Warning: I will not censor this 'blog, so if you offend easily, you need to leave now. Character assassination in progress.
Yesterday night I came home to check my email and noticed a large truck, a van, and a car in front of my house. To say I was puzzled would be like saying Vietnam was a mistake. It was my roommate and former friend Tony trying desperately to move while I wasn't home. As it was, he nearly was successful. When he left, he left me with nothing but my bed, my desk, my bookshelves and a white-hot loathing I've never experienced in the entiretly of my life. I don't have a microwave. I don't have a washer and dryer. I have no furniture in my living room whatsoever. I literally don't have a pot to piss in, and the one frying pan I do own, why, he stole the lid. He even took the trash can.
He did leave me, however, with debt. I've been paying half the rent, and now I am responsible for all of it. This means that this month's rent check will most likely bounce. This is because Tony's credit was so fucking bad that he couldn't be on my lease because he's a moronic deadbeat eternal-child motherfucker. I have no legal recourse to get rent from him because the lease only recognizes me as renting here, and that nasty donkey-raping motherfucker knew it. When I confronted him, he of course made this all sound like my fault. "I told you in February that I'd be moving." Yes, Tony, you said many things in February, most of which I ignored because you are a simple, ass-rimming waste of skin whose only pleasures in life come from your singular inability to have an adult relationship. I mean, come on. His mom still buys nearly all of his food and he's nearly thirty. But that was in FEBRUARY. What he knew was that if he gave me enough time to think about it by telling me, oh, last week, that he'd be moving, I would have had his tiny pin-head blown off his waste of a neck.
His parents were helping him move (THERE'S a goddamn surprise) and they knew he was doing something shady, and their eyes didn't meet mine. His mom usually comes and makes me give her a hug; this time she barely acknowledged I was in the room. Too bad they'd failed to pass down any of their lofty Judeo-Christian values to their goat-lovin' son. I could blame them, too, and since I am so pissed that I can barely hold my bowels, I might as well lump them in there, too. I hate them, as well. Oh yes. Try getting to Heaven now, you close-minded simple snatches. Enjoy the sulphur.
I feel utterly betrayed. I feel used, like a condom floating in a toilet. I feel, most of all, shame. I'm ashamed that I'd trusted him as much as I did. I'd like to say that this will harden me a little, but I think we all know differently. And, my vengeance center is calling to me, luring me with a siren-song towards the rocks of sweet, sweet revenge. I'm sadly not too good for revenge, and I'd be lying if I said that it didn't fill me with an insane amount of warmth and delight. I'm not sure I will act on it. As John Nash said, "One can be on a diet of the mind and not indulge certain appetites." Oh, but it will be so tasty...
In the meantime, I've got nothing. My money situation was tight to begin with, and now I will have to sell handjobs under the railroad trestle to make ends meet. The emptiness of my apartment is like a slap in the face every time I walk through it.
If any of you want to help me, here's what you can do.
1) Dress in black and meet me at 2326 Brandon Court, Bloomington, IN, 47401, for a good old-fashioned ninja excursion, which will end when we hear the hiss of air escaping from the slashed tires of gray Oldsmobile with Ohio plates.
2) Send boxes of venomous reptiles (snakes! he fears them!) to me and I will see to it that they are used... properly.
3) I guess what I need the most is support. Call me. Email me. (I will have internet till the 9th...) I'll be here, luxuriating in a hatred-filled chrysalis.
I'll be better soon, I promise. But today... today, I'm given entirely to the Dark Side, so don't cross me, a'ight?
I remain, as ever,
Dom
PS. He even took my bathtowel, which was a) used and b) given to me nine months ago. Petty sperm-Dumpster.
Sunday, May 29, 2005
Wednesday, May 25, 2005
A healthy appreciation for pâté.
Last night, my father (The Prince of Darkness) called to chat. And by "chat" I mean "remind me of a really painful memory that will, inevitably, come to mind when choosing a quality nursing care facility when he can't hold his bowels."
When I was a little boy, my favorite place in the world was the Place Where You Can Feed The Ducks. It was a series of ponds and enclosures for migratory waterfowl to rest and consume algae, which always was in Amazon-like profusion. In the spring, some of the waterfowl would nest in the ponds, and I, fascinated by the concept of eggs and how they were wee ones encased in calcate shells, was spellbound by the nesting birds. So, what we'd do is stop by the local Wonderbread outlet to buy some bracingly stale day-old bread and then we'd go to Feed The Ducks, an activity that I was bribed with on several occasions.
My mother was gravid with my pupating sister, so my father decided to take me to Feed The Ducks, most likely because my mother wanted me out of her sweat-drenched and hormonally swinging hair. I had a bag of bread, and the ducks (mostly mallards, but also some Canadian geese) saw me coming and began to congregate.
Here's where my story and that of my "father" diverge.
My father contends that he told me not to feed all of the bread to the little, cute ducks, because there were a few nasty old knob-billed white geese in the pond, and, when they weren't making the smaller ducks their bitches, they would require sustenance as well. Since I was all of three and a half, maybe four, those geese outweighed me by several tons and they weren't thrilled with me giving all the bread to the cute little ones.
I contend that, since the white, nasty geese were evil, depriving them of food would cause them to die sooner, which would make it so I wouldn't have to endure their incessant hissing.
The outcome was simple enough. When the massive white goose realized I had no bread for him, he savagely attacked me by stabbing his fetid bill right between my eyes, and, when satisfied that I was nearly dead, began to stomp the everloving shit out of me. I still can hear my father's laughter as I was nearly slain by that velociraptor goose; laughter, and inaction.
Oh, I made it out alive. I came home to my mother, who saw the massive swelling on my forehead and asked how it came to be. "A duck beaked me", I responded, and she began to laugh, too.
That night, as I wove dolls out of their hair for the houdoun ritual I'd perform on them at dawn, I swore vengeance. Of course, my personal style of retribution is subtle. Oh, can't find your carkeys? Oh, I don't remember where I put your favorite pen. No, I don't know who laid cable in the houseplants.
If I ever have kids, I will swear to them in infancy that I will not allow seventy-pound greylag geese to savage them in their youthful innocence.
Speaking of geese, my grandmother Barbara (the West Virginia one) used to have three geese, who served no other purpose on the earth than to be terrifying. Nobody was safe. Near the gate to the barnyard was a walking stick and a croquet mallet, one of which you needed to have on you at all times. The geese would be somewhere, quietly taking the life of smaller, weaker creatures, and when they'd hear you they'd rush over to you, hissing, the pupils in their beady yellow eyes dialating in the sheer pleasure of the kill. Once, when the geese got into the henhouse, my mother and I took croquet mallets and batted them from here to Kingdom Come, lest they ravage the laying hens. When they became geriatric, they lost some of their resolve. One froze to death, another was carried off by a fox (we found a gore-covered wing in the pasture) and the last was euthanized via shotgun by my grandfather after it broke one, and then the other, of its legs. Can't say I was too sad to see them go, really, but it ruined my own plans of making a delightful French-inspired spread out of their entrails.
Lesson of the Day: Geese suck. You can't really trust your parents. And, most importantly, while walking through life, always carry a goddamned croquet mallet.
I remain, as ever,
Dom
When I was a little boy, my favorite place in the world was the Place Where You Can Feed The Ducks. It was a series of ponds and enclosures for migratory waterfowl to rest and consume algae, which always was in Amazon-like profusion. In the spring, some of the waterfowl would nest in the ponds, and I, fascinated by the concept of eggs and how they were wee ones encased in calcate shells, was spellbound by the nesting birds. So, what we'd do is stop by the local Wonderbread outlet to buy some bracingly stale day-old bread and then we'd go to Feed The Ducks, an activity that I was bribed with on several occasions.
My mother was gravid with my pupating sister, so my father decided to take me to Feed The Ducks, most likely because my mother wanted me out of her sweat-drenched and hormonally swinging hair. I had a bag of bread, and the ducks (mostly mallards, but also some Canadian geese) saw me coming and began to congregate.
Here's where my story and that of my "father" diverge.
My father contends that he told me not to feed all of the bread to the little, cute ducks, because there were a few nasty old knob-billed white geese in the pond, and, when they weren't making the smaller ducks their bitches, they would require sustenance as well. Since I was all of three and a half, maybe four, those geese outweighed me by several tons and they weren't thrilled with me giving all the bread to the cute little ones.
I contend that, since the white, nasty geese were evil, depriving them of food would cause them to die sooner, which would make it so I wouldn't have to endure their incessant hissing.
The outcome was simple enough. When the massive white goose realized I had no bread for him, he savagely attacked me by stabbing his fetid bill right between my eyes, and, when satisfied that I was nearly dead, began to stomp the everloving shit out of me. I still can hear my father's laughter as I was nearly slain by that velociraptor goose; laughter, and inaction.
Oh, I made it out alive. I came home to my mother, who saw the massive swelling on my forehead and asked how it came to be. "A duck beaked me", I responded, and she began to laugh, too.
That night, as I wove dolls out of their hair for the houdoun ritual I'd perform on them at dawn, I swore vengeance. Of course, my personal style of retribution is subtle. Oh, can't find your carkeys? Oh, I don't remember where I put your favorite pen. No, I don't know who laid cable in the houseplants.
If I ever have kids, I will swear to them in infancy that I will not allow seventy-pound greylag geese to savage them in their youthful innocence.
Speaking of geese, my grandmother Barbara (the West Virginia one) used to have three geese, who served no other purpose on the earth than to be terrifying. Nobody was safe. Near the gate to the barnyard was a walking stick and a croquet mallet, one of which you needed to have on you at all times. The geese would be somewhere, quietly taking the life of smaller, weaker creatures, and when they'd hear you they'd rush over to you, hissing, the pupils in their beady yellow eyes dialating in the sheer pleasure of the kill. Once, when the geese got into the henhouse, my mother and I took croquet mallets and batted them from here to Kingdom Come, lest they ravage the laying hens. When they became geriatric, they lost some of their resolve. One froze to death, another was carried off by a fox (we found a gore-covered wing in the pasture) and the last was euthanized via shotgun by my grandfather after it broke one, and then the other, of its legs. Can't say I was too sad to see them go, really, but it ruined my own plans of making a delightful French-inspired spread out of their entrails.
Lesson of the Day: Geese suck. You can't really trust your parents. And, most importantly, while walking through life, always carry a goddamned croquet mallet.
I remain, as ever,
Dom
Tuesday, May 24, 2005
The scarlet...fever.
Yesterday while I was talking to Keith I remembered that, as a small child, I managed to contract scarlet fever, which (and I may be wrong on this one) I'd thought was erradicated from the North American continent. But whatever. I was four, and my sister was still a larva; my mother had gone to Maine (we were living in Hackettstown, NJ at the time) to settle my grandmother Anna's estate after her passing and had brought my sister with her. That left me and my dad, and while my dad was at work I was left in the care of my German godmother, Helga.
A word about Helga. Helga liked many things, among them being severe. Her hair was always pulled back in a wee watertight bun that scarcely permitted her to blink; her food was always dry and brittle, tasted of regret and came with a generous side of European guilt. "Ven I vas a childt, ve had to eat ze filth from ze streets and forage in ze dank forest because it vas vartime. American children are so spoiled. If you are not vanting zat cookie, I vill wrap it up and you vill starve like a rabid beast on ze streets." Of course, since I was four, my attention was almost instantaneously elsewhere; there are a great many shiny things in the world, and Helga had quite a few in her home. I, however, was permitted only in the basement, which, while furnished and possessed of a television, smelled of mothballs and devil-worship. She chided me for holding my fork "like ze peasants" and often lulled me to sleep by telling me about how she'd have to wait in line for seventy-five hours to buy seven pungently rancid chicken heads for "ze putrid broth" for her and her four hundred brothers and sisters. When I was baptized at the age of four, she and her husband Tom were there; Tom had a glass eye which laid dead in his skull, unmoving, piercing my tender young soul with unearthly dread. I remember nothing about their two children save that their daughter had a stuffed unicorn that she teased me with [whore!] and their son had a rubbery Japanese mask of Satan, which my mother donned once and proceeded to terrify me so badly that I urinated down the front of my overalls, prompting me at a tender age to scan the news for bad nursing homes to send her to when she became a burden. {Hahahahaha! Maybe!}
Helga tired of me quickly, and since there were small children across the street, I was sent to frolic with them. The problem: they were diseased little children. When I awoke one morning in my He-Man pajamas completely drenched in my own brine and vomiting a la Linda Blair, my father sensed that something might be amiss. And by "sensed" I mean "my mother screamed at him to get me to the doctor, her shrieks of maternal righteousness interfering with satellite transmissions and causing beluga strandings in Nunavut." He brought me to Helga's wrapped in our nappy brown afghan, and Helga called our doctor, Doctor Chi.
Dr. Chi was, at that time, one of the only Asians in Hackettstown. He always smelled vaguely of bologna, but he was a good doctor and great with children. When Helga called, he told her to "Bring baby now! He so sicka-so!" So she did, wrapped in that nasty brown afghan because the cold most likely would have snuffed me. Dr. Chi prepared a syringe which, even in my state, looked like a harpoon with which he'd impale me. He sensed my apprehension and took the syringe's plunger and began to tap it on my arm. "See, baby? No hurt!" He smiled and, when I wasn't looking, plunged the syringe into my arm all the way through to the other side; I could fairly hear it scraping bone and rending sinew. I was outraged. How dare that coldcut-reeking mothereffer try to trick me! So, I did what any four year old who is delusional and hallucinating would do; namely, I took the harpoon out of his baby-murdering hands as soon as it had left my tender young arm and I flung it onto the floor, where it comically stuck in the ground needle-first and quivered. Dr. Chi looked nonplussed, but Helga was mortified. "I svear, he must haff gone to the insane!" Dr. Chi smiled and shook my hand; we made our peace. However, Helga took me home and fettered me in the basement with only liverwurst on Wonderbread to consume. "Vat vas you thinking? He vas trying to help you! Vy, ven I vas a vee von, I vould haff never throwed a needle at ze doctor!" I wanted to hasten to add that she didn't see doctors as a little girl, since she was living in a weed-choked cavern at the bottom of the sea with all the other hags; that, or her story of wartime Europe, which I thought was malarky. But since she'd already pulled out three of my fingernails with pliers, I thought it best to eat my liverwurst in silence.
I hear that the kid who actually gave me the fever got married a few years ago. Ironically, his mother works (still) at Hackettstown Hospital as one of the lab vampiresses. I attribute my inability to lower my body temperature below 100 degrees to this brush with death; that, and my fear of Asians.
Yay! Done with random memory time!
I remain, as ever,
Dom
A word about Helga. Helga liked many things, among them being severe. Her hair was always pulled back in a wee watertight bun that scarcely permitted her to blink; her food was always dry and brittle, tasted of regret and came with a generous side of European guilt. "Ven I vas a childt, ve had to eat ze filth from ze streets and forage in ze dank forest because it vas vartime. American children are so spoiled. If you are not vanting zat cookie, I vill wrap it up and you vill starve like a rabid beast on ze streets." Of course, since I was four, my attention was almost instantaneously elsewhere; there are a great many shiny things in the world, and Helga had quite a few in her home. I, however, was permitted only in the basement, which, while furnished and possessed of a television, smelled of mothballs and devil-worship. She chided me for holding my fork "like ze peasants" and often lulled me to sleep by telling me about how she'd have to wait in line for seventy-five hours to buy seven pungently rancid chicken heads for "ze putrid broth" for her and her four hundred brothers and sisters. When I was baptized at the age of four, she and her husband Tom were there; Tom had a glass eye which laid dead in his skull, unmoving, piercing my tender young soul with unearthly dread. I remember nothing about their two children save that their daughter had a stuffed unicorn that she teased me with [whore!] and their son had a rubbery Japanese mask of Satan, which my mother donned once and proceeded to terrify me so badly that I urinated down the front of my overalls, prompting me at a tender age to scan the news for bad nursing homes to send her to when she became a burden. {Hahahahaha! Maybe!}
Helga tired of me quickly, and since there were small children across the street, I was sent to frolic with them. The problem: they were diseased little children. When I awoke one morning in my He-Man pajamas completely drenched in my own brine and vomiting a la Linda Blair, my father sensed that something might be amiss. And by "sensed" I mean "my mother screamed at him to get me to the doctor, her shrieks of maternal righteousness interfering with satellite transmissions and causing beluga strandings in Nunavut." He brought me to Helga's wrapped in our nappy brown afghan, and Helga called our doctor, Doctor Chi.
Dr. Chi was, at that time, one of the only Asians in Hackettstown. He always smelled vaguely of bologna, but he was a good doctor and great with children. When Helga called, he told her to "Bring baby now! He so sicka-so!" So she did, wrapped in that nasty brown afghan because the cold most likely would have snuffed me. Dr. Chi prepared a syringe which, even in my state, looked like a harpoon with which he'd impale me. He sensed my apprehension and took the syringe's plunger and began to tap it on my arm. "See, baby? No hurt!" He smiled and, when I wasn't looking, plunged the syringe into my arm all the way through to the other side; I could fairly hear it scraping bone and rending sinew. I was outraged. How dare that coldcut-reeking mothereffer try to trick me! So, I did what any four year old who is delusional and hallucinating would do; namely, I took the harpoon out of his baby-murdering hands as soon as it had left my tender young arm and I flung it onto the floor, where it comically stuck in the ground needle-first and quivered. Dr. Chi looked nonplussed, but Helga was mortified. "I svear, he must haff gone to the insane!" Dr. Chi smiled and shook my hand; we made our peace. However, Helga took me home and fettered me in the basement with only liverwurst on Wonderbread to consume. "Vat vas you thinking? He vas trying to help you! Vy, ven I vas a vee von, I vould haff never throwed a needle at ze doctor!" I wanted to hasten to add that she didn't see doctors as a little girl, since she was living in a weed-choked cavern at the bottom of the sea with all the other hags; that, or her story of wartime Europe, which I thought was malarky. But since she'd already pulled out three of my fingernails with pliers, I thought it best to eat my liverwurst in silence.
I hear that the kid who actually gave me the fever got married a few years ago. Ironically, his mother works (still) at Hackettstown Hospital as one of the lab vampiresses. I attribute my inability to lower my body temperature below 100 degrees to this brush with death; that, and my fear of Asians.
Yay! Done with random memory time!
I remain, as ever,
Dom
Monday, May 23, 2005
The spell of the corn.
OK, who's totally imagining a cob with a wand there? Y'all are freaks.
I came to the corn two years ago this August, I realized with a start yesterday. If I squint my eyes hard enough and concentrate until I exude rosy perfume (a la Teresa de Avila), I can remember that day with clarion detail. My car was packed so full that my tires visibly sagged; shoes were crammed under my seat and I rode astride half my wardrobe. As I crossed the border from Ohio (Motto: We May Be Flat, But We're Also Dull) into Indiana landspace, I stopped in a tiny "town" near the border so that I could sleep; this town was chosen entirely because of its name (Spiceland) and the delight it brought me. Had I known that I would be sleeping above my sheets with a bat, a baling hook and a taser under my pillow listening to a biker orgy next door degenerating into a fist/broken bottlefight, I might have reconsidered sleeping in a swampy culvert with the kaiser-roll-sized leeches. As I listened to the moans of "eff yeah!" and "right there, do that right there" for about three hours, harmonized with the revving of Harleys, I thought: what the hell am I doing? Why have I done this to myself? Will they notice if I steal away to that snack machine for a HoHo? I've lived many places far away from my beloved Maine, but going to Indiana seemed like a uniquely hellish folly. I mean, for the love of Benji, until that hearthstone-hot August day, I'd never even BEEN to Indiana. I was going to be going to a school I'd never seen for two years. As I puked a little in my mouth, I remembered how, two years before that, I'd done the same thing to myself by picking up and moving for a half-year to THE MIDDLE EAST. There was going to be no language barrier in Indiana. I wouldn't need to eat goat entrails. Plus, if the going got rough, it was only a four hour plane ride to my doorstep.
I moved into my eleventh floor dorm room in 105 degree heat (80% humidity), sweating through two outfits like a Thai whore's first night on the corner, and looked out over the corn. What was I going to find out here? Would I be happy? Also, what exactly does heatstroke feel like?
So much has happened in two years. The job I began in my third week of school transformed into a Graduate Assistanceship, and now I wait in my pupa to use what I've learned servicing internationals in what has now become my bizarrely unanticipated passion. I've seen people in my life whom I've adored come and go in the strange biorhythms of life in a college town. I've endured the most challenging coursework of my entire life and come out (academically) unscathed. And, in a development that still makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up when I think too hard about it, I've found a powerful, youthful, childlike happiness I've never felt before.
There have been things that have profoundly blown, to be sure. I'm not entirely thrilled with my current living situation, a direct result of (apparently) mushroom-induced hallucinations. I've been emotionally sacrificed upon an offal-strewn altar by the kinds of assholes you read about in books and about whom your mother warned you. I've come to loathe Indianapolis, the "premier" metropolitan area in the state, with the white-hot heat of ten thousand suns and would rather orally pleasure the homeless than spend time there.
But then, there's the corn. "Knee high by the Fourth of July", they say out here. I drive out of the Republic in any direction and the verdant fields rustle in the gentle summer zephyrs under an impossibly enormous sky, hopelessly exotic to a boy raised in the lush fecundity of omnipresent conifers; it is the soundtrack and backdrop to a new life I'd never dreamed for myself. Two crops have come and gone since I've been here, and a third is pushing its way up as we speak; you can almost hear it. It's saying "eaaaaaaaaaaat meeeeeee", oh-so-faintly, Field-Of-Dreamsy.
Oh, I will, bitches. You wait and see.
This morning I watched a man in a wheelchair get down out of his van with the aid of his little van lifty-thing. The entire process took about ten minutes, and when all was done, he smartly closed the van door and briskly spun his wheels and began moving towards me. "Whaddya know?", he asked sunnily. "Not too much, I have to say", I replied. "How are you?", I asked.
"Well", he said, "I can't complain."
He couldn't complain. His legs were the size of a five-year-old's and it takes him ten minutes just to get into a car, and he can't complain. I complain when my coffee is off or when my car smells like feet, and here's a guy who will never be able to run through the corn without being carried. Hey: maybe I've got it good. Maybe I've got it really good.
But I still want a unicorn.
I remain, as ever,
Dom
I came to the corn two years ago this August, I realized with a start yesterday. If I squint my eyes hard enough and concentrate until I exude rosy perfume (a la Teresa de Avila), I can remember that day with clarion detail. My car was packed so full that my tires visibly sagged; shoes were crammed under my seat and I rode astride half my wardrobe. As I crossed the border from Ohio (Motto: We May Be Flat, But We're Also Dull) into Indiana landspace, I stopped in a tiny "town" near the border so that I could sleep; this town was chosen entirely because of its name (Spiceland) and the delight it brought me. Had I known that I would be sleeping above my sheets with a bat, a baling hook and a taser under my pillow listening to a biker orgy next door degenerating into a fist/broken bottlefight, I might have reconsidered sleeping in a swampy culvert with the kaiser-roll-sized leeches. As I listened to the moans of "eff yeah!" and "right there, do that right there" for about three hours, harmonized with the revving of Harleys, I thought: what the hell am I doing? Why have I done this to myself? Will they notice if I steal away to that snack machine for a HoHo? I've lived many places far away from my beloved Maine, but going to Indiana seemed like a uniquely hellish folly. I mean, for the love of Benji, until that hearthstone-hot August day, I'd never even BEEN to Indiana. I was going to be going to a school I'd never seen for two years. As I puked a little in my mouth, I remembered how, two years before that, I'd done the same thing to myself by picking up and moving for a half-year to THE MIDDLE EAST. There was going to be no language barrier in Indiana. I wouldn't need to eat goat entrails. Plus, if the going got rough, it was only a four hour plane ride to my doorstep.
I moved into my eleventh floor dorm room in 105 degree heat (80% humidity), sweating through two outfits like a Thai whore's first night on the corner, and looked out over the corn. What was I going to find out here? Would I be happy? Also, what exactly does heatstroke feel like?
So much has happened in two years. The job I began in my third week of school transformed into a Graduate Assistanceship, and now I wait in my pupa to use what I've learned servicing internationals in what has now become my bizarrely unanticipated passion. I've seen people in my life whom I've adored come and go in the strange biorhythms of life in a college town. I've endured the most challenging coursework of my entire life and come out (academically) unscathed. And, in a development that still makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up when I think too hard about it, I've found a powerful, youthful, childlike happiness I've never felt before.
There have been things that have profoundly blown, to be sure. I'm not entirely thrilled with my current living situation, a direct result of (apparently) mushroom-induced hallucinations. I've been emotionally sacrificed upon an offal-strewn altar by the kinds of assholes you read about in books and about whom your mother warned you. I've come to loathe Indianapolis, the "premier" metropolitan area in the state, with the white-hot heat of ten thousand suns and would rather orally pleasure the homeless than spend time there.
But then, there's the corn. "Knee high by the Fourth of July", they say out here. I drive out of the Republic in any direction and the verdant fields rustle in the gentle summer zephyrs under an impossibly enormous sky, hopelessly exotic to a boy raised in the lush fecundity of omnipresent conifers; it is the soundtrack and backdrop to a new life I'd never dreamed for myself. Two crops have come and gone since I've been here, and a third is pushing its way up as we speak; you can almost hear it. It's saying "eaaaaaaaaaaat meeeeeee", oh-so-faintly, Field-Of-Dreamsy.
Oh, I will, bitches. You wait and see.
This morning I watched a man in a wheelchair get down out of his van with the aid of his little van lifty-thing. The entire process took about ten minutes, and when all was done, he smartly closed the van door and briskly spun his wheels and began moving towards me. "Whaddya know?", he asked sunnily. "Not too much, I have to say", I replied. "How are you?", I asked.
"Well", he said, "I can't complain."
He couldn't complain. His legs were the size of a five-year-old's and it takes him ten minutes just to get into a car, and he can't complain. I complain when my coffee is off or when my car smells like feet, and here's a guy who will never be able to run through the corn without being carried. Hey: maybe I've got it good. Maybe I've got it really good.
But I still want a unicorn.
I remain, as ever,
Dom
Friday, May 20, 2005
Monday, May 16, 2005
Ankara: kalbimdesin.
"The best thing about Ankara? Well, that would be how fast you can leave it". - hoary Turkish witticism
The first time I heard that I was standing on the top floor of AŞTİ, which (if memory serves) stands for "Ankara Şehrinin Terminal İstasyonu", or something like that. AŞTİ is a triple-leveled bus station, the likes of which I'd never seen before or since; long into the dead of night, hundreds of busses depart merrily for the cultured, glittering Aegean cities to the west, northwest to the Big Meat on a Stick herself, İstanbul, to the lush fecundity of the Karadeniz, or the Black Sea, to the searing heat and pressing antiquity of the Southeast and to the remotest towns in snow-shrouded Eastern Anatolia, in the shadow of Ararat. One of my friends had brought me to the station so that I wouldn't get royally raped for the ticket to Antalya; that, and I would have never taken the right minibus and would most likely have ended up in two day's time in Damascus, betrothed to livestock. He stood next to me as a miniature Anatolian pageant unfolded in front of us as the people began to cram inappropriately-sized luggage into hopelessly small overhead compartments. "Hmph", my friend said, wrinkling his nose at their antics. "I'm surprised someone's not trying to smuggle a goddamned goat onto there." He turned his gaze towards Ankara, the country's second largest city, the capital, and, at that point, my home for more than two months. He snorted in disgust. "I hate it here. I hate it here so bad I could cry." When I pressed him for an explanation, I got the same response as I'd gotten hundreds of times before when my Turkish friends began to whine like sodomized poodles about their exile in the city while going to school. "There's no sea", they weep in unison. Of course, far be it from me to explain to some of them that, indeed, their own hometowns (Konya, Adana, Elazığ and Diyarbakır) were also devoid of pelagic delight. They'd come to Ankara for an education with the hopes that it would be a city of grandeur and omnipresent antiquity, like İstanbul, or one of waving palm trees, culture and elegant refinement, like İzmir. In Ankara, they found a brash, poorly designed city that constantly defies conventional notions of what a capital city should be. They see the geceköndü (squattertowns) spreading out from the city center and quietly shake their heads in horror and disgust. And, when it comes time for a holiday, the entirety of the city is abandoned to the government workers, who also secretly wish for better digs.
I have to admit: my first impressions of Ankara weren't the sauciest, because unlike some cities, Ankara doesn't pretend to be anything other than a place to live, a place to work and a seat for the government of the Turkish Republic. From the heavens above, my first glimpse of Ankara through the ovoid peephole on my Turkish Airlines flight was of a brownish smear devoid of any distinguishing characteristics on the Anatolian plateau, reaching as far as the eye could see. When I landed, the school's shuttle-driver took me through a part of Ankara that wouldn't appear on any postcard: small children feeding tethered goats, endless illegal television antennas blocking the harsh Anatolian sunlight, garbage tattering through the streets, and not a few feral canids feasting on the bounty of waste. I remember thinking: Goddamn. OK, I have enough money in my bank account for a ticket home. No problem. What the hell were you thinking? Surely heroin was involved.
After I got over the initial shock of being someplace where *gasp!* everything isn't whitewashed and antiseptic, where I'd be expected to defecate into a hole in the ground, where food is killed out back mere hours before you eat it, I was fine. In fact, I was more than fine: Ankara became a place where I felt comfortable and at ease, night and day. I knew her streets, her bazaars, and the dozens of distinct mahalleler (neighborhoods), each with a distinguished history and pleasantly sordid present. I spent quiet weekends in the shade of mosques and poking through dusty carpet shops, where apple tea was proffered in bladder-rending quantity. I got to know a population of urbanites who, one generation before, had been shepherds or rug-weavers or blacksmiths in towns so small they can only be approached by two-lane dirt back-roads.
It's been four years since I left Ankara, but scarcely a day goes by when I don't imagine for a moment that I smell the rosemary that grew under my window, or hear the aged muezzin from the local mosque crying to the faithful. I'm not sure you know what I would give to sit across the courtyard from the Kocatepe Camii, resplendantly white in the waning light of an Ankaran sunset, drinking a lemon Fanta, watching moths the size of pigeons alighting on the dome and the minarets.
I need to go back; it's been too long. Ankara: the city nobody in Turkey loves. Ankara: a city on the move, a city of immigrants, a city of history. Kalbimdesin, sevgili Ankara. Gideceğim.
(You're in my heart, my dear Ankara. I will come.)
I remain, as ever,
Demir
The first time I heard that I was standing on the top floor of AŞTİ, which (if memory serves) stands for "Ankara Şehrinin Terminal İstasyonu", or something like that. AŞTİ is a triple-leveled bus station, the likes of which I'd never seen before or since; long into the dead of night, hundreds of busses depart merrily for the cultured, glittering Aegean cities to the west, northwest to the Big Meat on a Stick herself, İstanbul, to the lush fecundity of the Karadeniz, or the Black Sea, to the searing heat and pressing antiquity of the Southeast and to the remotest towns in snow-shrouded Eastern Anatolia, in the shadow of Ararat. One of my friends had brought me to the station so that I wouldn't get royally raped for the ticket to Antalya; that, and I would have never taken the right minibus and would most likely have ended up in two day's time in Damascus, betrothed to livestock. He stood next to me as a miniature Anatolian pageant unfolded in front of us as the people began to cram inappropriately-sized luggage into hopelessly small overhead compartments. "Hmph", my friend said, wrinkling his nose at their antics. "I'm surprised someone's not trying to smuggle a goddamned goat onto there." He turned his gaze towards Ankara, the country's second largest city, the capital, and, at that point, my home for more than two months. He snorted in disgust. "I hate it here. I hate it here so bad I could cry." When I pressed him for an explanation, I got the same response as I'd gotten hundreds of times before when my Turkish friends began to whine like sodomized poodles about their exile in the city while going to school. "There's no sea", they weep in unison. Of course, far be it from me to explain to some of them that, indeed, their own hometowns (Konya, Adana, Elazığ and Diyarbakır) were also devoid of pelagic delight. They'd come to Ankara for an education with the hopes that it would be a city of grandeur and omnipresent antiquity, like İstanbul, or one of waving palm trees, culture and elegant refinement, like İzmir. In Ankara, they found a brash, poorly designed city that constantly defies conventional notions of what a capital city should be. They see the geceköndü (squattertowns) spreading out from the city center and quietly shake their heads in horror and disgust. And, when it comes time for a holiday, the entirety of the city is abandoned to the government workers, who also secretly wish for better digs.
I have to admit: my first impressions of Ankara weren't the sauciest, because unlike some cities, Ankara doesn't pretend to be anything other than a place to live, a place to work and a seat for the government of the Turkish Republic. From the heavens above, my first glimpse of Ankara through the ovoid peephole on my Turkish Airlines flight was of a brownish smear devoid of any distinguishing characteristics on the Anatolian plateau, reaching as far as the eye could see. When I landed, the school's shuttle-driver took me through a part of Ankara that wouldn't appear on any postcard: small children feeding tethered goats, endless illegal television antennas blocking the harsh Anatolian sunlight, garbage tattering through the streets, and not a few feral canids feasting on the bounty of waste. I remember thinking: Goddamn. OK, I have enough money in my bank account for a ticket home. No problem. What the hell were you thinking? Surely heroin was involved.
After I got over the initial shock of being someplace where *gasp!* everything isn't whitewashed and antiseptic, where I'd be expected to defecate into a hole in the ground, where food is killed out back mere hours before you eat it, I was fine. In fact, I was more than fine: Ankara became a place where I felt comfortable and at ease, night and day. I knew her streets, her bazaars, and the dozens of distinct mahalleler (neighborhoods), each with a distinguished history and pleasantly sordid present. I spent quiet weekends in the shade of mosques and poking through dusty carpet shops, where apple tea was proffered in bladder-rending quantity. I got to know a population of urbanites who, one generation before, had been shepherds or rug-weavers or blacksmiths in towns so small they can only be approached by two-lane dirt back-roads.
It's been four years since I left Ankara, but scarcely a day goes by when I don't imagine for a moment that I smell the rosemary that grew under my window, or hear the aged muezzin from the local mosque crying to the faithful. I'm not sure you know what I would give to sit across the courtyard from the Kocatepe Camii, resplendantly white in the waning light of an Ankaran sunset, drinking a lemon Fanta, watching moths the size of pigeons alighting on the dome and the minarets.
I need to go back; it's been too long. Ankara: the city nobody in Turkey loves. Ankara: a city on the move, a city of immigrants, a city of history. Kalbimdesin, sevgili Ankara. Gideceğim.
(You're in my heart, my dear Ankara. I will come.)
I remain, as ever,
Demir
Saturday, May 14, 2005
Once...twice...three times at Wal*Mart.
I awoke last Saturday morning with a sensation of intense dread, as I imagine the sensation of waking up near the end of a stint on Death Row would be. Well, without the three hundred-fifty pound cellmate nicknamed "The Bone Dude", whose gigantic back tattoo of King Kong cornholing Godzilla expanded and contracted when he breathed, eerily animating the copulating mega-beasts.
No, I bit my lower lip and firmly resolved to be strong; with mist in my eyes I guided Orhan, my shag-me-now Ford Focus to the
BLOOMINGTON BUREAU OF MOTOR VEHICLES.
I'd blocked my whole day off because I knew, deep within my husk, that I would need that much time to be properly sodomized. Going to the BMV with only an hour or two to spend is simply inviting disaster on a "white Levis after a lunch of Indian and a dinner of Mexican" scale. The last time I went to the BMV, a year ago this August, I spent nearly three hours there, passed mostly "talking" immigrationese to the forty-five internationals who'd recognized me from the Front Desk and who'd descended upon me like carnivorous raptor-birds onto flyblown carrion. Nothin' beats sitting in a Delhi-hot BMV office whilst trying to dodge immigration questions. No, I don't know when your new I-20 will be ready. No, I don't know how the process of your H1B approval is going. No, I can't go to explain your situation to the nice BMV lady so that you can get your driver's permit. Nothing but horror surely awaited me.
I walked into the BMV with a crucifix, a cleverly concealed baling hook and a roast beef sandwich to ward off the Hindu contingent. I went to the checky-in place and spoke to a "woman" there, who listened "attentively" as I told her what I needed. Standing behind her was a lovely blonde lady who took the slip that was given to her by the beast at the reception area. "Could you come with me to station five?" she crooned. What? I didn't have to wait for twelve hours with nothing to do but watch the endless parade of "humanity" and read a magazine published six years ago by missionaries, who by now have erradicated the people they've gone to "serve" by giving them colds and then forcefully enculturating the rest into creepy mainstream identities? I said nothing as I went to station five, where an efficient, even pleasant exchange took place. I was prepared, she was prepared, and she was actually smiling. About ten minutes later, she had me sign a slip and then she said, "OK, you're done. It will be a couple of minutes for the cashier to ring you up. Have a great day."
All of this seemed more startling given the following, which I neglected to mention above. Whilst rooting around in my junk for one of the documents she requested, I found--wedged between two batches of paper--a butter knife. I don't have any earthly idea why it was there. I know I didn't put it there, at least intentionally, but there it was, gleaming harshly between my lien information and my insurance cards. I was horrified, and I began to stammer like a junkie coming down off smack. "I don't know...oh my God...uh...COMPLETELY INNOCUOUS BUTTER SPREADING OBJECT!...don't know why...don't rape me..." She looked at it and smiled. "You'd never believe what I find in my purse sometimes", she bubbled.
That was IT. I stood up in my chair. "I DEMAND to know why I am not being punished for possessing a potentially lethal object in your presence! Isn't there a small unventilated room that reeks of urea and tears that you'll bring me to out back wherein I'll be asked to take a boxcutter to my belly to carve a pound of my flesh off, and then you will feed said flesh to dozens of mewling distempered alley-cats while I try not to faint from the blood loss? Aren't you going to make me kneel on uncooked rice and broken shards of glass whilst spraying my loins with a tincture of Chinese five-spice, bleach and ammonia whilst offering my shrieks of mortal pain to your gore-soaked BMV goddesses? Aren't you going to make me remove one of my eyes with a melon-baller and then tie me down to allow a diseased wombat to skull-eff my socket? Or, perchance, get me drunk on grain alcohol, shave off my eyebrows with the top to a soup can and leave me for dead in a trailer park wearing nothing but a ballgown?" She smiled expansively. "We're trying to improve our image. If you'd wanted that, you should have been here six months ago." Again, the smile.
I drove home bewildered and terrified. The warp and weft of the universe had been altered. If I couldn't get punishment at the BMV, where could I expect to get it? Item number two on my list for the day provided me with the succor of knowing that some things will never change. After all, I was on the way to Wally World, and the day that it isn't filled to the brim with human detritus is the day I fly to Switzerland to have a gender reassignment without anaesthetic. I needed a cable that connected my new DVD player to my TV. Now, usually I am good with these kinds of things and I can figure out what I need, but when presented with dozens of wires, I found myself at a loss. So, I chose the wire that had the neato pretty colored prongs, and I paid for it and left. Once home, I found that the sound came through fine, but the picture was grainy and black and white, which simply wouldn't do. So I went back to exhange the cord for another. As I walked back through the spellbinding beauty that is the slidy-door thing at the Wal*Mart entrance, I saw the thing that would be "helping" me with my exchange. Greenish, mildewy scales covered her body, and her eyes were empty, dead, and the color of rancid milk. A brine hag! My day was looking up! I brought the cord and the sad remains of the shredded box. The sound of her talons on the cardboard brought me to a level of insanity I thought was reserved for the seventh level of hell. "What the eff's wrong with this?" she hissed; her breath smelled as though she'd been feasting on something bloated that you might find dead, bobbing on a lakeshore after a really heavy rain. I explained that it was ther wrong cable, and with a slimy hand she gave me my money back. "Go eff yourself", she murmured. So I went to get a new cable, which I brought home. To my horror, it too didn't work; this time I didn't even get a picture. So I got back in my car and went back. The hag was still at the counter, but she looked more pleased; a small pile of cleaned bones that surely belonged to a lost seven-year-old held court at her webbed feet, which were clad in thong sandals. I brought back the cable; she'd mercifully forgotten who I was in her post-kill euphoria. She rang me up with my new cable and looked pensive. "Some guy came in here a while ago and exchanged a cord like this . When I meet him again, I will mate with him and gnaw the flesh off his skull while I watch Law and Order." I laughed heartily with her while I evacuated my bowels. That cord worked, I am happy to report, and I spent the day watching the entire second season of Six Feet Under.
******
It's been a week since my last post, and I have to provide some sort of excuse so that I stop getting threatening emails. This week was my first week back as a full-time employee at my office, which merrily coincided with one of the most hellish weeks at the office. Hundreds of internationals need travel documents! And work authorization! And, if I may be frank, a good squirt from my clown bottle. I've actually started a nap regimen, which terrifies me. But next week should calm down some, and I will be posting regularly soon. And hey; whomever sent me that decomposing pigeon needs to calm the eff down, y'hear?
I remain, as ever,
Dom
No, I bit my lower lip and firmly resolved to be strong; with mist in my eyes I guided Orhan, my shag-me-now Ford Focus to the
BLOOMINGTON BUREAU OF MOTOR VEHICLES.
I'd blocked my whole day off because I knew, deep within my husk, that I would need that much time to be properly sodomized. Going to the BMV with only an hour or two to spend is simply inviting disaster on a "white Levis after a lunch of Indian and a dinner of Mexican" scale. The last time I went to the BMV, a year ago this August, I spent nearly three hours there, passed mostly "talking" immigrationese to the forty-five internationals who'd recognized me from the Front Desk and who'd descended upon me like carnivorous raptor-birds onto flyblown carrion. Nothin' beats sitting in a Delhi-hot BMV office whilst trying to dodge immigration questions. No, I don't know when your new I-20 will be ready. No, I don't know how the process of your H1B approval is going. No, I can't go to explain your situation to the nice BMV lady so that you can get your driver's permit. Nothing but horror surely awaited me.
I walked into the BMV with a crucifix, a cleverly concealed baling hook and a roast beef sandwich to ward off the Hindu contingent. I went to the checky-in place and spoke to a "woman" there, who listened "attentively" as I told her what I needed. Standing behind her was a lovely blonde lady who took the slip that was given to her by the beast at the reception area. "Could you come with me to station five?" she crooned. What? I didn't have to wait for twelve hours with nothing to do but watch the endless parade of "humanity" and read a magazine published six years ago by missionaries, who by now have erradicated the people they've gone to "serve" by giving them colds and then forcefully enculturating the rest into creepy mainstream identities? I said nothing as I went to station five, where an efficient, even pleasant exchange took place. I was prepared, she was prepared, and she was actually smiling. About ten minutes later, she had me sign a slip and then she said, "OK, you're done. It will be a couple of minutes for the cashier to ring you up. Have a great day."
All of this seemed more startling given the following, which I neglected to mention above. Whilst rooting around in my junk for one of the documents she requested, I found--wedged between two batches of paper--a butter knife. I don't have any earthly idea why it was there. I know I didn't put it there, at least intentionally, but there it was, gleaming harshly between my lien information and my insurance cards. I was horrified, and I began to stammer like a junkie coming down off smack. "I don't know...oh my God...uh...COMPLETELY INNOCUOUS BUTTER SPREADING OBJECT!...don't know why...don't rape me..." She looked at it and smiled. "You'd never believe what I find in my purse sometimes", she bubbled.
That was IT. I stood up in my chair. "I DEMAND to know why I am not being punished for possessing a potentially lethal object in your presence! Isn't there a small unventilated room that reeks of urea and tears that you'll bring me to out back wherein I'll be asked to take a boxcutter to my belly to carve a pound of my flesh off, and then you will feed said flesh to dozens of mewling distempered alley-cats while I try not to faint from the blood loss? Aren't you going to make me kneel on uncooked rice and broken shards of glass whilst spraying my loins with a tincture of Chinese five-spice, bleach and ammonia whilst offering my shrieks of mortal pain to your gore-soaked BMV goddesses? Aren't you going to make me remove one of my eyes with a melon-baller and then tie me down to allow a diseased wombat to skull-eff my socket? Or, perchance, get me drunk on grain alcohol, shave off my eyebrows with the top to a soup can and leave me for dead in a trailer park wearing nothing but a ballgown?" She smiled expansively. "We're trying to improve our image. If you'd wanted that, you should have been here six months ago." Again, the smile.
I drove home bewildered and terrified. The warp and weft of the universe had been altered. If I couldn't get punishment at the BMV, where could I expect to get it? Item number two on my list for the day provided me with the succor of knowing that some things will never change. After all, I was on the way to Wally World, and the day that it isn't filled to the brim with human detritus is the day I fly to Switzerland to have a gender reassignment without anaesthetic. I needed a cable that connected my new DVD player to my TV. Now, usually I am good with these kinds of things and I can figure out what I need, but when presented with dozens of wires, I found myself at a loss. So, I chose the wire that had the neato pretty colored prongs, and I paid for it and left. Once home, I found that the sound came through fine, but the picture was grainy and black and white, which simply wouldn't do. So I went back to exhange the cord for another. As I walked back through the spellbinding beauty that is the slidy-door thing at the Wal*Mart entrance, I saw the thing that would be "helping" me with my exchange. Greenish, mildewy scales covered her body, and her eyes were empty, dead, and the color of rancid milk. A brine hag! My day was looking up! I brought the cord and the sad remains of the shredded box. The sound of her talons on the cardboard brought me to a level of insanity I thought was reserved for the seventh level of hell. "What the eff's wrong with this?" she hissed; her breath smelled as though she'd been feasting on something bloated that you might find dead, bobbing on a lakeshore after a really heavy rain. I explained that it was ther wrong cable, and with a slimy hand she gave me my money back. "Go eff yourself", she murmured. So I went to get a new cable, which I brought home. To my horror, it too didn't work; this time I didn't even get a picture. So I got back in my car and went back. The hag was still at the counter, but she looked more pleased; a small pile of cleaned bones that surely belonged to a lost seven-year-old held court at her webbed feet, which were clad in thong sandals. I brought back the cable; she'd mercifully forgotten who I was in her post-kill euphoria. She rang me up with my new cable and looked pensive. "Some guy came in here a while ago and exchanged a cord like this . When I meet him again, I will mate with him and gnaw the flesh off his skull while I watch Law and Order." I laughed heartily with her while I evacuated my bowels. That cord worked, I am happy to report, and I spent the day watching the entire second season of Six Feet Under.
******
It's been a week since my last post, and I have to provide some sort of excuse so that I stop getting threatening emails. This week was my first week back as a full-time employee at my office, which merrily coincided with one of the most hellish weeks at the office. Hundreds of internationals need travel documents! And work authorization! And, if I may be frank, a good squirt from my clown bottle. I've actually started a nap regimen, which terrifies me. But next week should calm down some, and I will be posting regularly soon. And hey; whomever sent me that decomposing pigeon needs to calm the eff down, y'hear?
I remain, as ever,
Dom
Friday, May 06, 2005
Yaz geldi.
Summer has come.
Suddenly being without academic obligation is at once liberating and terrifying. It's terrifying because, yes, I can already begin to feel my brain atrophy like a broken leg in a cast. Come August, when that cast is split open to reveal the corpse-pale, decay-reeking skin, what of me then? Will Kemal hocam academically euthanize me? And, perhaps most importantly: who the hell will they get to replace that skank Nicole Richie on "The Simple Life?"
Earlier this week while I was cavorting about IU's rapidly emptying campus I stopped into one of my "safe bathrooms" in the Indiana University Memorial Union to drain the lizard and splash a bit of cool water onto my olive-oil-from-the-pores forehead. As I sidled up to the pristine, self-flushing urinal, I felt a presence to my right, and I assumed it was another gentleman who had need of releasing white-hot urea. In that way that you can't really describe, I felt his gaze settle and rest pregnantly on me, and I thought: shit - I'm getting cruised in the men's room again. I decided to look over to see what the eff this dude's damage was and I was met with a crooked smile. It was an international student, and not just any international student; I remember vividly a day when he kept me almost a half hour into my lunchbreak arguing with me about how he could approach getting a travel document for his wife to apply for a visa in Delhi. When I get angry, which (despite what I write in here) is quite infrequent, I become very cold inside, and this cold radiates from my torso to my extremities. He'd gotten me so pissed off that I couldn't even type because my fingers were locked in icy little claws. There he was, his hands on his junk, and there I was, my hands on my junk, and he
STARTED TO ASK ME IMMIGRATION QUESTIONS.
I was too astonished to even register what was going on. I was holding my petie right there, in a public restroom, and an international student was asking me how to submit effing bank statements to my office so that he could bring his woman to the states. When I came to my senses, I allowed the urinal to flush itself and I walked over to wash my hands before I spoke. I was firm with him: Never talk to me again while I am holding my male member. Also, yes, your department's financial guarantee will be sufficient. Also, don't ever talk to me again while I am holding my male member. Then I punched him in the neck and ran.
Last night I went out to my friend Mary-Kate's house for her self-styled "Vegan Mexican Extravaganza", replete as it was with faux-meat tacos and Key Lime pie that makes you regret every single day that you've not eaten it. After a sunset tour of the geode-encrusted shores of Lake Monroe (Bloomington's reservoir), we retreated to her Tibetan prayer flag-encrusted house, where a merry fire was picking up intensity in her yard. Soon, so very soon, that fire was to be getting more fuel. This is because, uh, we decided to burn our French books. You see, the four of us who were present had all been completely sodomized sans lubrication by the Dread Romance Tongue, and, in a rather pagan cleansing ritual, we rid ourselves completely of the evil.
Now, I know all of you are thinking "Gosh! Burning books? That's SO Third Reich!" Well, they weren't books in the strictest sense of the word. They were bound photocopy "books" that the IU Bookstore (Motto: We Have More Money Than Jesus) charges you a kidney for. I kept my two real books, of course, though the day I open them voluntarily is the day I stop eating babies. And, even if I had wanted to burn real books, I do wha' I wan', uh.
Today marked the last day of the Spring Semester of 2005, and, as expected, innumerable international students came to our aerie in Franklin Hall in various states of desperation. "I go home the Korea Sunday night!" and "I start working at my internship on Monday" and "I'm joining the Korean army - what I need to do now?" rang out merrily at the Front Desk, where, as a last mitzvah to me, Brooke stayed the whole of her last day to make sure I didn't kill again. By the time five PM rolled around, we'd stabbed--uh, helped-- no less than one hundred and fifty-two people, all in the span of six hours. The air was thick with pepper spray and the electric stench of ozone from the tasers. Bodies lay in putrid heaps in the lobby, and carrion raptors circled lazily in the cloudless Indiana sky. Yet, in all of the carnage, there was one moment of raw humanity... and it's not just my story, but the story of how an office like mine can actually make a difference in someone's life.
Yesterday, an international came to my desk with her friend. I've got a problem, she said slowly, as if it pained her. My sister is in intensive care in the UK and I have to go see her immediately. A quick glance in her passport confirmed my worst fears: she had neither a visa to visit the UK nor a valid US visa. I told her what she needed to do and whom to contact, and told her that our office was poised to help her in any way that we could. At five minutes to four, when our office closes, she and her friend as well as a man who was accompanying them come through the door. She's being almost entirely supported by her friend as if her body was rendered boneless. She was weeping uncontrollably and couldn't speak, and when her eyes met mine, I knew what had happened. Her sister had passed in the night, and the British Consulate in Chicago couldn't get her a visa until Monday. I'd never had someone crying at my desk before; sure, I'd cut a few unruly internationals, and they'd cried, but that wasn't out of anguish and grief. I took her and her people into a currently unoccupied office and sat them down and grabbed Jenny, who swooped in and made phone calls and made documents and... well, in general, made a situation that seemed utterly desperate into one where there was a faint glimmer of hope to hold on to. Rendy and I mobilized and got her transcripts from the (closed) Registrar's office, and as they left, they all began to weep while thanking us for helping them so much.
There wasn't a dry eye in the house.
I horse around about my job a lot in this 'blog, but, if you notice, I never mock it. This job may be infuriating and seemingly thankless sometimes, but there's always that one time when you can see the difference we make in people's lives magnified and on a scale that we'd never thought possible. I feel so fulfilled, so imbued with a sense of hope and raw humanity when people tell us how much our office means to them while they are here.
I came home and threw a skinned and disemboweld she-goat to Cuddles, one of the Underbed Clowns, which distracted him long enough for me to grab my Ouija board from his ravenous craw. As I lit a sandalwood (aka, ass-scented) candle and bit the head off a gravid nightengale, the dank of the crypt filled my mask-encrusted room as I summoned "Marvin", who decided to drink a fifth of Jim Beam and ride his snowmobile onto half-inch ice on a lake so deep that it took his rapidly cooling carcass three hours to settle on the bottom.
Me: So, "Marvin", what's it like to spend eternity strapped to a snowmobile in he sunless depths of a lake so deep that the lacustrine worms didn't find the bounteous feast that was you for three months?
"Marvin": L..o..n..e..l..y..W..i..l..l..y..o..u..b..e..m..y..f..r..i..e..n..d..?
Me: Not bloodly likely. I don't speak "motard" and I spend my day respirating, thankyouverymuch.
"Marvin": T..h..e..n..l..e..t..s..g..e..t..t..h..i..s..o..v..e..r..w..i..t..h
..y..o..u..m..o..n..s..t..e..r.
Me: Ooooh, tough words from someone who's last thought was "Maybe when I get back in my old lady will lay me." Well, I'll tell you something: that whore you schtupped at that truck stop two years ago? The one in the fishnets? Yeah, you gave your wife the clap, and she kisses your kids at night.
"Marvin": M..o..v..i..n..g..o..n..,..s..h..a..l..l..w..e..?
Me: So "Marvin", now that you possess the omniscience that only those in the Beyond can have, tell me: how do you know when you've found your calling?
"Marvin": W..h..e..n..y..o..u..r..v..e..s..t..i..g...a..l..t..a..i..l..w..a..g..s.
Me: But Marvin: mine wags all the damn time.
"Marvin": W..e..r..e..y..o..u..t..h..i..n..k..i..n..g..a..b..o..u..t..y..o..u..r..
f..u..t..u..r..e..i..n..t..h..i..s.. w..o..r..k..?
Me: Actually, mostly it's me thinking about how funny it would be to see your algae-covered skeleton mouldering at the bottom of the lake. But yeah, when I think about my future in this stuff, too.
"Marvin": S..i..t..a..n..d..s..p..i..n..y..o..u..a..s..s.
[gaily colored glove protrudes from under my bed; I surrended the Ouija and got a faint whiff of cotton candy and the high reek of offal]
I am surrendering on this, my last night as a second-year Master's degree student, to trashy movies, melon-hinted wine and my blankets. Helvacı kabağım - seni özledim.
I remain, as ever,
Dom
Suddenly being without academic obligation is at once liberating and terrifying. It's terrifying because, yes, I can already begin to feel my brain atrophy like a broken leg in a cast. Come August, when that cast is split open to reveal the corpse-pale, decay-reeking skin, what of me then? Will Kemal hocam academically euthanize me? And, perhaps most importantly: who the hell will they get to replace that skank Nicole Richie on "The Simple Life?"
Earlier this week while I was cavorting about IU's rapidly emptying campus I stopped into one of my "safe bathrooms" in the Indiana University Memorial Union to drain the lizard and splash a bit of cool water onto my olive-oil-from-the-pores forehead. As I sidled up to the pristine, self-flushing urinal, I felt a presence to my right, and I assumed it was another gentleman who had need of releasing white-hot urea. In that way that you can't really describe, I felt his gaze settle and rest pregnantly on me, and I thought: shit - I'm getting cruised in the men's room again. I decided to look over to see what the eff this dude's damage was and I was met with a crooked smile. It was an international student, and not just any international student; I remember vividly a day when he kept me almost a half hour into my lunchbreak arguing with me about how he could approach getting a travel document for his wife to apply for a visa in Delhi. When I get angry, which (despite what I write in here) is quite infrequent, I become very cold inside, and this cold radiates from my torso to my extremities. He'd gotten me so pissed off that I couldn't even type because my fingers were locked in icy little claws. There he was, his hands on his junk, and there I was, my hands on my junk, and he
STARTED TO ASK ME IMMIGRATION QUESTIONS.
I was too astonished to even register what was going on. I was holding my petie right there, in a public restroom, and an international student was asking me how to submit effing bank statements to my office so that he could bring his woman to the states. When I came to my senses, I allowed the urinal to flush itself and I walked over to wash my hands before I spoke. I was firm with him: Never talk to me again while I am holding my male member. Also, yes, your department's financial guarantee will be sufficient. Also, don't ever talk to me again while I am holding my male member. Then I punched him in the neck and ran.
Last night I went out to my friend Mary-Kate's house for her self-styled "Vegan Mexican Extravaganza", replete as it was with faux-meat tacos and Key Lime pie that makes you regret every single day that you've not eaten it. After a sunset tour of the geode-encrusted shores of Lake Monroe (Bloomington's reservoir), we retreated to her Tibetan prayer flag-encrusted house, where a merry fire was picking up intensity in her yard. Soon, so very soon, that fire was to be getting more fuel. This is because, uh, we decided to burn our French books. You see, the four of us who were present had all been completely sodomized sans lubrication by the Dread Romance Tongue, and, in a rather pagan cleansing ritual, we rid ourselves completely of the evil.
Now, I know all of you are thinking "Gosh! Burning books? That's SO Third Reich!" Well, they weren't books in the strictest sense of the word. They were bound photocopy "books" that the IU Bookstore (Motto: We Have More Money Than Jesus) charges you a kidney for. I kept my two real books, of course, though the day I open them voluntarily is the day I stop eating babies. And, even if I had wanted to burn real books, I do wha' I wan', uh.
Today marked the last day of the Spring Semester of 2005, and, as expected, innumerable international students came to our aerie in Franklin Hall in various states of desperation. "I go home the Korea Sunday night!" and "I start working at my internship on Monday" and "I'm joining the Korean army - what I need to do now?" rang out merrily at the Front Desk, where, as a last mitzvah to me, Brooke stayed the whole of her last day to make sure I didn't kill again. By the time five PM rolled around, we'd stabbed--uh, helped-- no less than one hundred and fifty-two people, all in the span of six hours. The air was thick with pepper spray and the electric stench of ozone from the tasers. Bodies lay in putrid heaps in the lobby, and carrion raptors circled lazily in the cloudless Indiana sky. Yet, in all of the carnage, there was one moment of raw humanity... and it's not just my story, but the story of how an office like mine can actually make a difference in someone's life.
Yesterday, an international came to my desk with her friend. I've got a problem, she said slowly, as if it pained her. My sister is in intensive care in the UK and I have to go see her immediately. A quick glance in her passport confirmed my worst fears: she had neither a visa to visit the UK nor a valid US visa. I told her what she needed to do and whom to contact, and told her that our office was poised to help her in any way that we could. At five minutes to four, when our office closes, she and her friend as well as a man who was accompanying them come through the door. She's being almost entirely supported by her friend as if her body was rendered boneless. She was weeping uncontrollably and couldn't speak, and when her eyes met mine, I knew what had happened. Her sister had passed in the night, and the British Consulate in Chicago couldn't get her a visa until Monday. I'd never had someone crying at my desk before; sure, I'd cut a few unruly internationals, and they'd cried, but that wasn't out of anguish and grief. I took her and her people into a currently unoccupied office and sat them down and grabbed Jenny, who swooped in and made phone calls and made documents and... well, in general, made a situation that seemed utterly desperate into one where there was a faint glimmer of hope to hold on to. Rendy and I mobilized and got her transcripts from the (closed) Registrar's office, and as they left, they all began to weep while thanking us for helping them so much.
There wasn't a dry eye in the house.
I horse around about my job a lot in this 'blog, but, if you notice, I never mock it. This job may be infuriating and seemingly thankless sometimes, but there's always that one time when you can see the difference we make in people's lives magnified and on a scale that we'd never thought possible. I feel so fulfilled, so imbued with a sense of hope and raw humanity when people tell us how much our office means to them while they are here.
I came home and threw a skinned and disemboweld she-goat to Cuddles, one of the Underbed Clowns, which distracted him long enough for me to grab my Ouija board from his ravenous craw. As I lit a sandalwood (aka, ass-scented) candle and bit the head off a gravid nightengale, the dank of the crypt filled my mask-encrusted room as I summoned "Marvin", who decided to drink a fifth of Jim Beam and ride his snowmobile onto half-inch ice on a lake so deep that it took his rapidly cooling carcass three hours to settle on the bottom.
Me: So, "Marvin", what's it like to spend eternity strapped to a snowmobile in he sunless depths of a lake so deep that the lacustrine worms didn't find the bounteous feast that was you for three months?
"Marvin": L..o..n..e..l..y..W..i..l..l..y..o..u..b..e..m..y..f..r..i..e..n..d..?
Me: Not bloodly likely. I don't speak "motard" and I spend my day respirating, thankyouverymuch.
"Marvin": T..h..e..n..l..e..t..s..g..e..t..t..h..i..s..o..v..e..r..w..i..t..h
..y..o..u..m..o..n..s..t..e..r.
Me: Ooooh, tough words from someone who's last thought was "Maybe when I get back in my old lady will lay me." Well, I'll tell you something: that whore you schtupped at that truck stop two years ago? The one in the fishnets? Yeah, you gave your wife the clap, and she kisses your kids at night.
"Marvin": M..o..v..i..n..g..o..n..,..s..h..a..l..l..w..e..?
Me: So "Marvin", now that you possess the omniscience that only those in the Beyond can have, tell me: how do you know when you've found your calling?
"Marvin": W..h..e..n..y..o..u..r..v..e..s..t..i..g...a..l..t..a..i..l..w..a..g..s.
Me: But Marvin: mine wags all the damn time.
"Marvin": W..e..r..e..y..o..u..t..h..i..n..k..i..n..g..a..b..o..u..t..y..o..u..r..
f..u..t..u..r..e..i..n..t..h..i..s.. w..o..r..k..?
Me: Actually, mostly it's me thinking about how funny it would be to see your algae-covered skeleton mouldering at the bottom of the lake. But yeah, when I think about my future in this stuff, too.
"Marvin": S..i..t..a..n..d..s..p..i..n..y..o..u..a..s..s.
[gaily colored glove protrudes from under my bed; I surrended the Ouija and got a faint whiff of cotton candy and the high reek of offal]
I am surrendering on this, my last night as a second-year Master's degree student, to trashy movies, melon-hinted wine and my blankets. Helvacı kabağım - seni özledim.
I remain, as ever,
Dom
Monday, May 02, 2005
Ürdibehişt.
ooor-dee-bay-HEESHT: Persian: February.
Today, at 5:30 on the nose, Kemal hocam quietly turned from finishing writing the months of the year in a script that hasn't been used since the 1800s with his reeking wipeboard marker. Domonic'ciyim, he said, barely audible. Let's end here. Thus ended a bizarre chapter of my life; one in which I tried to understand a language so hopelessly complex that those who have studied it for decades would never in a thousand years' worth of daring say that they were fluent in it. It was humbling. It was expansively fascinating. And, when I didn't want to bite my own wrists open in sheer animal desperation, it was oddly rewarding, like when you manage to scratch a part of your back you can't usually reach. Yes, that random collection of squiggles reads "akbaba." No, you can't use "kef" when writing the city "Konya". Yes, the fumes from"Wipe-o" markers can make you feel as though you are the rightful incarnation of the Panchen Lama and may prevent you from successfully transmitting your genes into the future.
When French was over, I internally celebrated like I was being liberated from Treblinka; today, as I walked to my sexmobile (Orhan, my rainforest green 2000 Ford Focus), I dragged my feet a little. There's a part of me that will miss the misery of trying to figure out what goddamned vowel to put into a seemingly random collection of consonants. There's a part of me that will miss horsing around with Kemal about how fiendishly difficult his beloved texts are. Then I remember: three and a half hours of Ottoman on innumerable sunny Friday afternoons. I bought two nobake cookies and, as their chocolatey goodness coursed through my lardo veins, I knew I'd never forget what I learned with Kemal; namely, that I can do anything I want to do, even when it seems darkest and there can be no hope.
Ok, eww. Lifetime: Television for Women moment. {cue smarmy piano music}
Hmm. Lifetime. Now, don't get me wrong, it's affirming and empowering for those possessed of two "x" chromosomes, but I honestly don't know how. Every time I turn it on, it's a movie with a title like "He Raped Me Blind and Slaughtered My Children" or "I Had Bulemia So Bad I Threw Up My Spleen on My Best Friend's Birthday Cake." One time, I watched a movie (whilst imbibing, of course) wherein Candace Cameron ("DJ" of Full House notoriety) was stalked and murdered by Fred Savage (of The Wonder Years) and then her hacked corpse was thrown into a body of water of some kind in a Hefty Bag.
[Alert Life in the Corn Reader Prize: Name that Movie!]
The other day, I was reminded that the things that come out of my mouth tend to be... well, let's just thank Krishna's blue skin that I am usually surrounded by people who love and understand me. About two months ago I was talking with one of my coworkers about her workload, and she was telling me that she was weary of starting every email with "I'm sorry I am getting back to you so late"; this was due to the fact that her email inbox had more than a hundred "urgent! I needing the help so soon!" missals. I told her that she should just begin her emails with "Now that I am back from my gender reassignment...." and that would take care of it. I said this out loud. What the eff is wrong with me?
It's to be a long night. I fell asleep watching reruns of "Everybody Takes a Dump in Raymond's Mouth", but now I am awake, hyper, and listening to strange movie soundtracks whilst preparing a small woodland creature for his trip to meet Pan, his maker. After all, in merely forty-eight hours, I will be taking my final final, and if I choke, I will have to give myself to Honkers the Underthebed Clown.
Somewhere in the dark of an Indiana night in a township named after an ancient Iraqi city-state, a turn-of-the-century farmhouse sits empty, the spring winds whistling through the stubbled cornfields that surround it on three sides. I've never wanted anything more. Keep my luck in your thoughts, my minions, and I shall reward thee with Paradise!*
*Or, uh, my thank-you.
I remain, as ever,
Dom
Today, at 5:30 on the nose, Kemal hocam quietly turned from finishing writing the months of the year in a script that hasn't been used since the 1800s with his reeking wipeboard marker. Domonic'ciyim, he said, barely audible. Let's end here. Thus ended a bizarre chapter of my life; one in which I tried to understand a language so hopelessly complex that those who have studied it for decades would never in a thousand years' worth of daring say that they were fluent in it. It was humbling. It was expansively fascinating. And, when I didn't want to bite my own wrists open in sheer animal desperation, it was oddly rewarding, like when you manage to scratch a part of your back you can't usually reach. Yes, that random collection of squiggles reads "akbaba." No, you can't use "kef" when writing the city "Konya". Yes, the fumes from"Wipe-o" markers can make you feel as though you are the rightful incarnation of the Panchen Lama and may prevent you from successfully transmitting your genes into the future.
When French was over, I internally celebrated like I was being liberated from Treblinka; today, as I walked to my sexmobile (Orhan, my rainforest green 2000 Ford Focus), I dragged my feet a little. There's a part of me that will miss the misery of trying to figure out what goddamned vowel to put into a seemingly random collection of consonants. There's a part of me that will miss horsing around with Kemal about how fiendishly difficult his beloved texts are. Then I remember: three and a half hours of Ottoman on innumerable sunny Friday afternoons. I bought two nobake cookies and, as their chocolatey goodness coursed through my lardo veins, I knew I'd never forget what I learned with Kemal; namely, that I can do anything I want to do, even when it seems darkest and there can be no hope.
Ok, eww. Lifetime: Television for Women moment. {cue smarmy piano music}
Hmm. Lifetime. Now, don't get me wrong, it's affirming and empowering for those possessed of two "x" chromosomes, but I honestly don't know how. Every time I turn it on, it's a movie with a title like "He Raped Me Blind and Slaughtered My Children" or "I Had Bulemia So Bad I Threw Up My Spleen on My Best Friend's Birthday Cake." One time, I watched a movie (whilst imbibing, of course) wherein Candace Cameron ("DJ" of Full House notoriety) was stalked and murdered by Fred Savage (of The Wonder Years) and then her hacked corpse was thrown into a body of water of some kind in a Hefty Bag.
[Alert Life in the Corn Reader Prize: Name that Movie!]
The other day, I was reminded that the things that come out of my mouth tend to be... well, let's just thank Krishna's blue skin that I am usually surrounded by people who love and understand me. About two months ago I was talking with one of my coworkers about her workload, and she was telling me that she was weary of starting every email with "I'm sorry I am getting back to you so late"; this was due to the fact that her email inbox had more than a hundred "urgent! I needing the help so soon!" missals. I told her that she should just begin her emails with "Now that I am back from my gender reassignment...." and that would take care of it. I said this out loud. What the eff is wrong with me?
It's to be a long night. I fell asleep watching reruns of "Everybody Takes a Dump in Raymond's Mouth", but now I am awake, hyper, and listening to strange movie soundtracks whilst preparing a small woodland creature for his trip to meet Pan, his maker. After all, in merely forty-eight hours, I will be taking my final final, and if I choke, I will have to give myself to Honkers the Underthebed Clown.
Somewhere in the dark of an Indiana night in a township named after an ancient Iraqi city-state, a turn-of-the-century farmhouse sits empty, the spring winds whistling through the stubbled cornfields that surround it on three sides. I've never wanted anything more. Keep my luck in your thoughts, my minions, and I shall reward thee with Paradise!*
*Or, uh, my thank-you.
I remain, as ever,
Dom
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