30 June 2008

"Cop"

"Cop wot," my sister says. She is handing me a glass of water. "Huh?" She points out that "cop" means "take," and that she is instructing me to take the glass of water ("wot.") Having just watched the spectacular acting of Al Pacino and the lovely Kitty Wynn in The Panic in Needle Park, I associate the use of "cop" with 1970s junkies who resent having to go all the way up to Harlem to "cop." Her other favorite habit is repeatedly to ask, "Who you tekkin', kid, who you tekkin?" whenever I am sending someone a text message. There is little doubt in my mind that this is some sort of gateway to terrible slang-related decisions, like using "jive" as a verb. (I'm ok with it as a noun, though, or whenever it precedes "turkey" - is that adjectival?)



Incidentally, the movie is really impressive and was co-written by Joan Didion and her late husband John Donne. The movie has no soundtrack and most reviews of it use words like "grim," and "stark," which are certainly apt. And certainly more refreshing than hammy stuff like "Requiem for a Dream," in that I don't think there is a latent sermonizer hiding behind the camera. The final scene, a jittery, long shot featuring Wynn waiting for Pacino's release from prison, conveys all the desperate claustrophobia of their condition, their young and beautiful energy totally dissipated, good intentions evaporating into death and disease. She turned him in to keep from doing time. We surmise that she has prostituted herself, again, while he was in prison, in order to feed her habit. When Pacino is released, he walks out fuming, shot out of a cannon. He pointedly walks away from her, and the camera stays a few steps ahead of him. We see her looking dejectedly after him, and she breaks into a slow jog, calling out his name. The dynamic holds for several seconds, seemingly interminable. You wonder if they have finally been torn apart by the depths of their own addictions. He finally stops walking, and gives her a furious look as she catches up with him. "Well?" he shouts. Cut. Credits roll.

28 June 2008

home-life and vacation-life

At the risk of sounding like like I have an unhealthy fascination with how objects are or aren't useful at different points in time, let me ask this question: what do you do with your home-life keys when you are on vacation? Part of me thinks I should carry them around anyway, because I am used to having their weight in my left pocket and checking for the presence of keys in my pocket is part of the so-called "wallet, keys, cell phone" check I do several times a day.

So since for the past two years we've been to Colorado during the summer, we end up with a rental car, which means a new unfamiliar key that I actually need to carry around and use. It's not like going to New York for the weekend - that left pocket isn't just up for grabs, in other words. I guess I could add the rental key to my home-life keyring, but it seems like that would be according the transient key a more prominent place than it probably deserves.

However, I am always very afraid that if I stop carrying my home-life keys around while I'm on vacation, I'll end up misplacing them and not noticing they're gone until I get home and need them again. So, carrying them around every day is like a charm to keep them from being lost. But they become sort of like a superfluous appendage in that their uselessness is so evident.

Does anyone else fret about this?

12 June 2008

Smashed windows and unexpected comedy

Like most couples, the Abstract Citizen household relies on the occasional pet name. We’re not a shmoopy/honeybunny kind of couple, but there are certainly names that, for all intents and purposes, we only use at home or in private with each other.

Recently, Ms. Abstract Citizen went out of town for a few days. I had gone to see Indiana Jones 4 with some friends. On the way back, I found out from a neighbor that the police were trying to track me down because one of my windows had been smashed. As I walked out to the car, I noticed – with some excitement – that there was a note on the windshield.

“Great,” I think. “The guilty party was neighborly and did the right thing by leaving me a note.” As it turns out, the note was instead a heartfelt love note left by Ms. Citizen earlier that day, before hopping into a taxi to go to the airport.

It was addressed to by my pet name. Now, in the interest of maintaining some privacy, I will change the pet name for the purposes of this narrative. Let’s say she does call me “honeybunny.” So the note reads, “Dear Honeybunny, have a good weekend in Vermont.” Signed, “Shmoopy.”

My friends Dannyboy and the A-Train were quite helpful in getting the broken window sorted out. We called the police back, and they ran a quick errand or two to help me out after taping a couple of trash bags to now vacant window frame.

It’s getting late now, and I’m standing on Columbia, talking to two police officers. It really looks like I’ve done something wrong. If you were a passerby, you would think, “Man, that guy’s in some serious kind of trouble.” The officers were actually quite nice. We made small talk. I said, “That new Indiana Jones movie is really not worth this hassle.” The male officer – call him Officer P. - was about 6’4, very strong, and cut a very imposing figure. He joked that he would have to go anyway because of his kids.

So there we are, making small talk. I know I’ve written a lot about my recent interactions with the police. And I’m marveling at how, as a young idiot in college, I might have perceived the police as something more like an occupying force than as agents of law and order. Again, I am now very grateful to them. And frankly, I’m enjoying the small talk. I mention the gunshots from the other night, how we heard them clearly and how it’s a bit unsettling. We talk about Adams Morgan on Fridays and Saturdays. He suddenly realizes that it’s Thursday, meaning the next night is a Friday. “Oh no…I thought I had one more night before going back to it.” Deep sigh. Neighborhood busybodies are stopping by, making small talk with us.

And there are conversational lulls. We are waiting for dispatch to call back and assign this property damage a case number. I mention how my wife left me a note much earlier that day, at around 1:30 p.m., but we already knew the window was smashed closer to 8 p.m. because of when it was reported. It is during one of these lulls that Officer P. turns to me and says, deadpan:

“So. You’re the Honeybunny, huh?”

There was very little I could say back. Just, “That’s right. That’s who I am.”

05 June 2008

Declarative sentences possessing varying degrees of truth

It was in an unfortunate place, the tire-swing. It still is.

In my childhood, I planted mountains that grew tall before crumbling into middle-aged rocks.

The scotch you poured over the gravel was amplified and amber.

All along I never knew I would look so good in a hat, so bad in a suit.

Things I know are jockeying for position, hoping not to become things I knew.

Surviving is its own relevance, but enduring is just another concession.

I kept a list composed exclusively of thoughts I had when I was wearing the color green, but all the thoughts turned out to be unfair and wrong.

The world is bright until you look at it.

We say that birds sing, but we would never pay for their music. Sometimes when I notice them, the song is almost comically loud. I wonder if they listen to each other or if their chorus is a series of parallel soliloquies, soloists in autistic unison. The thought is almost too beautiful to bear.

But no, I didn’t think it would turn out like this, me writing a nature thing and turning thirty. I thought by now it was too late to improve upon the valleys, to re-package and deliver them to you with any additional value.

The truth is, I’ve always settled for clichés when I’m near rivers, lakes, oceans.

I am often scared though I’m seldom afraid.

Threatened by pine cones. There are only earth tones.

When I was brash, I believed hands were soft, faces brittle, and tongues papery.

Where I saw love, I thought of bees working, working, working.

I could not see the differences between angels and dogs.

I looked askance, because nowhere could I find the right coat. I wanted the blue one, the one I call Gratitude.

In the cold, I looked somehow larger, and seeing mountains ahead, I fixed my mind’s eye on a picture of the bears I grew up with. Together we ate salmon, and for months, asleep, we would gather dust, and we dreamt of being shafts of light on the forest floor. We saw ourselves successfully fighting our way through the trees and branches all the way back to earth.

04 June 2008

The imagination and Rwanda

About two years ago, I was in Rwanda, posting elsewhere. I thought that, with a long summer of mindless events and relatively trivial problems lying ahead, it might be a good time to try and re-capture what I thought while in Kigali. The original short pieces are below.

I. Happy Hour at the Mille-Collines

Expat hour at the Hotel Rwanda. The pool, famously used as a water source, full of swimming children. When birds hang overhead, it is not because of an abundance of corpses nearby. The tall glasses of Mutzig lager are poured cold and frothy; bowls of warm potato chips topped with skin-on red peanuts. The Rwandese hosts are ex-pats too, raised mostly in the DRC. They are, I surmise by the date their families moved to the Congo, wealthy Tutsis whose parents made the decision to leave during one of the first bursts of violence, in 1957 or 1958.

Dinner follows, our first local meal at a place named Chez Jean - hardened manioc scooped with your hand into a vegetable sauce, enormous tilapia (NOT local), piri-piri, and conversation where words like "sustainable progress" are used unironically. Most streets in Kigali are still nameless, so giving directions is tricky. I have a hard time getting in touch with our earlier cab driver, and while not nerve-wracking, exactly, it’s still off-putting, though the hills sparkle. The legless streetperson from earlier in the day is nowhere to be seen.

II. Thought Hangover
Kigali is a gorgeous city, but at night I feel drunk on my own thoughts. I don't think I have ever been in a place where this much evil has been concentrated into a few months of hacking and domination.

You meet people and do a mental subtraction, current age minus twelve years: what were they doing between April and July of 1994? Were they running for their lives, were they elsewhere, were they one of the few silent Hutus given the luxury of not taking sides, or, worse, were they the fourth option?

The genocide museum yesterday was too much for words, especially being that I'm in the middle of Philip Gourevitch's We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families. His writing touches on imagination in the context of the genocide, and he can only offer the thought that while looking closely at what happened is nauseating, looking away makes you feel even worse.

Indeed, I have heard the word "genocide" so many times - and yet, with each repetition, with each closer examination, the subject is more painful. The senses are never dulled by it.

We are, each of us, functions of how we imagine ourselves and of how others imagine us, and, looking back, there are these discrete tracks of memory: the times when our lives are most sharply defined in relation to others' ideas of us, and the more private times when we are freer to imagine ourselves...

It was the same with nearly all the Tutsi survivors I met in Rwanda. When I pressed for stories of how they had lived during the long periods between bouts of violence - household stories, village stories, funny stories, or stories of annoyance, stories of school work, church, a wedding, a funeral, a trip, a party, or a feud - the answer was always opaque: in normal times, we lived normally.

So, remembering has its economy, like experience itself, and when Odette mentioned the hand of the professor of internal medicine on her bottom, and grinned, I saw that she had forgotten that economy and wandered in her memories, and I felt that we were both glad of it. A professor had imagined her susceptible and she had imagined that as a married man and her teacher he should know greater restraint. They had each other wrong. But people have the strangest notions as they navigate each other in this life - and in the 'good years,' the 'normal times,' that isn't the end of the world.

I think what Gourevitch is getting at is the importance of imagination, both in the positive and negative sense - because while the "lessons learned" section of the museum stresses that genocide is never spontaneous, never unplanned, it is always without a context. Genocide is always the result of a most brutal act of imagination that isolates the individuals who perpetrate it, cutting them off from their own long history of being doctors, teachers, nurses, neighbors, friends – anything other than being a genocidaire.

03 June 2008

I concluded nothing from this (Vermont)

Lake Champlain is about 120 miles long, and 12 wide. Staring at it, all I could think was to wonder how much all that water might weigh. Then I thought about how strong the land below it would have to be hold all that water up, which led me to think about what might be below the land holding the lake up. No doubt something even stronger.

Then I suddenly thought of land masses, entire continents, and their weight. I wondered whether land must be strong to hold those lakes and oceans up, and then I also thought that somehow gravity must also push that water up to keep it from just crashing through the surface onto whatever is below, which means that gravity itself might be conflicted about whether it should always be pulling, pulling. I remembered a line from an old poem of mine about where I described rubberiness as the ground pushing up on your legs, making them fall apart like a budget sushi roll.

Everything is tethered in a contiguous way so that we are not just floating and so that there aren’t gaps between, say, the bottom of the lake and the surrounding mountains. There is no nothing, only a bunch of tight-fitting somethings. It’s all packed so tightly, and the whole arrangement just seemed so improbable that I had a short moment of awe and excitement.

Life seems best lived, to me, when those moments are earned by a little bit of inquisitiveness. I took that thought with me to the wedding, where someone – E.D.S., I think – said something about how a wedding brings together all these disparate things to create a temporary (but undeniable) whole. Even when a wedding is not electric, it can still be somehow contagious, and so I circled around the room once more, trying to hand off a potato to an unwilling mark, wondering where all that good will goes when the party evaporates.