Author Archives: admin

Travel log: Malaysia

2 Replies

20130413-175602.jpg

I used to live with a guy named Al. Al in many ways was a total freak. The stand out sign of his freakishness was giant bowls of Maypo with frozen blueberries stirred into the otherwise gruel-like meal. It was a meal that could occur at any of the 24 hours in a day and would often leave a blueish gray cast of spills and crusted tableware all over the apartment.

Al also called himself a writer. He would watch and look and examine and write in his imagined grotto. One day I came home to him transfixed by a can opener, which he was twirling to view at every angle and at every gradation of open and closed.

Caught in his study, he explained as a writer one must at all times carefully observe everything, even minutia to a minute detail. All was fodder for greatness.

I think his plan was to be as Melville was to whaling, but his passion would be kitchen utensils.

Al puzzled me.

His contention, his philosophy was that all writing is at its core was observation. He was a watcher. He existed in the square rooms of our apartment never venturing beyond the journeys he concocted between his temples and behind his forehead.

At the same time, I was studying journalism, writing that by its very nature stepped back to observe and report. Aloof from the messiness of human existence, we were taught to remain factual and by extension allowing the story to create its own structure remaining neutral in the telling. I suppose this training had me thinking Al was onto something.

But, my favorite journalists just might be Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson. They, in the sense of Neal Cassady, Ken Kesey and The Electric KoolAid Acid Test, got ON the bus.

Many years later, I found my own tribe of writers and storytellers. Not quite out there in the wilderness of the 1960s and 70s, they did not ascribe to stories coming from afar, cool observation. Nope, stories came from going balls in and doing something.

Which, in all apologies, brings us to today. Holy fuckballs (as I like to say in countries where the locals are unlikely to be able to translate, I did take a long-winded path to today.

Today, I had round two sparring with the kung fu master who bloviated that he is one of 10 elite in the ‘hood called Malaysia who can tap out impurities and do something good to your chi or qi or chee (definitely not chia). My qi has positively been beaten into submission.

For a couple of bucks, I succumbed to a type of massage that literally involves a long series of backhand slaps to my areas of arthritic pain. By the way, I grew up hearing the word arthritis and thought of diseases and treatment. In these modern days, it’s medical shorthand for the fact of my cartilage deteriorating and my bones rubbing together, nothing more interesting.

In the spirit of travel, adventure, story telling, sucking the marrow from existence, I figured the investment was worthwhile on two scores.

First, I have back and leg pain and it sucks and I exercise and try to work out the kinks and strengthen my core and it persists and it sucks. Anything that could remove the suck would be fine indeed.

Second is just the awesomeness. I have a story to tell and pictures to show.

I have these:

20130413-183117.jpg

20130413-183155.jpg

I also have this one of my knee. Grace and good sense preclude me from posting the worse bruising on my ass.

20130413-183324.jpg

Best of all, we get too bring home magical and mystical and therapeutical bottles of oily elixir of mystery.

20130413-183429.jpg

My back and leg are sore as I type this missive. But, if all goes well, in 2 days time I shall be healed. He promised me that soon I could do things with my legs I couldn’t before. I’m hoping that means ballet.

Of all of it, it’s a traveler’s dream of “authenticity.” The master’s rap was solid, peppered with references to the Chinese, qi, cultural superiority and my yin mixing with my yang. Westerners like me, we can’t take pain of treatment like the Chinese can.

The promises were wonderfully rich with self-promotion and mystery. He had skills and powers and training that few possess and to which he wouldn’t give a name.

I can’t decide which experience I like more–His burning my back, literally, with the heated ember of a block of incense, the visible bruising or the manifestations of health represented by the color and texture changes of my beaten flesh. Perhaps it’s the sum of it all.

So I wait, and I’ll report back if I can plie and jete like nobody’s business as the bruises subside and the oil seeps into my wounds.

Random thoughts at 40k

1 Reply

I’m more or less comfortably sitting in my sky chair, going from one side of the globe (California) to the other (Kuala Lumpur). As the crow flies it’s a fucking long ride. Different continent, different languages, different everything and far. That’s how I conceptualize travel.

I grew up packing snacks and loading up a station wagon to cross a state line. New Hampshire wasn’t even 100 miles a journey, I don’t think, but journey it was. A day could be set aside preparing and anticipating. However, if it weren’t for the signage, you really couldn’t tell you were somewhere different.

I yearned for travel as a kid. Plotted my escape from suburban torpor. Imagined exoticism, adventure. If asked at age 12 my retirement plans, I probably would have said a round-the-world ticket that never stops.

I’ve been places now past my wildest imagination. Safari in Africa, whitewater rafting the Nile, street food, temples, snake charmers and even a snake temple in Malaysia, shopping in Bangkok and Singapore, Edinburgh’s Fringe, punk bands in London, the tops of the Eiffel Tower, Empire State Building, the Golden Gate, and the Grand Canyon. Crunching snow underfoot in Yellowstone, and shooting guns in early summer outside of Yosemite.

It seems kind of fake to me, the one who couldn’t figure out the logistics from my bedroom daydreaming.

But, here’s the dark side of my experiencing some of my flightiest dreams. I am not a comfortable traveler. I ache with erratic sleep and temperature changes.

I never factored in dehydration and back pain while fantasizing.

Fortunately, I can eat pretty sturdily. I only have two gastrointestinal complaints in years of trekking. There was the incredibly tasty, succulent crab in Thailand that carried so much more. Nota bene: the public toilets in Bangkok are unparalleled in quantity and quality.

The less said of finding myself tangled in mosquito netting in a pitch black Ugandan night groping for the bathroom, the better.

But, where food is fine, sleep is elusive. It doesn’t arrive when it should, if ever. Even now, an almost 20 hour flight that took off at 1 a.m. to my body’s clock, sleep should have been a given. I dozed fitfully repositioning myself and never really getting to bliss for about 5 hours, and that unsatisfying stint was with the help of modern pharmacology.

Of course, a soupçon of the sleeplessness could be my hard-wired anxiety. We snagged the easy mobility and ample leg room of the emergency row. It’s a great perk — not only have I had room to do some stretches for my back, but we’re behind the galley and the bathroom. Plenty of water, and an extra snack and easy plotting for personal relief.

“But at what cost?” My brain says. Will I really be able to fulfill my promise to read and follow instructions and help evacuate the plan in the case of an actual emergency? Do I have the strength and dexterity to rip off the door and inflate the slides?

Who can sleep with that kind of pressure?

By the way, I’m wondering about the age of this flying vessel. There’s roughly a million built in ashtrays, on the bathroom doors inside and out, near the galley and around the sides. How the hell long has smoking been banned?

In hotels, sleep is much the same. I lay awake in the downiest of featherbed counting the hours until daybreak. (Back in the olden days when I might have occasion to visit strange beds, not sleeping was a great coping mechanism. I was up and out before the damage could be assessed, a ship sailing out of port and into the horizon before the dude knew what hit him.)

Maybe Morpheus will give me a little something something this trip.

Otherwise, if you ask me now to channel that 12-year-old’s view of retirement, travel dreams have gone to sleep. Now, retirement will be a cushy couch and a fluffy, warm blanket at home.

It’s like a giant, evil bad thing tapping on my eyeballs

Leave a reply

20130331-163242.jpg

Lately, I had a little free time and read some stuff by some other people of a comic nature. When I read comedy-like stuff in clump, much like when I go to open mike comedy nights, I start hating “funny” people.

I wish I could remember the bit. Chris Walsh had a goofy thing he acted out about similes and metaphors. I think there may have been a wolf involved, but a cartoon wolf, not a killer. Something hungry, maybe, like a wolf.

Anywho, it was like a Sesame Street episode explaining what a metaphor is versus a simile.

When I read “comedy” I start hating similes. I hate them like poison. No, in the spirit of what I hate, I hate them like sumo wrestlers and serial killer clowns eating too much Taco Bell and shitting in my vagina. Yeah, that’s about the kind of sentence I hate.

It’s like somewhere in a comedy writing course in a dark, windowless club with the shittiest beer on tap at the most usurious prices, a teacher is saying “You know what’s funny?” “Funny is unrelated, fantastical descriptions of things that don’t exist and slapping the word ‘like’ in front.” “That’s funny.”

I’m making these examples up, because I’m not like a douchebag filled with pus, but here’s what I mean:
It felt like a sumo wrestler was sitting on my forearm.
Hang overs feel a like tiny, mean leprechaun was taking a peen ball hammer to my temples.
The refrigerator growled like a mouse with a case of diarrhea.
My wife screamed at me like a Sherman tank filled with Fourth of July fireworks, careening through a marketplace in Kandahar.

Back when I learned the fancy talk of formal English and expository writing, similes were meant to tell you something. So, “eating like a bird” was because birds are small and eat seeds. You get some info inside your skull, if you can imagine a bird.

However, “My date ate like a prehistoric rabbit, related to a distant relative of a gerbil, in a desert being pummeled by hail,” imparts no similar information. It merely tells me “Hey, I can write words.”

A lot of comedians go for wacky descriptions to color up an otherwise boring, fucking story. I hate wacky.

In truth, I’ve obsessed about this literary device for the last couple of days. Of course, my obsession grew from my own reality. I’m as guilty as the next clown and equally boring.

The other day, I was expressing the anxiety that is wrought in me by a visit to an equatorial area with 85% humidity and very tiny, attractive family. In simpler terms, we are about to head back to Malaysia to visit M.’s mom, who has been sick.

It’s a good thing we are going, and I like hanging out and eating great food and having a lot of laughs.

However, even at 5 foot 3, I tower over M.’s mother. She is petit and small boned, and I could crush her in a bear hug or unthinkingly kill her with a sleeper hold just by the sheer bulk advantage. In Asia, as my acting out to my co-worker demonstrated, I am Godzilla or Gamera crushing Tokyo’s buildings with my awkward footfalls.

I am a sumo wrestler.

I am Lenny in Of Mice and Men.

I am a red-faced missionary in 1843 bringing my sweaty, sunburnt pastiness to foreign lands, although in my case sans the whole Christianity thing.

The less wacky truth is that, yes, I will wilt in the heat. But, a honking hunk of time, I’ll be lovingly caressed by A/C, or as the locals say “aircon.” I may even need a sweater for some mall walks.

I will be beet red for large chunks of time, and i will drink any and all beverage proffered to me, as I am from a people where snow blows and our thirst is unslakable.

Often his family will ask if I am OK, and they will offer hats, parasols, ice water, hot tea, lying down and showering. I feel helpless when this happens, but I do believe it is kindness not mockery.

I will probably not leave his mother bruised, broken or bloody when I bend down and give her a hug. And, she will likely squeeze me harder than I squeeze her.

Still and all, I am Gamera. And, it is also with some certainty, there is a family member who will allude to my size. But, she will be jovial and polite and not mention my ability to physically crush skyscrapers with the careless wagging of my backend.

It ought to be a holiday

Leave a reply

Every year, well more frequently than that, I think about my mother. I think about her on the Ides of March, the portentous day in which Brutus stabbed Caesar and my mother was born. Not the same year, mind you, as I’m not tapping this out on my ancient Roman computer.

Actually, it was portent upon portent for old Pat. She was born on the Ides of March the year of the stock market crash for the Great Depression. She was meant for great things.

So, another anniversary rolls around.

I like to remember the ways in which Pat stood out from the crowd. Or in my warped and selfish and self-absorbed brain, the ways in which Pat affected me and stood out from the crowd.

Today’s memory is tied to the current season of my manual toil. OK, typing and sitting at a desk isn’t manual labor, but some days it grinds you just the same. I got callouses on my tappy type finger tips.

At work these days the pesky little papers (now computer files) that once a year worker drones planet-wide, or at least U.S.-wide, bemoan are due — the annual performance reviews. The neat little report where you and your boss get to write out how you’re “meeting expectations” and otherwise doing what a cog does when one is employed.

You say to yourself right about now, I can hear you breathing and thinking, you say, but how does that relate to Pat. Surely, she was not your boss, apart from the sense in which we are all subordinates to our mothers.

Well, here’s the thing. I might be one of the only people rambling around that has written their own performance “self reports” for the decades that I have been employed as a grown up adult, who got their start years before they were allowed to work.

Pat, enmeshed in some heavy duty politics and just short of Brutus-like backstabbing in my town’s school system, turned her typewriter over to her precocious daughter one fine day and asked for her help in word smithing her review. She had to describe her classroom contributions, and since she floated around helping learning disabled kids within other people’s classrooms, she had to talk about that too.

By nature, she was a mix of fierceness on some opinions and topics (ahem, Catholic molesters) and shy reticence on a whole lot more. She complained to those nearest and dearest, but she was way too polite to complain to anyone or anything with any authority, including a cashier at a convenient store. (Although, the school teacher might pop out at any time if said cashier couldn’t do the math to make simple change.)

Real humility, not the false stuff that often passes for humility, was part of her core, and she could not find any words at all to describe what she contributed. She knew what she did, but she couldn’t spin it to advertise her brand.

I could do that for her and with some nudging to not get carried away with florid prose extolling her greatness, together we spoke about her patience with kids in the classroom. Her vast experience. Her gentle but persistent nature. Her true and deep caring for children and learning and education. Her mastery of basic skills and pedagogies and learning methods. That she could set and meet goals until the sun rose and set a hundred years.

She was a champion to a whole lot of kids fumbling in classrooms with dyslexia, a host of other syndromes and disorders, and simply poor study skills.

Pat was also a drill sergeant. No misplaced modifiers, misspellings (which I incidentally just mistyped), prepositions dangling at a sentence’s end, no math not shown happened on her watch. For the stuff where there is a right and wrong way to do it, by god she was going to teach you the right way or die trying.

All of her skills, the ones that made strangers come up to me in high school and beyond and say they knew my mother and that she was great, they were in her heart effortlessly as a teacher.

But, she did suck at telling management what was up. I helped do that for her. I was a kid and it was a fun writing assignment and in truth I had no feel for the politics or fear of the consequences, so I could write without inhibition. She could not. It became an annual ritual in her later years of work.

Now, about a thousand years later, or maybe just shy of that, I have to do the same kind of reports for myself.

So, I sit at my desk and return to the game that I had done at my mother’s typewriter. I right fast and furiously, and I have learned how to advertise my own brand but temper it with a soupçon of self-reflection. I allow for the things I do not know, and I hammer out my strengths. I find the notes of self improvement that are surmountable and demonstrate my good attitude.

I try very hard not to by cynical. But, for that to happen, I do not dwell, I do not agonize. If I spend over 15 minutes on the thing, at about 10 minutes in, I walk away until my head is in the game and I give it only 5 minutes more.

It’s impossible to tell your boss that in addition to my 25-30 years of doing the things for myself, I might have done 10 years more. We breeze through the things, the virtual online handshake is done and another year will pass.

And my highest proof of mastery were the words of my attorney, the one I hired on account of my work at the time not really feeling the love, the labor lawyer who helped me out of a jam. That besuited gentleman pulled all of my Human Resources records out of the belly of the employment beast, and he went through each paper with the loving care that an hourly fee will get you.

Upon sage and learned analysis, he proclaimed that while many a person had come through his office doors with a sad story to tell about the workplace, almost all of them had some marks in their permanent records. But my file, the years of reviews and meetings, they were a pristine and glimmering example. He said in all his years of lawyering he had never seen such stellar performance reviews.

Another year older and deeper in debt

3 Replies

Here’s my overdue musing on yet another birthday. I can’t believe I’m completely easing into total decrepitude, but 49 is a grown-up, fucking age anyway you slice it.

On the other hand, I ain’t dead yet.

Maybe it’s the baby boomers, of which I think I am one, tail end of a generation and all that. After all dear old dad was in Fort Lee, NJ during the big one, WW2. But, perhaps the baby boomers and their clinging to the old ways of listening to electric guitars, hot-tubbing and refusing to give up capital F Fun really are making a dent in how aging is perceived. 60 is the new 30 and all.

What I realize, as I refuse to go gentle into that good night, is that people really do have strong ideas or pictures in their heads of what middle age looks like. In the golden oldie days of my hitting comedy clubs night after night, I had a joke about being 40 and it not being a compliment if someone tags a remark with “for your age,” as in “You look great! For your age.”

In other words, I’m not sure I’m completely digging all of the times that folks say to me (and to M.) that we don’t look our age. Baby, this right here, this chubby body and all, this is what 49 looks like.

I know it’s meant well and maybe it’s true. After all I know a chick about 6 months younger than me who rocks the mom jeans and acrylic sweaters. But, if you look at her face, she’s not actually decrepit either.

For fuck’s sake, I don’t really know anyone under the age of 90 who looks like the Crypt Keeper, so why is that our image? I would totally make out with Helen Mirren.

And with all of that, my secret will be the launch of the upcoming “Forever 49,” a store for normal people. My jeans will be old school, the way jeans were meant to be, with zippers that are not so short and low they end at your clit. T-shirts will be long enough to not just cover your belly button but reach your hips. More simply, clothes will go back to fitting you well and covering your muffin top, not create a whole other roll.

Here’s to another fucking decade of living. And, when the wrinkles catch up, I’ll just wear my sunglasses indoors.

Lets get ready for some football

Leave a reply

I don’t actually have anything to write about football. Truth be told, behemoths crashing into each other hold little allure.

I do think the possibility of repeatedly getting you’re bell rung, as the cliche goes, might be creating a whole lot of murderous crazy. How is it not the days of Roman bread and circuses?

Still and all, I will probably cook up some chili. It may be a protein laden pot sans legumes of any kind as the man in my life has been getting in touch with his caveman forebears, at least dietetically.

Tomorrow, we will be Romans. We will be Neanderthals. We will be observers. We will be sports fans. We will be Americans.

Cooking time

1 Reply

Here’s something I’m disproportionately proud of to start the week: I made some seriously kickass chicken soup.

M., the man with whom I cohabit, did something he ain’t never done before since I’ve known him. He packed a lunch for work with said kickass soup. Then he shared with his co-workers, who are now seeking a recipe, so I’ll do the best I can to write it all out.

It’s recipe time boys and girls!

First, days before you make the soup, whip up this recipe from Farm Fresh to You.

Butternut Squash & Swiss Chard Hash
Ingredients
• olive oil
• 1/2 large onion, thinly sliced
• 1 jalapeno, finely chopped
• 1 small, yellow bell pepper, chopped in 1/2-inch pieces
• 1/2 tsp cumin
• 1/2 tsp smoked paprika
• 1 cup butternut squash, cut into 1-inch cubes and roasted
• 1 cup shredded swiss chard, kale or spinach
• salt & pepper
• 2 eggs poached, fried or soft-boiled. Runny yolk recommended.

Instructions
1. To roast butternut squash: Heat oven to 400 degrees F and place cubes on an oiled baking tray. Bake for 20-30 minutes until tender and slightly golden.

2. Heat olive oil in a large skillet over a medium high heat. Add onion and cook, stirring for about 5 minutes until soft. Add jalapeño, yellow pepper, cumin and paprika and cook for another 2 minutes. Stir in Swiss chard and cook for 2 minutes until wilted. Add roasted squash and cook for another minute. Remove from heat.

3. Season with salt and pepper and serve warm with a poached egg on top.
Serves 2
http://voraciousvander.com
Serves: 2

Oh, but don’t do the egg bit. Just use the veggies as a side dish, sans eggy-wegg. Have leftovers.

Cook up a seriously tasty chicken dinner the next night. Maybe use one of Trader Joe’s pretty tasty “Organic brined chickens.” I roasted that puppy up on a bed of leeks with a few slices of red pepper also thrown into the pan.

Eat the chicken. Save the ravaged corpse.

When the weekend comes along, time to boil up your bones and make a broth.

Here’s the tricky part — First, juice a whole bunch of tangerines, while your loved one watches. Let him leave the house to go for a run.

While he’s out, switch out the tangerines from the juicer, clean up the citrus and switch on over to carrots. When you make carrot juice, you end up with a bucket full of ground up carrot bits. All of the juicing guides tell you, you can make stuff with a bucket full of ground up carrot bits. For example, you can make broth.

So, there you are, a chicken carcass, a bucket full of ground up carrot bits, water and a big pot. Boil that shit. Boil it some more. Let hours pass. Throw in some laundry. Not in the soup, in the washer machine. Do your core exercises, while the pot simmers. Maybe a little knitting, while the pot simmers. Update your craptacular blog, and you guessed, the pot simmers.

You’ll end up hours later with a murky orange goop of soupy base goodness. Time to let it cool, strain it into a bowl and recover any meat that ended up at the bottom of the pot. Throw that into the bowl with the lovely, strained chicken broth.

Slap it in the fridge and go out to eat. Drink wine. Carpe the old diem.

The next day, throw the broth back in a big pot. Put the pan, and a bit more water on the fire getting it back up to a toasty simmer.

Rummage around the refrigerator, and pull out the leftover squash and chard hash from the recipe above. Dump the leftovers into the pot.

Wash and chop up some carrots (the other ones in the pack that you didn’t get around to juicing), and throw the carrot slices into the pot.

Check the crisper in the refrigerator, and discover a bunch of neglected spinach. Clean that up, throw out the leaves of no return, chop or rip it up, and throw that into the pot.

Throw out the beets behind the spinach. They’re wilted and soft anyway, and only in Moscow do you want beets in your soup. This is California, not the Soviet Union. Bad beets. Bye bye beets.

Sit on the couch and let that stuff chill on simmer. OK, not chill exactly. Relax on simmer.

When you finish your core exercises, go back to the pot and grind in a serious helping of fresh pepper. Look around for what other soupy type spices you might have. Hmmm, just in case, throw in a chicken bouillon cube and a bit more water.

Discover the unopened spice mix you got as a Christmas present and check the label. If it says something like “celery salt, garlic salt, pepper and sea salt mixed,” throw some of that junk in. Toss in a little dried rosemary. The old parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. Although, probably not the sage.

Back to the fridge — take out the giant jar of minced garlic in oil, and throw a metric shit ton into the pot. Or at least two heaping tablespoon’s worth.

Let that boil a long while longer. Throw in more water if it starts getting low, and check the carrots. If eyes are the windows on the soul, carrots are the windows on your soup’s doneness. Soft carrots equal done soup.

While this all is boiling, fight off the local critics and naysayers who question your simmer. Simmer is good.

Finally, when you’re hungry, declare the soup is done and force all in the house to eat. Or else.

Oh, and it doesn’t hurt to throw in some breast meat from a brand new chicken just to give it some more meat.

Enjoy.

Maybe it’s because another birthday is a-coming

Leave a reply

20130126-165724.jpg

I thought I had a thought about something to write about here. The jump was a Facebook status I saw with a quote that boiled down to whether you could call yourself an artist.

I usually don’t. Sometimes I do. It’s usually when I am melodramatically claiming insights and wisdom and sensitivities I don’t actually possess. Recently, I did gesticulate and gesture broadly while declaring “Fuck them all, I’m an artist,” to a work friend (he is beleaguered as I am by those people who cannot discern wit and sarcasm from assholic behavior).

Generally, I’m more unsure. Although, as M. will shout at me, ridiculously so. If I don’t trust my words or my way with words, why the fuck should anyone else?

It’s a baby step that I now tell people that I’m a “writer” (yup, note the quotes and do the little airy double-fingered gesture) or admit to blogging or working on a book, now with M.’s sage advice an admitted collection of essays. Essays I can manage; a book creates a dry heave kind of thing in my brain. Hmm, not a great visual that – a retching head.

It’s important, I think, that you have to at some point say “fuck it, I’m in the club.” I’m tired of waiting for permission to decide what I am.

I never or rarely call myself a stand up comedian. I say (admit) I’ve done stand up comedy (and suppose I might again).

At night in dim clubs and bars, there was a mostly unspoken hierarchy, and there was a definitely bitched about gripe of who got to call themselves a comic. I think I took the atmosphere too much to heart, too personally, and I couldn’t bring myself to compare my meager offerings to people who made money and gigged madly and got auditions.

In retrospect, I wish I had brassier balls to front myself as belonging, even if I didn’t feel it inside. After all, I drank beers (and retro-shamefacedly even slept) with clowns who cashed checks built literally on fart jokes. Fart, fucking, jokes.

(Cue the smoke and vaselined lens with swirling colors, I feel a nostalgic memory coming on….

Back in old Boston, there’s a dingy room in a basement of what was once a bank. The tiny tables behind the stage, where comedians impatiently wait there turn, is adjacent to the black, iron wall of the bank’s vault.

I chatted and fiddled with my list of jokes in front of me and nursed a beer. A guy who at the time got paying gigs and took a shine to me, leaned over me to whisper sweet nothings of advice, and no doubt peer from above my head at the fun bags in my blouse.

He explained that I was too smart, and audiences don’t like that. My success, it would seem, would best be served by following his lead. He suggested I stand up from where I was sitting and watch his carefully calibrated performance unfurl.

Woman that I am, because I do sadly believe woman are a bazillion times more likely to politely follow these kind of orders, I got up to watch.

No lie, it was painful. Scampering and dancing on stage and a solid gold bit that if my dim mind remembers culminated in the comic gold of not being able to tell if the farts were coming from his dog or his grandmother sleeping on the couch. GOLD!

People do laugh at that shit, I’ll give him that. Although, sometimes it’s the uneasy laugh of watching someone fall spectacularly or the cruel laugh at the handicapped or maybe the giggle from watch monkeys flinging poo at the zoo. So, indeed the room had laughter in it.

A couple of people later, it was my turn. He returned the favor to study my set and give me notes.

It was one of those nights I only sort of remember. My best moments on stage are the ones where like a trained athlete it’s all muscle memory, mechanics and flow. Everything rolls out instinctively, not held up by my conscious (and self-concious) thought of what’s next.

I ripped it. The audience was listening and laughing exactly where I planned. They were silent on my words that would lead to revelation and release. But, in my game, in that ultimate zone, I don’t remember the details.

Admittedly, those nights were rare for me. I could measure my success by the astonished smiles and back pats from my friends and acquaintances back stage.

In a comedy club, a cold handshake with no eye contact tells you your fellow comics are embarrassed for you. In contrast, there’s a warm spread of people reaching out to touch you, pat you, congratulate you, smile when you’ve just nailed it in the end zone.

My would be suitor, smiled and offered the perfunctory hand shake and “good set.” He didn’t try to sleep with me again after that night.)

Those moments are the ones that make me want to sell myself harder. I only wish it didn’t take negative stimuli for me to feel the need to conquer.

There’s a bit more in my head. Stuff about what happens into the next decade, now that I’m about 10 years deep in M.’s and my relationship, just shy of that many years into my California dream, and looking down the barrel to 49, knowing it was 38/39 when it all last shifted seismically. And, as they say on Madison Ave. and Cupertino, wait there’s more.

But, for now, I’ll have to consider a part 2.

Hanging in the gym

Leave a reply

20130126-170131.jpg

The more things change, the more time passes, the more decrepit I get, nothing really changes. In today’s episode of stasis, I’m in a gym.
The air is redolent with sweat and dust. Sneakers squeak and whistle rubbing against the hardwood floor. Grunts echo from above and below in that cave of acoustics where people go to ooze electrolytes and heat from their pores.

Instructors are speaking sounds that enter my earhole and worm their way into my gray matter, translate into meaningful words that describe actions my body cannot mirror. My whole life it has amazed me that some people can listen to a description of physical action and then carry out said action. I am not one of those people.

It’s continually confounding. I hear the words, I understand the thoughts, but my muscles do not obey. In my head, I am a swan. In my body, I am a penguin on dry land.

I’m actually in the main room of the Muy Thai Academy of San Jose. Pretty much any being on the planet, even those that wiggle and squirm with nary a brain cell in their body, anyone that has ever met me knows that I couldn’t be possibly be here by my own design. Nope, gyms and I, fighting and I, athletics and I are strangers.

But I sleep with someone who seems to love all three. And, so here I am.

It’s probably some kind of cosmic twist of fate, karmic payback that I ended up with a guy who loves the gym and is able to move his muscles in line with his desired goals. I imagine the gods are laughing at me. Probably, it’s from that day that I spotted my bespectacled, rail thin English teacher wandering the single hallway of my high school’s gym building. “Ms. Ford,” I yelled after her, “Are you slumming it?”

My sweat-clothed nemesis, Ms. Ciesla, overheard me. Later during the mandatory instruction I loathed the most, perhaps during a detestable field hockey game as I slowly followed a white ball with a wooden stick, she pounced.

“D-Rob,” or any number of various nicknames and butchery of my hard to pronounce last name, “DId I hear you right, D-Rob? Slumming it? Is that what I heard you say? Slumming it? Do you think I work here in a slum? It’s a slum to you? Really, is that what you said?”

It was a rhetorical onslaught not meant to be answered. However, I think I did grunt out a “Yeah.” I think I may have implicated my English teacher and said she would understand.

It was a longer year than usual that year in gym class. It was the year Ms. Ciesla made me play forward in field hockey, scoring zero points to my name and making new enemies on the battlefield. It was the year she made me repeatedly try again and again and again to fling my lower body over a waist-high leather horse. A vaulter I am not, and my stomach purpled by hitting the leather and padded wood full-force in desperate flings vainly trying to will myself to flight attested to the truth. I think it was the year that a tiny little girl spotted me into a handstand that dropped straight to the floor knocking the air from my lungs and ending the class early.

It was the year I embraced myself and my bitter reality of limitations. Mortality and limits crept into my childhood soul.

The not so great pretender

5 Replies

20130102-195516.jpg

The above depiction is my little foot ensconced in the finest of paraffin wax. From the ankle down, I occasionally look as pampered and fine as any lady in the court. Above the ankle, I am’s who I am, which is more Popeye than Lucretia Borgia.

In the passing of age, and in the passing of various and sundry jobs to pay the bills, I now find myself side by side with the hoi polloi. For reals, I don’t just work for the one percent, I work among them. People who pay people with calluses to remove their calluses.

I swirl glasses full of fine wine and make decisions on morsels and settle expense accounts. The thing about experiencing luxury on someone else’s dime is that it starts to make sense to set aside a couple of centimes to buy your own comfort.

And, so we do.

Yet, I am’s who I am. And, as I took an apple and a honey stick from a very nice spa that dipped my feet into the above-depicted wax, and I drank their proffered champagne, tea and infused water, I considered survival.

So, here’re some tips for fine living on a shoestring budget, especially if you ever find yourself maybe getting a room on an expense account but otherwise needing to pay for food and survival and whatnot.

First rule of the one percent: Turns out their lives are cushier than ours. They get 800 count sheets, pristine logs in their fireplaces, real honey and a lot more snacks. A lot more snacks.

Corollary rule to live like the one percent: Take your share, everyone else is. Also, take another share. Live as they do. More is more. The rich don’t want, because they take what they need (and maybe a wee bit more).

(And, you know what? They get more. Wee little shampoo bottles are bigger the better the hotel. Bars of soap approach full size, not the bare little wafers lost in skin folds at the lesser establishments. Two-ply to clean your unmentionable crevices not industrial strength sand paper in single ply is how the other half lives.)

At hotels I can afford on my own, there is occasionally a card table set up with a carafe of lukewarm coffee, non-dairy creamer in powdered form, and maybe, just maybe, a box of doughnuts purchased, you hope, that same day.

At fine hotels, there is usually coffee you can brew in your room and coffee service, freshly brewed and monitored frequently, in the lobby. Better yet, fresh fruit is often freshly placed daily in a sparkling bowl somewhere for the guests’ enjoyment. Sometimes there is fresh fruit lovingly place on every single damn floor. Pass by, take an apple. Pass by, take a tangerine. Pass by, take another apple. Go to another floor, see what they’ve got.

You could wake up to gratis arabica beans, but you can live a day on free fruit with no gout to speak of.

Similarly, fine hotels dole out water, like it’s water. When you see a tureen, crock or glass dispenser of cool, cool H2O, often infused with fabulous fruits, juices and petals, grab a cup and drink long and deep. Hydration is easy in four-star hotels. No need for feeding a wrinkly dollar bill into a humming vending machine next to the ice machine.

Second rule of the one percent and of access to water: Fine hotels are an oasis, even if you don’t have a room. The key is acting like you belong.

Clean toilets off the lobby with real towels! Cold and dirty from a harsh walk in the grimy streets of a major city? Listen for the whistle of a uniformed doorman, pass through the doors and the cleanliness that is next to godliness awaits you as the mean streets recede into hushed tones of opulence.

I still own a hand towel I stole one cold winter night, drunk and seeking refuge at the lovely Charles Hotel in Harvard Square.

More snacks — head to hotel bars at nice places. When the well-off drink, even if it’s the same bottled beer or glass of modest wine as schmoes like me imbibe, the bartender passes snacks. In the olden days, a lot of bars were generous with salty treats, but now snacks are left for the elite. I’ve had prosaic Goldfish and gilded, gourmet Chex mix and the humble peanut.

And, then there’s wifi for them that is bold enough to ask. I’ve yet to have a front desk turn me down when I’ve asked for the password, even as I was nursing a glass of wine at the bar not planning on spending the night.

And, thus, in that last little bit is my ultimate survival tip — Even with the rattle of coin in my pocket, I will remain more like the peoples behind the desk than the ones in front of them. They are my people, my allies, my friends.

Event planning has reminded and taught and refined for me to always be nice, fair and generous to the staff anywhere and any time. Your brother, your friend in arms, your contact to the perks the wealthy demand.

Back about a thousand years ago, I scooped ice cream for my job, when a small cone cost a mere 63 cents. (Total tangent, I still remember the price scale of small and medium cones — 63 and 79 cents respectively. Ice cream sodas with a single scoop were $1.19.)

Some of the clientele were demanding, entitled and willing to push a full-court press to get their penny’s worth of frozen sugar and cream. They got no more than exactly the training manual allotment of cream into their cone and a quick swish in the dish of what Bostonians call jimmies with an extra shake to make sure not too many sprinkles clung.

Manners and attitude, a friendly smile or the humility of a hand digging deep to count out the change penny by penny got you a heaping helping. The small cone teetered into 75 cents worth of ice cream, and the medium might require a cup to handle the excess weight.

The same philosophy holds in the upper echelons. The masters of the universe, they need people like us, and people like us help each other out.

Go ahead, put on your nice shoes and your company manners and mingle in the corridors of the well-to-do. They have snacks.

(By the way, all of the above is part of my ultimate retirement plan. You’ll catch me in a pressed suit, skipping from fine establishment to another with high-end retail adding extra spice and cookies to my day.)