigrants, striving to make their way, just as generations of immigrants before them have done. I’ve begun to become aware of a rich, underlying framework of history all around me, requiring only attention to become aware of. This growing awareness of the cultural beauty of this community somewhat assuages some of the gap left in my heart after living for years in the natural beauty of Lake Tahoe,

Tremont Baptist Church

California. When I used to bike the 9 miles in and out of work in my last year there, I remember always reminding myself to try to absorb the beauty of the lake and surrounding mountains, ringed in pine. I knew that someday I might not live in such pristine beauty and wanted to try to savor it while it was there, and hold it in my mind, however fleetingly. That has turned out to be prescient, and those images come back to me still.

Similarly, I know I may not always live or work in a place with such a rich and dynamic history, and it is my task now to savor it, to take it in and build my awareness of it.

Simultaneous to this growing awareness of history all around me, I have begun reading The Narrative of The Life of Frederick Douglass to my students. I had downloaded the book from Project Gutenberg, waiting the 2 months it took to receive print-outs from my school, and downloaded free questions and vocabulary for each chapter from The Core Knowledge Foundation. The language of the book may be well above the reading level of my fifth graders, but they comprehend the content deeply, in a way atypical to much of the content that I teach them. The oratory grasp of the power of words emanates from Douglass. There are two paragraphs in Chapter 2 in which his articulate voice rings through the ages, impassioned, as he reflects on the songs that slaves traveling through the woods would sing. These songs of the slave, Douglass wrote, “represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears.” And suddenly, his outrage at the inhumanity of slavery lashes out from the page, lashes out from history. It’s a powerful moment.

There is never enough time to teach much of anything deeply in school. It’s hard to be consistent when schools are disorganized, schedules change on a moment’s notice, and there are constant interruptions from phones, loudspeakers, and children’s emotional outbursts. But reading this book is one thing I want to follow through on, because at some point, our children require us adults to make a decision on what is most important, and home in on that thing and stay true to it.

I have begun to feel the weight of history, and appreciate the power of a narrative in conveying the sense and awareness of that history. Our children, just like most of us adults, suffer from a disconnectedness from the wider context they live within. Though I may not be an inhabitant of their community, I can certainly make it my goal to become more aware of that community’s history and to help grow that awareness in my students.

Like much of the things I teach, I find that I learn the best material alongside of my students, discovering new ways of looking at the world and growing my own awareness.

Impressions of Philadelphia

Image via Wikipedia

Finally got back from our “vacation” in Philly. We stayed in Center City, which one would assume would be a bustling part of the city, but we were constantly taken aback by just how quiet it was. Where are all the people? Are they all on vacation? Why aren’t cars honking at each other? These were some of the questions we asked as we walked the streets.

My observations will naturally be generalized from only the few square miles that we saw there, so I have no idea if this rings true or not. Native Philadelphians, feel free to correct me if necessary. Here are my impressions of Philly:

• After NYC, Philly feels much less dense
• But even though it is more spread out, everything we wanted to see was in surprisingly short walking distance
• It has a nice historical feel to it
• Though it also has an accompanying air of decay
• There seems to be an abundance of young, successful (-looking) single women, at least in the places we went out to
• There’s no shortage of a diversity of quality dining options
• Philly kind of reminded me of San Francisco, minus the hills and the hippies
• Which may be because the subway system is very reminiscent of SF’s BART
• There are some really down and out folks in Philly–the blight of drug abuse is readily evident
• When we got back to NYC, I speculated that perhaps down-and-outers were just more apparent in Philly than here simply because in NYC they get lost in the crowd
• If there’s Latinos in Philly, then they must be somewhere other than the City Center
• The art museums are nice, and it’s cool the way they have a whole “museum row” kind of thing
• God bless the Amish–those soft pretzels we ate at Reading (why is this pronounced “Redding”? What’s up with East Coast spellings and pronounciations, like Houston? Is this a Dutch thing?) Terminal Market were damn good!
• We only ate one cheesesteak, and it sucked. I subsequently learned that the City Center is NOT the place to look for cheesesteaks. I’ll thus reserve my judgement on that matter until I actually taste an authentic one
• Do all the white people drive cars everywhere? What’s wrong with taking public transportation? Maybe it was just the part of town we were in?
• One complaint that soured our perspective at the end of our visit: you can’t buy just one dang token for the subway! You have to buy at least 2! What the hell?!
• In NYC, in any given direction you’ll hit a Starbucks, a Rite-Aid, a Duane Reade, and a CVS, not necessarily in that order. We were pleasantly surprised to find that downtown Philly didn’t have the same obsession with franchises and pharmacies that New Yorkers seem to. The franchises were certainly a presence, but they didn’t completely dominate

Overall, I enjoyed Philly, and while it doesn’t exactly call out to me to live there, if I was forced to move there, I wouldn’t complain. It has a neat sense of history, a great selection of culinary offerings, and all the cultural benefits that make a city a city. I like the way the slight decrease in density equates with a slight decrease in aggression. Philly, I’ll be coming back to see what these cheesesteaks are really all about. And to have another couple of your soft pretzels.

Goin’ Crazy

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Sometimes I feel like this profession is driving me crazy. Just about 80% of the other educators I meet I find either plumb crazy or I just simply can’t relate to them. The very few I can relate to are still pretty darn weird. Now, I ain’t exactly making any claims to normalcy myself. I have what could politely be called eclectic tastes. I drink weird herbal liqueurs and hate watching anything but depressing movies and listen to Norwegian electric guitar jazz or Senegalese mbalax. But I have worked with a pretty diverse amount of people in my time on this here earth, and once I got through my bitter misanthropic phase after college, I’ve mostly gotten along pretty well with the folks I’ve worked with. And I get along with most of the people I work with now, too. But I secretly find them all just frankly weird. I mean this in the sense that I just don’t find much of their actions nor dialogue intelligible.

I’m still confused about whether that’s because teachers in general are crazy or if it’s because public education is crazy and it drives people crazy. But it must be the latter, because now I think I’m goin crazy. I mean, how could you not? There’s so many conflicting values and directives and ideas being thrown at me that I never know which way is up. And I try to do what I do best, which is to examine the system as a whole and then enter into the fray with a structured vision which I then seek to implement. But then it’s like the rug gets pulled out from under me just when I think I’m achieving something.

Eventually, I’ve begun to understand why so many of the teachers I’ve met are such hot messes. They’ve become focused narrowly upon that point on which they know they can achieve something positive, and they lash out at anything that might threaten that unstable piece of manna. They cradle it like a flame from the wind. Because the fact is that the world outside of the classroom–even within the school itself–does not generally have the best interests of the teacher nor students therein in mind. And even when they do–the fact is that some things get very gray when they enter into the realm of classroom reality. People want to go on and on about “students first.” And no one would disagree, of course. But most of these folks have not actually stepped foot into the reality of a classroom in a high poverty district. Try it, folks. Please. See if you can take the abuse that many teachers undergo for an entire working day. Then step back and see if you can keep talking about accountability and high expectations from such a pristine moral vantage.

Schoolwork is messy, in the same manner that work in the ICU unit of a hospital is messy. At least in the NYC public school system in the South Bronx it is. Does it have to be? No. But in the meantime those of us who are crazy–or who are destined to become crazy–are the ones out on the front lines trying to dredge out a garden in the midst of a hailstorm on the precipice of a cliff. Welcome to reality. It can drive you mad.

Another Jolly Night in Ye Olde Neighborhood

If you amble down Broadway at 10 o’ clock at night on a Thanksgiving eve in my neighborhood–Inwood, Manhattan–you may be treated to some heart-warming, charming visual delights from some colourful local characters, such as by the thrilling sight of a half-naked older overweight woman with cropped hair lumbering extremely inebriated and/or drugged through the middle of the street, swinging her shirt brazenly, her wrinkly breasts bobbling in the frigid cold.  Or perhaps the pleasant sight of an old homeless woman frantically grabbing a roll of paper towels from her rolling suitcase and hurriedly waddling over to the most well-lit, visible window in front of the Bank of America and popping a squat, her white ass emblazoned in the franchise bank’s flood-lit display.

It is sights such as these that make me oh so very delighted to be living in New York City. Truly a phantasmagoria of inspiring humanity!

The City Mouse and the Country Mouse

Being back in Tahoe has been more than just a trip down memory lane–it’s been practically magical. While talking with old friends, drinking great West Coast microbrews, hiking up rocky, wildflower speckled mountains, or chilling out on a sailboat on a lake, I’ve felt an almost visceral pain. It’s that bittersweet awareness that this is a special place for me that I won’t probably see again for a long time hence.

There are many benefits to living in New York City, which mainly consists in its plenitude of social offerings. But though I’ve been there for over 2 years, I have few close friends to chill out with on a frequent basis. Coming back out here and hanging out with good people is what really makes me miss Tahoe. Not to mention the looming pine laden ridge-lines and dry, boulder strewn mountains.

One of the reasons I left was that I was craving metropolitan human culture–things like museums, live music, and multifarious places to wet your whistle. And this is one of the great draws of the big city. But now that I’m on the other side, of course now what I miss is the lonely midnight sound of the sierra wind rushing down the trees. That surrounding, everpresent quiet sentience of nature.

In the city, you not only have access to the pinnacles of human accomplishment, but also the constant, in-your-face reminders of human struggle. The rude, the loud, the aggressive. Sometimes I just want to get away, but there’s nowhere really to escape to. No 3,000 feet to climb to a nearby mountaintop.

Is it possible to get the best of both worlds? Some place that has all the cultural benefits of the city, but immediate access to the solitude of nature? I don’t know, but when I find it, I’ll know I’ve found a place I might more readily call home.

Posing at the Crossroads

What is there to say? The world can be a terrible place. To live, to truly feel with all your senses, can be at times horrific.

The worst of it is that none of it is really about me. I seem to have not much to do with it at all. I walk through the streets like an alien, a specter, a fleeting speck of insignificance. I stand upset in the warzone of my classroom, a flailing impotent bystander. I never seem to have enough air, or time, or space.

The important things seem to be sneakers, and the cut of your trousers, and the way your coat hangs. How aloof you can be in the face of despair. Or better yet, nonchalantly sincere. Untouchable in a crowd. Photogenic on the subway.

I can feel the cavity in the frontal lobe of my brain expanding. I’m not sure if that’s schizophrenia, or just mere psychic or physical exhaustion.

What is it that I want? To make my world a better place? Or to make my life better?

What is it that I want? To embed myself in the dense thicket of the inner city? Or to escape to a manicured expanse?

More importantly, do I have what it takes to consciously make that decision?

The Battle of the Bereft

Last weekend a friend was visiting, and of course I began discussing my students, because what else do I have to talk about now? I talked about their problems, their behaviors, their tough home lives. So he challenged me to say what they were good at. And in that moment I realized just how bereft my understanding of them is. I couldn’t think of anything. Not one thing. I wanted to weep.

When the entire world tells you you are worthless, in what place do you claw to find succor?

I watch them clutch empty-hearted at the manufactured dreams of the complacent, and shit on the very fabric of their own existence.

Dreams of graduation into comfort seem to be the defining tunnel vision of my own survival. All I can envision are green trees, rolling hills, an empty swatch of air and bird ringed silence across my bedroom window. A river, somewhere, without the brown slogs of industry.

Already, I have abandoned them. To leave them to their trash strewn streets, the steps of apartment buildings that serve as the template for passing the time. To their endlessly working, endlessly shopping mothers, who give them whatever they want whenever they can.

In this ghetto of the soul, it’s all about power. You take it any way you can, you drag down those who might love you and beat them into submission.

This is the game we play, whether in the streets or in the classroom. Who is the powerful? Who is the one who will lead by the blood on his hands?

I am too battered right now to step away from the battle. I see only red before me. I am angry. I am filled with despair. And this is when I know that this is the only fight worth

losing.

Territory (NYC style)

Eventually, it’s time to put down your roots in each step of your foot, to deny the possibility of stepping aside for anyone, to declare, firmly, that you belong here, that you have a purpose and a direction that cannot be ceded. You have a right to exist and to move unimpeded towards your destination. Others may move aside. You will only stop, patiently, until they acknowledge that they must move around you.

That you will bow to no one.

There is only one power to submit to, and it exists beyond the superficial territoriality of the street.

(Contrast this with another Territory post from LA long ago)

In Area of Bay

It’s funny how different different cities can be. As soon as you walk off the plane, there is a new vibe in the air that is particular to that particular city. Shit, even before you get off of the plane; the inhabitants on their way home set an intangible, introductory tone. San Francisco, with its REI wear hipsters, its segregated sidestreets of the strung out, its hippie bums who sometimes look relatively content. If I were a bum, I would live in San Francisco.

People in general look healthier, more wholesome in some sun-kissed way. Clothing is varied and colorful. The streets are wide, people wait patiently at stop lights. It is simultaneously liberal and yuppie at the same time in a sometimes contradictory but sometimes harmonious way. People bike through the city with their baskets full of Trader Joe’s tote bags. In the un-yuppified neighborhoods, if you don’t belong there then you stick out like a sore thumb.

A down-and-out man followed me across the street at one intersection, then good naturedly told me that he knew that I was loco. I thought he was telling me that I was a local at first. But then I got that he was saying that I was loco. “The way you walkin’, the clothes you wearin’. I can tell.” I took this as a compliment. If I appear loco, then that means that I won’t be fucked with. And I’m alright with that.

NYC vs. California

Now methinks it is time for more meditation upon the topick of la ciudad Nueva York, as I have now resided here for 8 months, and have become a daily inhabitant of its subterranean commuter lifestyle. Many New Yorkers seem to have a distaste/idealization of California in general, whereupon they either think that Californians are too laid-back and boring, or they think that California is paradise. As a native Californian, I can now bear witness to the differences between NYC and Californian lifestyles: really, the only difference comes down to a matter and concept of space. Allow me to elaborate.

In California, we are accustomed to vast amounts of physical space. We drive on wide freeways and vast suburban expanses. We sit in our SUVs and trucks by ourselves, and grow agitated when people drive too close to us or cut us off (although we are accustomed to sitting in thickets of single occupant cars in the midst of traffic jams). We think backyards are normal, and we are off-put by giant crowds.

In New York City, physical space is negligible, for both rich and poor alike, though obviously the rich have more routes and spaces of escape, and they tend not to be packed into their apartments like sardines. All riders of the subway brush up against each other during rush hour, are pressed against strangers in the compress of Times Square, are sideswiped by other shopping carts in the narrow lanes of gourmet grocery stores. All drivers here expect and are undeterred by the close proximity of other vehicles, bikers, and pedestrians.

In NYC, the people are somewhat more homogenous in a sense. Fashion on the street is echoed everywhere—women wear the same Uggs, men wear the same stiff caps, hoodies, or black jeans. There is a certain type of coat and messenger bag style that proliferates. Both women and men here tend towards a fashionable kind of asceticism: stick thin, utilitarian, and dark colored. There is a certain style of self-consciousness in many New Yorkers. They are accustomed to being overheard, stared at, and ignored.

Thus, there isn’t really all that much substance to the stereotype of “New Yorkers are aggressive”, and “Californians are laid-back”. It’s simply a matter of density. When you are shoved all together into a small physical space, then you kind of have to be “aggressive” in order to move forward. But contrary to the stereotype of “aggressiveness”, New Yorkers are also much more accepting in the face of adversity, as they know that people being in their way is a part of life. And contrary to the stereotype of Californians being “laid-back”, Californians tend to be very good at being completely unsympathetic to people and situations outside of their comfort zones, as they aren’t used to being forced to deal with diversity and difference.

What I love about New York is that people of all types are forced up together. And while they may not like each other, they are used to dealing with one another.

What I don’t like about New York is that it is dirty and industrial. All of the subway stations are falling apart, and as good as the public transit system is here, it still sucks—if you take middle-of-the-night trains like I do and you have to actually get somewhere on time. Too many people still insist on driving cars, and drivers here don’t have any patience for pedestrians. Let’s face it: NYC is the epitome of industrially created environments. It’s a completely leveled island on a nearly perfect grid system. This is both what makes it cool and what makes it suck, because all of what makes it hold together always seems on the verge of falling apart.

New Yorkers, being near the northeast with its abundance of rainfall, also don’t seem to understand the preciousness of water the way Californians tend (relatively speaking) to. All day long, I walk by New Yorkers with hoses spraying down vast swaths of concrete, as if that’s cleaning anything. What a waste of drinking water. I’d like to see how New Yorkers would cope with a drought.

I’m still ambivalent about what I think about NYC, just as NYCers themselves seem similarly ambivalent in their views of California. I like that even as big and dirty of a city as it is, people here love their neighborhoods and their communities, and this tends to imbue the city as a whole with a feeling of belonging and acceptance, even in the face of all the travails (i.e. unemployed young men) that urbanity brings.

In any case, I’ve developed an intermittent Queens-style accent, which seems to enable one to make sarcastic and ironic statements in a conversational manner. I have a tendency to adopt regional accents when I am trying to fit in somewhere, such as while I lived in South Lake Tahoe, I developed a slight drawl, or while in Peru, I would speak English with Spanish inflected vowels. Although I have been told by a New Yorker that I have a “California accent”, so the ruse is not complete.

As to where my affiliations ultimately lie, I will always love California, but I don’t know that I want to live there again any time soon. I think that I could live anywhere, and I will always take a little bit of that place with me, and I will always reject some part of it. I am an American, I am a nature boy and an urbanite, I am a hippie and a capitalist, I am a writer and a retail worker. Will I ever find some place that I can finally and with finality call home? We’ll see.

My Heart, The City

In the midst of the city, the light, the electrified transmission of energy, the movement and motion towards securing a better day tomorrow, if not for oneself than at least for one’s children. The strained acceptance in the faces of the waiting people on the train, swaying together to their destinations.

The way the jagged skyline of downtown is like the electronic visualization of sound. The way our lives are organized somehow towards a possibility, a potentiality beyond our own capability, grounded in everyday effort, a struggle steeped in mystery, faith, and irrational desire, yet somehow blessed by scientific technological development, by the evolution of market economies and political entities. How we strain towards betterment, despite the worst in ourselves and each other. How we adapt and orient ourselves against the steady erosion of our world. Communities huddled together against the unknown. Killing each other, loving each other. Living, dying, blessed, bereft.

I have joined the struggle of the masses by learning to become something lesser than what I can imagine. I will subsume my burning passion to the steady and solid rootedness of the earth, of this place and time and here and now that is my life and my love and my place in the world, stabilized against the storms of change. There is no greater adventure out there, somewhere exotic in the the vast cusp of the alien distance. My struggle is to live and to die by what I know, by what I can hold onto and cultivate within me, beneath me, around me. Homeward bound.

The wind blows through me as through the arms of a tree, unharnessed, a movement betrayed only by the shuddering of its leaves. I will harness the light.

I will surround myself with a community that will support me, that I will support, reinforcing one another against the void. Allowing myself to become weakened to become tied into something stronger, something wider, something encompassing of the cosmos.

The way the transit lines pump through the arterial lines of the city like the life blood carriers of a gruesome divinity. The way a trumpet echoes through a late night subway platform. The way my heart beats with you, for you, against you, to you.

Movement Towards Inclusion

“The bell jar [as described by Braudel, signifying the exclusivity of the capitalist sector of society] makes capitalism a private club, open only to a privileged few, and enrages the billions standing outside looking in. This capitalist apartheid will inevitably continue until we all come to terms with the critical flaw in many countries’ legal and political systems that prevents the majority from entering the formal property system. . .

Few seem to realize that what we have here is one huge, worldwide industrial revolution: a gigantic movement away from life organized on a small scale to life organized on a large one. For better or for worse, people outside the West are fleeing self-sufficient and isolated societies in an effort to raise their standards of living by becoming interdependent in much larger markets. . .

Like computer networks, which had existed for years before anyone thought to link them, property systems become tremendously powerful when they are interconnected in a larger network. . . .

Political blindness, therefore, consists of being unaware that the growth of the extralegal sector and the breakdown of the existing legal order are ultimately due to a gigantic movement away from life organized on a small scale toward one organized in a larger context. . .

The primary problem is the delay in recognizing that most of the disorder occurring outside the West is the result of a revolutionary movement that is more full of promise than of problems.”

—Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

De Soto’s insights are tantalizing: his essential message is that the poor are seeking to become a part of the larger market system, but are denied access through exclusive laws and fiscal policies. Faced with the inability to become a part of the global market, the poor then must operate within small-scale, community “extralegal” markets and negotiations. I have referred to this market activity, so visibly abundant and active within South America, as a “micro-economy,” not recognizing that this teeming market life was not necessarily included within the larger economy in a formal sense.

What I also like about De Soto’s vision is his recognition that the poor have always historically recognized the opportunities inherent in a larger market. The movement to urban centers during the Industrial Revolution is well documented, and the same movement is now occurring in developing countries daily. The poor innately recognize opportunity when they see it, and recognize that fundamentally, global markets can provide access to a wider network of capability and progress.

Of course, simply giving the poor land titles and opening up their economies to globalization does not necessitate a better life, due to the great imbalance of power and wealth in favor of developed nations and small populations within developing nations. De Soto’s simplistic diagnosis has thus been rightfully critiqued. But with corrected fiscal policy and global law, these imbalances can be addressed to become more inclusive. De Soto’s insights can very neatly be coupled with the insights provided by social entrepreneurs like Muhammad Yunus. With the tool of microcredit, the poor can be given the ability to become included within the wider market and use their properties as capital assets.

The wider the embrace of networks can become, the more powerful and effective they will be. A market that can include and embrace all of the teeming activity of the micro-economies of the poor (and thus raise them out of poverty) is a healthy and balanced market.

What I also appreciate about De Soto’s vision is his emphasis on the global movement towards interdependence. Accepting membership into a greater community is to shed a degree of self-sufficiency and isolation. There is a strong undercurrent within environmental activism as well as nationalist reactionaries towards self-sufficiency and isolationism. It is certainly important to have integrity and inner strength. But at a certain point, interdependence within greater networks provides a greater strength and resiliancy.

I can best phrase this within the context of death: when someone you are close to passes away, you can feel a humongous hole cut out from inside of you. It makes you realize just how interconnected you are with everyone else in your life, and of how illusory is the concept that you are alone and detached.

When acts of violence and terrorism are committed, they are best viewed as perverted and desperate attempts to become included into the networks that they have been excluded from. The answer, therefore, in fighting terrorism is not in utilizing weapons and occupations, but rather in fighting poverty, by seeking to include, in an effective and positive manner, the developing nations and those in extreme poverty into the global market and body politic.

It is no secret that those nations mired in extreme poverty harbor terrorists. So what should we do? Bomb them? Or seek to include them into the greater networks of which they so desperately want to become a part of and which they have been routinely denied. Isn’t the answer obvious?

New York Impressions

New York, New York, no denying its a dense thicket of human and infrastructural networking nestled in veneer of steel, tile, concrete, and glass. One can easily feel submerged in its structural grandeur, its art deco apartment buildings, staircases into the swampy depths of the subway, plated cars pushing a foreshadowing wind through the hair of scattered denizens waiting to be lost again in the motion of crowded progression towards some omega point of hidden comfort awaiting in a box somewhere in a ubiquitous, guarded gray unmarked building.

As a child of California now swimming through the tidal press of NYC, it can at times be an alien, out-of-body experience, to find myself carried along forward into some frontal lobed consciousness of the masses, dimly lit intuitive corridors of the citied species, swaying pendulous through the streets with a chip on my shoulder. But here am I, finding my way, learning how I must perform when the chance opportunity is flittingly opened, to dive heedless headfirst into the fray without hesitation, after eons of pent-up waiting.

Rats will be seen rocketing quietly about from the corner of your eyes, they move quickly through the background landscape of your conversations with a see-sawing motion of their bodies, unmistakably unbalanced yet somehow poised, self-confidant, that dastardly eternal persistence inherent in their step. Also now, during the summer months, fireflies will fleetingly appear in flashing arcs against the dusk, a magical sight to someone wholly unaccustomed to them. I feel like a child every time I witness them dancing their temporal and unintelligible flights in the onset of another humid summer night.

And that’s another thing foreign and alarming to me: the humidity, the heat. The sweat puddling down my back as I sit in the apartment. The unexpected flashes of lightning and rolling thunder, a catharsis of rain, almost immodest in its passion and hurried release. The other day I was caught in an inopportune downpour that began innocently with a mild drizzling, proceeding thence into ponderous heavy drops, still spaced enough that one could pretend to hide beneath a tree, then suddenly twisted into a literal outpouring of liquid sheets from the heavens. Without any cover, it became quickly apparent that it was useless to try to deny it. I was soon soaked completely, and my contacts were beginning to slide down my eyeballs. And then it began to rain yet harder, against all understanding or belief, it came down like something known only through hearsay, like tales of monsoons, hitting the concrete so hard it almost came back up. I then wandered about through a Whole Foods, dribbling puddles of water everywhere.

Another thing is the mosquitoes. I am hoping that it is possible to develop some kind of immunity after some time, as so far when I venture into the park across the street, I get bit an average of 7 times, each one swelling up to a half-dollar size and itching like beejesus. I am frequently struck, when the temperature is 90 degrees or higher outside and the humidity is thick, by the sense that I am in the Amazon jungle.

I am now honing in on a job, wending my way through 2nd rounds of interviews to see which offer might hopefully be made, which path my life will take. It has been a process fraught with depression, stress, and the sheer inertia of despair, but the sense of change stirs somewhere in the air, like the firefly flashing its silent message of joy. Or is it warning? The channel runs ever onward, and the decisions I can make at this point are only responsive; I am at the mercy of the flow.

There are certainly moments too many to count when I realize that the city is welcoming and even forgiving beneath its exterior shell of aggression and constant movement. It is like how I learned to look at hiking down boulders and rocks when in Tahoe: the rocks look hard, and they certainly can be hard and perhaps fatal if mistakes are made and they are taken for granted. But if you look at them like something soft, something pliable that you can trust, they will support you, they will be as supportive as pillows to your knees. You can run like water along their points. Giving everything to every step, your weight presses the rocks down into balance, even when they shift, you move with them. So as with rocks it is with the city. Running with its appearance, trusting in its integrity, it supports you and moves you forward.

Integrity in the Street

Flat surfaces superimposed in 3D alignments against the horizon, hard edges, challenges unsought for that must be met at every seeming second. On the street level, your illusions stand for nothing but what you’ve truly bought into. You sense shame, a fundamental smotheredness. Aspects of yourself that you cannot defend are attacked by glances that you have left unmet. You yearn for an openness that is only earned through pain. The sense of being incomplete surrounds you—the dissonant shards of failure due to negligence are strewn across the surface of the streets. Are you beautiful enough to join in its din? Are you pure enough? Are you enough of steel, enough of integrity, enough of acceptance? This is the challenge of the street. You must deliberately shed, sufferingly, your protective mundanity, the blinders that allow your days to fast forward into oblivion. Can you feel it, fully, the force of the untouched, the anguished power of the unsaid?

To walk, balanced, swaying in fecundity, through the broken corridors of the streets. The beat that drops assuredly through crooked time. Your flow is rapture, your channeling deliberate, your connections run deep. Integrity. Spirit. Vulnerable as the stars, naked in the frigid night, shaking out the past.

City Story III

Jara looked at herself in the mirror, contemplating her curves, acknowledging her beauty. She touched up her eyebrows and slipped into her heels and walked the 8 blocks to her job, brushing by distant strangers rushing to their destinations. The sounds of the city street, a world immutable in its reality, untouchable in its concreteness. Men who hadn’t bathed in months curled into darkened entryways, pigeons stepping blithely out of footsteps with their heads penduluming and mindless. The smell of grease and tar and eggs and somewhere too the ocean in the breeze, and the trees in their square enclosures, all mixed into something indefinable and filled with some kind of ache and loneliness and excitement. Anything could happen, but you kind of knew that it wouldn’t; and even if it did, somehow it would be just like something that had already happened before.

Jara opened the door, catching the sun streaking across its mirrored glaze, and stepped into the air-conditioned lobby, into another sense of manufactured space and scent, a world created to address the chaos outside, an answer to its immutability. Here in this corporate structure the world was exactly as it had created itself according to a law that subsumed and consumed humanity. Nothing mattered, nothing was of value except as it pertained to money, to money that grew endlessly. The people within reflected this demand and were judged accordingly. How expensive the shoe, how much the gym, how big the ego, how connected the family.

But sexuality was acknowledged, albeit grudgingly, to have a force and power which of course was linked also, somehow, to money. A women’s genetic traits as symbols of the fruits of money. All of this available only to the highest bidder. Jara knew how to use what she was God given to play to these moneyed mentalities. They thought that they could have anything they wanted. Let them think that. And then give them nothing.

She flirted, she made loud jokes, she went out drinking. She would let them buy her dinner. But this was where she stopped. She knew that her limited power could only be wielded through the subtlety of suggestion. To allow anyone to fulfill their fantasy of ownership would be to lose all of that power. She would become just another thing, another product, another backroom story. For now, she was unattainable, and thus desirable, and thus powerful.

But people always attempted, of course, to bring her down in other ways. Insinuations about her ethnic heritage, snide comments about her upbringing. But she knew that with these things, too, the greatest weapon was her indifference and mystery. She had made the mistake at first of telling stories about her childhood, before she learned the hard way that anything that she said that was true would be used against her. Now she kept her true self and history hidden from these people. She would talk about current events, the weather, fashion, arts, food. Anything but about herself.

Distant, cold, mysterious, well-attired and full-figured. They all wanted her. They all wanted to tear her down into a powerless, sexed, insecure mess. They wanted her to act like something that they could buy. Something they could use and throw away and forget about in their quest for something else they could never have.

Zansky

The sunlight bothered Zansky. It bothered him because it made him squint, no matter how dark or wrap-around the sunglasses. The woman sitting across from him at that blindingly white table is pretty, her name is Lasie, pronounced Lacey, her parents either couldn’t spell or were trying to be different, and Zansky met her one day at work when he went into the accounting department, which he rarely did, and she was new, she could care less about the wider world, and all of the men in the surrounding offices stopped by to say hi and make jabs at getting her out for a drink. Zansky ended up having a rather wonderful 15 minute conversation with her at that time, in which they explored zodiac signs, salsa dancing, and fig newtons. They now met regularly for lunch, usually went to the same place–the only food joint within walking distance that didn’t clog your colon if you ate there more than two times a week. They were the talk of the 10th floor of Bingham & Merle. Insinuating remarks at the water cooler. Snide gossip snippets walked into. You know how offices are. People get bored. We talk down each other out of earshot until everyone we know is reduced to cheesecake.

Zanksy liked talking to Lasie. That’s really all that mattered to him. He knew better than to believe in other people’s envy. He had given up on rustling women into bed. It’s good for maybe a half a night of something that makes you feel bad about it later. The only sex worth having is when there’s some love behind it. Enough at least for more than 2 nights. Enough for everything, for forever, for nothing at all but knowledge of self. Interchange of past lives. Molding bowls of futurity.

When Lasie was out of high school, she had traveled the world with a knapsack of 3 days worth of clothes. One set of clothes was for dancing. One drunken night she was in Morocco, smoking opium with five men who were cousins, none of whom could speak English, and yet she claims that she learned from them that their forefathers were Assassins, and they taught her the recipe for making a mean falafel. She doesn’t know how this information was transmitted. She laughs as she talks about her past, everything behind her. No regrets, no shame, everything leading up to her point of now. She knows what it is to be alone.

Zansky tells her a story of when he was a child and he tortured a potato bug by pulling out its limbs one by one. He still feels that he hasn’t fully payed out his karmic dues for that. He wakes up in cold sweats sometimes. Lasie is laughing, and Zansky tries to keep her laughing for the rest of the half hour. Her laughter is a stream of cascading water catching the light through the trees. She smokes cigarrettes after eating. She rides bikes that don’t move anywhere in a glass room with sweating people in spandex.

City Story II

Hunter keyed his way into his building and climbed the six sets of stairs to his sanctuary and prison. His refuge and battleground. The answering machine light bleeped in repeated four minute intervals and he was excited to know that someone had wanted to talk to him. He pressed the play button and listened to the voice of a friend he hadn’t heard from in a while re-crafting the connections that made her immediately present in his life again. It was good to know that love continued, that it was not simply a bubbled world lost like Atlantis to the submergence of time and fading memory. Hunter executed a quick dance-step, a little kung-fu jig that expressed his joy to himself that he was alive and recognized.

Hunter sat on his floor and stretched. It was something he did daily when he got home from work, something he did with religious conviction–exhaling slowly as he inched forward, stretching different leg muscles in a few various poses. It was yoga except that he didn’t know that it was yoga. He thought of Yoga as a sweaty room with an Indian pretzel guru guiding huffing middle class white people through feats of balance and groin pulling. This was mere stretching. He was working out the kinks in his system.

The light of the Corolla sign across the street blinked, a stuttering blink that was annoying to the point of driving him insane at first when he moved in, but now it was reassuring, a crippled reminder that he was home, largely unnoticed except when he stared at it. A stammering blinking that whispered at the edges of his subconscious apartment visual space, the way the repetitive ticking of an old grandfather clock goes unnoticed until suddenly you hear it again for no reason at all and then you can’t stop listening to it. But it was reassuring, this monotonous stuttering. It was reassuring in the way that the muttering homeless man with his white sneakers and plastic cape on the corner was reassuring. It assured you that the world was unknowable and mundane and that it was consistent as long as you didn’t pay attention to it.

Hunter put some bread in the microwave to thaw it out from the freezer. He chose some Dixieland jazz from his CD collection and put it on. He changed into what he liked to call his flappy pants and he puttered about the apartment with his shirt off, feeling the cool hardwood floor against his feet. He liked to do this, putter about without purpose. It felt good to putter about and feel the cool floor on his feet and have nothing to do. He fluttered about in his flappy pants and took bites from a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The trick to making a good peanut butter and jelly sandwich is to put a ridiculous amount of both peanut butter and jelly on it. Even more peanut butter. The jelly is really just there to counter the dryness of the peanut butter, to provide a basic counterpoint. Damn a good peanut butter and jelly sandwich is just about one of the best things to chew on as you putter about your apartment, and it never lasts long enough. One sandwich is never enough. But you don’t want to make another one. Another one would be overkill, it would ruin what was good about the first one. Plus it just takes extra effort that really isn’t worth it, not when you’ve got bananas sitting just perfectly ripe on top of the fridge.

Hunter peeled the banana the way apes do, from their natural tops, the half without the taper, because he had read that apes peel their bananas in this way. He consciously made the decision each time he picked up a banana to peel it down from the non-tapered end, because this is the way apes did it. He figured that if apes did it, then there must be a good reason for it, beyond our immediate understanding. It imbued his banana peeling with deeper significance. He felt slightly righteous as he peeled the banana, like he was in tune perhaps with some primal forces that others who might peel their bananas heedlessly could not understand.

A banana which follows a well made peanut butter and jelly sandwich is a form of heaven, a slice of paradise. It is the little things that count, the cool floor on the feet, the puttering about and the meditational imbibing of the banana. The flapping of the pants as the Corolla sign flickers lonely but always going. The old time jazz, back when jazz was dance music, back when people did not sit down to listen and reflect on the solos, they did not see the colors flying in the spaces between the notes–they got onto the dance floor and shook their rumps to it, their asses were down in it, they were shaking inside of the music. Before the world came together and apart and grew self-conscious of itself.

Now in this post-modern time, Hunter thinks. Post-post-modern. Pre-something. In the middle of something going to something from something. To modernize was to become aware of oneself and to proclaim this, to make a song of oneself, to destroy oneself. To post-modernize was to deconstruct the self, to fragment the self, to see the pieces of self in the all self. Or something like that. To become lost in the primordial soup like a matrix mystic. Now where were we?

Hunter turned on his desktop computer and waited for the hard drive to stop clicking and opened up his word processing software.

Breakfast and Work

Hunter splatted out the habanero Tabasco across the surface of his eggs and hash browns as Jordus returned to the table with a newspaper folded in his paw. It was one of Jordus’ annoying habits to peruse the paper while eating with others. Hortencia sipped her coffee black and watched Hunter shovel a fork-load of food into his gullet. He was aware of her watching and felt the vague discomfort and insecurity that accompanies the outside observation of normally unaware tasks. He liked eating better alone, without the need for social projection. He liked sitting alone with a book in front of him and putting food into his mouth without thought, immersed in the story, the process of eating an excuse to concentrate for a period of time solely on the book, without any other distractions beyond the unconscious simple joy of bringing food into the mouth and chewing and washing it down in pink lemonade.

“City Recoils In Aftermath of Black-out,” Jordus read.

“So you like the job, then,” Hortencia said to Hunter.

“It’s surprisingly fulfilling to fill out forms and move them from the In to the Out box. I gain satisfaction from filling in the boxes with information that only I am designated to give, and then to place these papers in the Out box. I take the pile at the end of the day and I walk them over to someone else’s desk and I place them in their In box.”

“The job has a future.”

“It is remarkable, this feeling I get when I drop the completed forms in someone else’s In box.”

“’25 percent of adult Americans are afraid of the dark.’ And those are just the ones who admit it.”

“I wish I could enjoy meaningless mundane tasks that I am not paid enough for. My boss gave me a raise on Monday, I think the company senses that I am restless. They apparently felt the need to show their appreciation for my mundane tasks. Employee recognition, the demonstration of the company’s awareness of ‘the little guy.’ I didn’t even ask for it,” Hortencia said, pulling off a piece of a blueberry muffin top, the kind with giant crystalline sugars on it, and stuffing it delicately in her mouth.

“There is even a gym and showers at my new job. I can come into work after a night of partying, sleep in until the last minute, then shower when I get there. They provide Mountain Action scented body wash.”

“They gave me a button in my mailbox. It says, ‘I Am Appreciated’ on it with a little golden star. In some ways I am offended.”

“It says here that children are fast becoming the top consumers of electronic devices.”

The hot sauce sprayed on Hunter’s food was beginning to cause a light sheen of sweat to break out on his forehead. He washed down his food with O.J. and breathed through his mouth.

“I am offended because it shows how disconnected the company is from my needs. They think giving me a button is going to increase the quality of my work? There’s probably statistics. I am offended because they blatantly treat me like a number rather than like a human being. They could have had my boss make me cookies or something. That I might appreciate. A fucking button. Like I’m in third grade. Even third graders don’t want buttons anymore. They want an early pass to recess or a coupon for McDonalds, something with value. Not that I’m complaining about the raise. The raise itself was a nice gesture. I could have done without the button. I would have been happy without the button. The button just served to piss me off.”

Hunter kept looking out the corner of his eye at an Asian girl sitting at the next table. She sensed she was being looked at and animatedly talked to her friend and brushed her hair back with her hand. Hunter made sure not to be caught looking, but to look enough so that she knew. He breathed through his mouth and gulped down O.J.

“That was some shindig last night, huh. I’d never seen Harris dance before. He looked like an ostrich on acid.”

Jordus folded up the newspaper and sat back and laughed. A piece of toast flew out and stuck to the table. Hunter had started laughing at the remembrance of Harris dancing and then laughed harder at the flying bit of toast. Hortencia smiled and pulled off a chunk of muffin and adjusted her glasses.

City Story

The lights in the city went red green red in the puddles of oil glistening in the cooling Autumn sun, Los Angeles, walking along the suppertime sidewalk, Hunter prowled head down, needing air, strangers, the ever busy and indifferent outside world, the simple flowing motion forward of stepping after struggling for hours alone on his computer in his clean, organized, solitary apartment. The basic problems of language tonight could not be resolved. There was no expressing what he needed most directly to say. There were side avenues, right angles to that direction, but it was like poking a needle at a vein in the dark. Added to the basic fact that he wasn’t even sure what he wanted to say exactly, just knowing that he needed to. And then the heavy stillness of his loneliness pressing in around every spark, making it difficult to catch even the draft of one opening sentence, nothing insubstantial tindered–all thoughts were vital, boundless, and opaque to immediacy. He stopped and fingered out a Kamel Red Light and lit it and blew out smoke steadily, standing before a pink staccato hanging plant infested apartment complex lined with projecting rectangular balconies from which smells of various take-out and stove-cooked foods emanated. He watched a pretty woman across the street talking on her cellphone and looking up and down the street, waiting to be taken somewhere. He breathed in smoke and held it deep in his lungs and blew it out at the sky. He wasn’t a nicotine addict, but there were times in the streets that he needed the cigarette excuse to stand and meditate in the midst of so much apparent purpose. The many cars sleeping along the curb were glistening with lights in the descending dusk. Smells of foreign worlds, flowers mingling with the dinner street Fall smells.

Hunter continued down the blocks, listening to the fragments of peoples lives spilling into an atonal polyrhythmic flow of city life. Always everywhere something there to let you know that you are a piece of something less and something greater. There is you and there is me and the in-between is but a matter of beginnings and endings which have no distinction. Here is the rich and here is the poor and here is the hunger and here is the denial and here is the ever looming threat of the crowd boxed in, separated and policed mainly by the mind–the danger is felt when the eye is opened and the reality stirred. The blinders of everyday indifference are the city’s lifeblood, it’s basis of existence. Alien human beings are traffic, they are passerbys, they are herds and individuals, they are box office ticket buyers and supermarket cart wheeling hobos, jazz club afficianados Hollywood industry junkies. They are a force contained and exploding in windows all across the night

Well, it made him stronger, Hunter felt. It destroyed him as he loved it. It recontructed him as he hated it. And even when the voice within him couldn’t find its way into this overlying structure, simply walking through the solitary streets and breathing the electric air soothed him to an unrequited silence. Where the inner ground of integrity was known, with no verification, with no credits and no communication.