Tell Well

Scene From a Bus

2006-11-25T14:52:00.000-08:00

A picture of honduran countryside.

pee-ed myself

2006-09-29T21:23:00.000-07:00

i struggled a bit with whether or not i should share this story, but time and half a bottle of wine later, here goes:

when i was in elementary school, my mom's family all went on summer vacation to a camp-like resort upstate (NY) or somesuch locale. the compound was right on a pretty large pond, or small lake. it wasn't the type of pond/lake you could really swim in as it was kind of a huge depression carpeted deeply with lily pads and other aquatic vegetation, then filled to the brim with lakewater.

but still it was pretty idyllic, with the sunlight dappling and glimmering off the water's surface in that wondrous trippy-without-drugs way. i was romping around with the protagonists from the pear-tree incident (they'll be recurring characters in these episodes). don't recall everyone who was in the rowboat, but mike, billy and myself were definitely all onboard, and i think one more person.

yes, so the thing about a lake, and all the time it takes to row into the center of it, and start to row back to shore, it aint just sunshine, a gentle breeze, and sublimely beautiful sun dappling. there's inevitably all that water and what eventually seems like an infinite chorus of lapping wavelets.

blup, blup, tling, dling, nup, ling... toward the end, i couldn't hear anything but the low-frequency, insistent drone of my bladder muscles attempting to suppress a tsunami. the pain was also expressing itself with a red-tinge flooding the borders of my vision. (speaking of weird sensory spillovers, once while eating with the same family, i gorged myself out on many dishes, ending with lobster, and then proceeded to have this gluttony-induced headache where the throbbing actually "tasted" like lobster. weird but true.)

i valiantly held out for what seemed a geologic epoch and made it to the dock when my fortitude gave out. it was either piss my pants in front of everyone or "accidentally" capsize the boat and my fellow travelers so i could pee unnoticed. looking back, it occurs to me i could have jumped into the water solo, leaving the others safe and dry, but how would i have explained that?

post-affliction

2006-07-12T11:53:00.000-07:00

just realized the title and trajectory of this blog consigns it to an earnestness i'd rather not make the focus of all my writings.

anyway, in this post-postmodern world, who can afford to have a unitary expressive identity and cyberpresence? not me.

that said, out of curiosity and real desire, i am trying to devise a new name for a domain that would express all those things i aspire to integrate into my personality: theory-headedness, political righteousness/apathy, irony/sarcasm, techno-lust/incompetence/neurosis, paranoia, naivete, pop-culture indulgence/distance, etc.

of course, this just feeds me back into the wrong-headed dialectic loop, forever seeking uniformity.

maybe you can't teach an old dog new tricks. stay tuned here for more genetic fragments of memory and the unveiling of my new domain.

-ty

pear tree

2006-06-24T23:54:00.000-07:00

i forget whose idea it was to requisition some fruit... probably stella's, the undisputed leader, at least among the three of us, and due to the then significant age gap between us and michael.

in any case, it must have been around 1981, queens ny, and either hot and dry or hot and humid. a pear or two from the shady and seemingly towering tree that presided over the patchy islands of crab grass dotting the dusty sea of packed and rain-starved soil. who could argue with that? i now realize this was the time before anything like arguments even existed for us.

barefoot, our three-year old bodies struggled with the too-heavy wooden pole and managed to liberate a few hard green orbs from the branches. six bare feet went stomping into the bathroom situated oddly close to the front stoop to wash the knobby pale green hides.

biting into the pear was too difficult from the start, the first vague clue of something awry, then the bitter and decidedly un-pear-like taste. without much deliberation, i rejected our hard-won spoils with a simple throw onto the stoop (i don't think we even exited the bathroom) and it rolled off.

It's Okay

2006-03-30T17:51:00.000-08:00

Today, I realized I don't like working in a socially-isolating office as a "researcher," in "the movement." Unfortunately, I've spent too much time thinking doing "intellectual" work makes me more important: a member of the class people who think, investigate, talk, write and put into motion, in order to "fight the power" and improve people's lives.

Patriarchy is at play:

service, teaching children, talking to people, hearing what they have to say and helping:

this is women's work = bad.

thinkers and writers of the movement use their heads, provide worldviews, bring pressure to bear:

men's work = good.