On the living room floor

For those of you with kids, the first time you’re trying to teach your kid hide-and-go-seek and they just lay on the floor and close their eyes. Because they can’t see you, you can’t see them. That’s how they’re thinking. That’s how you’re thinking spiritually right now. You’re just like, 'Come find me, come find me.' You’re on the living room floor. --Matt Chandler, of The Village, a church in Flower Mound, Texas, in the first of a multi-part sermon on Colossians

So I picture this: I'm fucking lying here on our dirty rug. I'm just lying there, on this disgusting rug that used to be beige and orange and is now gray and orange, that hasn't been washed or vacuumed or shaken out or brushed off since the beginning of the semester, and I'm pretending nobody, least of all God, knows that I'm falling apart.

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I went biking again, for hours, until not just my toes but my feet were all numb. I thought: when you stand up on the pedals, as you're going downhill so you don't have to worry about peddling and swaying from side to side, if you just spread your featherless arm-wings, it's as close as you'll ever get to flying.

Reciprocity

I did not leave the house today. Today, the house was my shelter, my fortress, the walls my barricade against an unrelenting world. Correction: it is not unrelenting, it has relented, has given me up for dead. Today, I did not exist in the world.

I waited in line for food, although I knew I would not eat, as I was fasting to cleanse my system and myself, seeking a physical levity in place of a psychological one (so much harder to attain). CW was in front of me, and I can't recall what we were talking about when he suggested I find him on Facebook.

"I don't add people," I said, flippantly but honestly. "People add me, if they want to."

"Ooh, you're one of those people."

Sometimes I suspect he thinks he has everyone figured out, typified and categorized, neatly folded and placed in a series of mental boxes. I can almost see them, sometimes, through his small, well-shaped head of brown hair. People are understandable to him and always, with few exceptions, less interesting than he himself. But that is a harsh suspicion; he is entertaining to listen to and earnest.

Ordinary

I am just ordinary. I am ordinary. Oar-duh-NAE-ree. The tongue carresses the roof of the mouth not once, not twice, but three times, each different, a tap, a touch, a brush. Ordinary. I am.

Gliding across the landscape on my road bike, the sun on the road above the freeway by the hills through the trees, it was so hard to believe.

"我們是普通人. We are ordinary people. What makes you think you're so special?" my mom had asked, as I sat there, trying, trying to explain all my half-baked plans, of salmon packing in Alaska, barback-ing in Ireland, sheep-shearing in New Zealand, pearl oyster diving in French Polynesia, waitressing in Hawaii, cycling across the US mainland, organic farming in Israel, au-pairing in France, menial-job-working and starved-artist-living in Portland. And then I'd come back and write about it, I told her. I'll write all about it and get my degree.

Muay Thai and accordions

The gym is small, a row of punching bags like sentries guarding the training area, opposite a mirror. The boxing ring hems you in on the left as you enter, an informational table, tiny, on the right. The room reeks of dried sweat, unwashed and unwashable mats, gloves, pads, fighters' bared feet and handwrapped hands. A frenetic dynamism everywhere in the room, a methodical whump-whump-whump of jump ropes echoing one another at the start of every hour.

Descending into the catharsis of violence, all you hear is your breath, heaving from deep in your chest, through your clenched teeth. Hhhh, hhhhh, hhhhh, the metronome for your jab-jab-cross, right kick, right-knee-left-knee jab-hook-jab, left kick. All the world is but pain and precision, precision and pain. You ration your energy, measure it in breaths, listening for each bell. Three minutes a round. Three rounds.

You see not a person, you fight not a person but targets, bulls-eye's, stomach, side, temple, cheek. It is pure rage, pure muscle, not malice or hate. It is a strange dissected emotion, limbless and malformed, unloved, unreal.

Which contrasts sharply with accordion playing later in the day, the doleful notes resuscitating memories of Metro stations and ancient archways in which/ under which beautiful and beautifully dressed French people sit and play. I had talked to one, sitting (as they do) on his accordion case near the marché at Denfert-Rochereau: he had come from the countryside, looking for a way and a place to be and to stay in Paris, and I thought his dream was not so different from mine, or from that of anyone who, in visiting a city, searches not for a physical place but an abstraction; it is (before you arrive) what you have always dreamed it will be, and whether the reality measures up is a different matter altogether.

Clambake

The man shook his head. Then the woman. A faceless sequence of heads shaking, no, we are not leaving the parking lot, no, these coveted spaces are not yours to have, no matter the little size of your car, no matter the significance of your venture to the beach today, we are not going and you are not parking.

But we found a spot, in the end, that is, someone left at just the right moment, which is really what searching for parking is, anyway, isn’t it? A massive board game of chance in which we, all of us who are automotively inclined, are willing or unwilling participants in, players hungry for fortuitous timing, blind to environmental consequences, as we circle and circle about the playing board. And sometimes, particularly in Asia, we try to rig the game and up our chances and send out scouts, our little antennae-agent-family-member-feelers, who stand in newly vacated spots for us, as we go round and round.

We unloaded our precious cargo, lifting out heavy baskets filled with foil and artichoke hearts and Two-Buck Chuck, with bread and cheese and garlic, a pot of potatoes and onions and asparagus, with little dead shellfish, the centerpiece, and there it all was, the sun and sea, and sand and surf, and we, with our clambake goods to our chests. We did not know at the time that hours later the food would not in fact be cooked, that the banana leaves we had stolen and carried across campus on our heads, barefoot, tribal, a college replicate of a National Geographic glossy, that the leaves would not serve any real purpose later in the day.