the day's activities are best epxlained through pictures...

standing around

this is day two of my great Floridian visit, and i still cannot find a comfortable place to sit. when i’m in dad’s house, i stand around, waiting for something to do, like wash a dish or move a piece of furniture. i feel awkward, under foot, but at the same time i feel a part of the household. this is not the home i grew up in, nor is that the dog i played with for hours. those are the cats i’ve avoided for ten years, and the same ham radio equipment; the faded prints of sailboats and lighthouses hang on the walls, just as the painting of dad and amie on their sailboat hangs auspiciously devoid of yours truly; the promise to paint me in left unfilled years after the artist’s death. i still, however, do not have a place to sit.

How To Be A Mermaid

when i was growing up, despite my announcements of becoming an artist or a doctor, deep down i really wanted to be a mermaid at weeki wachee park. these women donned mermaid tails and spent their days underwater, observed through great glass walls, breathing air from hoses hidden behind great rocks. their long hair like feathers floated behind them, their faces pinched ever so slightly from the foreign atmosphere, and they moved slowly, serenely, with a green-blue elegance that mesmerized me.
i poured over pamphlets picked up at road-side rest stops, i stuck my eyeballs to the screen at every television commercial. in our 4’ pool i would practice swimming with my legs glued together, affecting the perfect Ariel stroke. i would hold my breath for as long as i could, pushing my hair behind me like a mane, and gracefully flail my arms about. i spent days at the bottom of our pool, wondering what life like a mermaid would be like.
never once did i get to see these hypnotic women dance; my imagination was to suffice, and i had all but forgotten about them, and my dreams, until monday. hidden among the billboards announcing WE BARE ALL, and COUPLES WELCOME, i caught a heartstopping sight: two women, larger than life, with gleaming tails and flowing locks, beckoned with their pale arms and pinched faces, calling the speeding passers-by to their world. immediately i was a pot-bellied child again, flopping around in four feet of hyper-chlorinated water, singing to myself intelligible songs of the deep, pining for my two-legged love to whisk me out of the aquatic world i knew into the land of forks and breathable air.  

roadtrip rains

rainstorms in florida are a magical sight. coming down i-75, i ran into about four of them, all the same. first, the horizon appears hazy. is it my sunglasses? is it smoke? no, it’s cloud cover. then the grey blocks of amorphous stuff falling from the heavens, which direction is it headed? will i hit it or miss it? and then it’s dead ahead. flocks of white birds dart out of the way, just before the drops plunk into the windscreen; one, two, then a thousand all at once. countless aqueous suicide bombers grind the north-south machine of a great highway to a slow crawl, each car blinking mercifully, guiding its followers. i strain over the steering wheel, eyes glued to the car in front of me, checking the yellow line to my left and the perforated white on my right, rounding out with a glance behind me to make sure i have no assailants from behind. one, two miles of blind driving, the fear of will i hit a flood? what if a wave comes over the bridge? this blind leading the blind is the stuff of which Darwin awards are made, will i be one of them? stop, damn you! this is enough! stop raining! and then, about ten minutes later than i’d like, it subsides, i drive through, the speed picks up, the wipers are turned off, and a collective breath of relief is blown southbound, for about another 30 miles.

and these!
these are delicious!
i ate them for the first time in el salvador, and lo! they're in a shell mart in alabama. god bless the immigrants.

road tripping

579.9 miles, 9 hours to Montgomery, Alabama.
64 mph, average.
minus a 45 minute dead-stop traffic jam, people lining the side of I-65 south like the apocalypse was nigh; i put my feet up and filed my nails, listened to npr, though about flipping out and decided against it. the day began at 10:30, when i pulled out of the driveway for what was to be the first of four separate attempts to leave Indianapolis, including one episode of the Great Naked Roommate run-in; finally got going around noon. i packed myself a few fake turkey and pumpernickel sandwiches, some lime la croix, chex mix and apricots, threw my ipod on shuffle and slapped my brother’s aviators on my face. it was a smooth day for the most part, hovering around 30 degrees C, clear blue sky and white fluffy clouds. i hit a storm just south of Birmingham, thick rain slamming into the windscreen, white cracks of lightning hitting just beyond the shoulder of the highway, using the taillights of the car in front of me to know there was pavement ahead. it reminded me of when i drove to new Orleans with matt, and we hit a similar storm in Mississippi, in the middle of the night on an unpainted stretch of highway, and i prayed and prayed and prayed, pressing my nose against the windscreen just to see, matt white knuckling the passenger side door handle, and just when i was about to burst into tears, we cleared a hill and there was a fresh line of road reflectors pointing the way south.
i thought of my friends while i was driving, both surprised and grateful my phone was silent. i thought of the shmoops, mostly when the gorrilaz cycled through the playlist. and of Theresa and new friends. a line in a james blunt song brought back a story irish told of the tall aussie, and that brought me right to Tapae Gate and the Rendez-Vous Guest House, the Montri Hotel and the beauty of Thailand. I miss it very much.
i have felt, in sharp relief, the immeasurable wealth i have compared to others around the world. the things i take for granted, a new car, an ipod and big sunglasses and a cooler of food, are things that 80% of the world doesn’t even fathom. which then led me to another thought of how if one has nothing, one is solely defined by one’s ideas, whereas when one begins to amass material things, one is defined by those. we are defined by what we have, like it or not. i think i would rather be defined by my thoughts, but i live in America, where no good deed goes unpurchased.
it’s raining, steady and soft, here in Alabama. i decided to come down 65 to 231 because i’ve never slept in Alabama before. tomorrow i’ll jump on 231 to 10, follow this to 75 and head to Venice. i might stop in tallahassee to see kelli, we’ll see.
good night.

daily inventory

embarrassment of the day: stepping into a restroom during an aa meeting and realizing that my polo is decidedly see-through, and the meeting room is decidedly cold. and crowded.

triumph of the day: finalizing the layout of my office, and being extremely productive in a short period of time. also, cleaning out a section of the garage for my shoes. plus, a new stack of books from the library that all look very good.

sadness of the day: one less myspace/realspace friend. and the constant feeling-like-shit over it.

fear of the day: am i totally self-centered?

excitement of the day: my birthday is three days away!!

learn thai:
http://www.learn-thai-podcast.com/

this is a really interesting site:
http://www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/
it takes the most recent google news headlines and composites them for your add enjoyment

kh

11 june

11 june
i feel frozen in time, stuck in that moment with Michael, can’t get out if it, can’t get it out of my head, my heart, can’t let this in, stuck stuck. restlessness pervading. i want sex, food, loud music and speed. i want to smoke and shoot pool and spend money. i want to numb this feeling that i am not happy here, that this is a temporary landing site until i move one. but i’m not unhappy, see, i’m just not overlyhappy here. i have the option to go, and i am not exercising it. that makes me unhappy.

full moon night

full moon tonight. the kind of moon the clouds bow to in reverie. the kind of moon you kiss goodnight before clicking off the lamp. the last full moon i watched rise over chiang mai from doi suthep, standing next to the tall aussie. tonight i watched it glow in the bright daytime sky before its indigo backdrop fell. now it hovers, pulled in and out of a patchy blanket of clouds.
i drank Bangkok green tea at the bookstore this evening, the smell of rounded coconut, light lemongrass and ginger filled my nose with a scent that carried me back to sukhumvit road in an instant. i feel like i’ve forgotten some of it, not the sights and the sounds, but the expansion of my world has resized itself a little bit. two days ago i sat in front of two computer screens, unable to write or think or do anything. a gnawing hunger inside of me begged to be assuaged, but i knew not how to feed it. it was a restless tiger, pacing inside of me, fluttering my heart and shutting off cognizant thoughts. i got up and out and found myself having a tea, reading a book, running into friends. the isolation that occurs here in my life is so easy to fall into, it’s so comfortable and terrifying. i feel as though i am often climbing out of a hole in the sand: the more i climb, the more it caves in on me.

why we fight

the rage against the people who drop the bomb, who lie to us, who kill in our names, and the futility i feel knowing my screams won’t reach the ears they’re intended for. the hot tears that come in seeing a man who has list his son, a man who has probably only cried twice in his life, and one of those times on camera. i don’t know how it works, or how it all evens out in the end. how can this even out in the wash? the only way it does, it seems, is when we force it to even out, and then something happens to disrupt the balance all over again, and once more we talk of evening it all out. to every turn, its season, i get that, but i think that’s a cop-out, a rationalization for us to continue doing what we want to do. there are people in society who rail against the idea of addiction as a “disease,” who reject any notion that one doesn’t have complete control over one’s actions, and stopping is a matter of willpower alone. how can you do this to your family? to god? to us? this is the question i pose to the ones killing, rejoicing in the death of another human being, using the propaganda of war to justify taking another’s life: can you stop? can you stop succumbing to the hate machine for a day? for an hour? can you, for five minutes, stop thinking of the blood and the guts and the victory and ego and realize that in war, there are people who die, there are people who suffer, there are people whose souls come ripped undone, thrown aghast in a gutter in a third world alley, irretrievable. and can you stop your disease? the thirst to loot and plunder, can you take a break? can you stop anytime you want to? here’s the secret: they kill us because we kill them, and then we kill them because they started killing us, and someone else is paying us to kill someone else, and those someones are really on another’s side, and we’re all dead. it takes one to break a link. it takes one costa rica to abolish its army, it takes one nation to remain neutral. and it takes one nation to betray the trust of an international audience, to kill its own first, others second.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1422779427989588955