A Snippet of Trivial Text Holds the Promise of Unimagined Pleasure

I promise not to make a habit of reposting things from other blogs, but it warms my heart to know that somewhere, someone felt enough like I do to go through the trouble of plastering a college campus with these posters:

from PassiveAggressiveNotes.com

Thanks to Elyse Barrere for sending this to me!

Take Me Home Tonight

Turning the last lights off in the bar, I gather my things and wait ten minutes, until it's 3 a.m. on the dot. Then I can call Sammy. His is the only phone number in this world that I currently have memorized. But he's not my brother or my early-morning booty call. He's my cabbie.

Only this time, when I call, instead of his familiar accent speaking, "Hello, my dear," I hear a robot instead. I'm told that his phone no longer accepts outside calls. Ah. I forgot that he was going on vacation. I also forgot that our relationship was really a business transaction.

Sammy took me home three-four nights a week for about six months. It was great. He was almost always available, knew where I lived, left the meter off and promised to rescue me free of charge if I was ever in trouble. He taught me a lot about the business of driving a cab. He shared his with a day shift person, and began driving at exactly 3 a.m.

I didn't always have a dedicated driver, but after some weird experiences with random drivers--like the old man with a foot fetish who caressed my feet! TWICE!--I decided to make Sammy my steady.

I bring this all up because when I linked to Texts from Last Night in a previous post, I skimmed the recent ones. Someone wrote something to the effect of: "Just hit on my cab driver. I think my 'desperate for a man' phase has segued into a FML phase."

It made me wonder about cabbie behavior all over. Obviously, everyone is an individual. If Text from Last Night lady had written, "Just hit on my creepy cab driver," then, OK. But her language makes a blanket class statement.

Is it more inappropriate to have a crush on your cabbie than to be crushing on your boss, teacher, mailman, doctor or hey--let's get real!--any of the hundreds of handsome-but-alcoholic-or-otherwise-fucked-up dudes in any major city? Is the power dynamic between a provider and purchaser of this particular service more charged than another? Is crushing on your cabbie really the point of no return?

A SURVEY

As I said, Seattle is a grab-bag. Of all the drivers I've had, I'd say it's 50/50 on the friendliness scale, with only one or two people ever seriously creeping me out. Many were married with children, working on a degree during the day, educating me about American history or lecturing me on the importance of watching Al-Jazeera for a balanced global viewpoint. So I certainly didn't think any of them were less productive or intelligent than me just because they were driving cabs. Honestly, they listen to BBC World News all day while I listen to Katy Perry!

Then there are other locales. When Lu and I were in a cab in Hollywood, separated from the driver by bulletproof glass, the dude was not having any conversation whatsoever. I remember NYC cabbies being fairly friendly. A driver in Portland took advantage of my inebriation once, by taking the scenic route over the wrong bridge and back. And a fiendish cabbie in Prague wrote something in my notebook that I don't think I ever want to have translated. (If you're out late in Prague, just walk home, however far. It's safer.)

/END SURVEY

I guess my point is, I really enjoyed my ten minutes per night with Sammy. He told me how he makes his special couscous during the holiday season. He was funny. One night, I was waiting for Sammy and another guy kept circling the block, trying to cajole me into his cab. I said, "No, thanks, I called someone." He was like, "But I'm here!" and being very persistent. I told Sammy and he said, "Oh, 640! he is no good! Do you see this? [pointing to his knuckle] That is that guy's teeth!!"

Once he asked if I could bring him a soda, and I liked that he felt he could ask me for something. I sometimes brought him candy. He put up with my obnoxious dates when I shouldn't have. I told him the only Arabic phrase I remember from Oma: phonetically it's Intee albee or "You are my heart." He said he'd try to teach me a new one now and then. And then he told me that he works only a few months at a time, saving for 45-day visits to Morocco. I came home drunk one night and read about Morocco for an hour. I looked at pictures and tried to feel a warm breeze on the edge of the ocean.

I don't know if I'll remember his number in the summertime, or if he'll even be back. For now I met another nice guy. Mohammed is my man. But maybe Sammy will come back, and he'll pick me up on a random call or a corner after I'm out dancing. Maybe he would ask to see me in the daytime. Maybe I don't think that's so strange.

Downward Spiral Pose

Ganesha, Remover of Obstacles, found on a Google Image Search.

My friend Danielle is a YA (Young Adult) librarian here in Seattle, and she has to read hundreds of books every year to keep on top of everything. I rarely pick up YA novels, but in my recent bookstore-on-the-verge sweep, I bought a book called Fat Vampire, by Adam Rex. (Yet another handsome author my age, who lives in Tucson with his wife, who makes me reconsider genre writing...)

It was a mostly hilarious skewering of all kinds of nerd and teen culture--Comic-Con, superheroes, goths, nerds/jocks, vampires, hackers, drama geeks. In it, a foreign exchange student, Sejal, arrives from India. She becomes the vampire's crush. But she has another problem: "The Google."

Here are two ways Rex describes the fictional disease in different chapters.

"I-I feel I should tell you I've sometimes had panic attacks. Not for a long time now, but...I do not want to freak you out."

"'Cause of...the Google?"

Sejal nodded at her feet. Panic attacks when reminded that she could not just close her eyes and vanish from the real world with its fleshy claustrophobia. Panic at the thought that she'd failed to log on and check her status for two hours, a day, four months. She pictured the complicated yoga of it--hands at her temples like blinders, bent at the waist to gaze at her own navel. Downward spiral pose."

_______

"I'm trying to be a better person," Sejal said. "A stronger person."

"You're good. You're strong."

"I'm not," Sejal insisted. "I have the Google. Did you know that?"

"Oh," said Ophelia, stepping back. "That internet disease?"

"It's not contagious."

"Sorry."

"It makes you forget what's important. I lost track of myself for a while. I forgot who I was. You can do terrible things when you don't know who you are, na?"

Ophelia shifted from one foot to the other. She shrugged slightly.

"I became a ghost, and I only cared about other ghosts. I was not available to people at school, on the street...I wasn't there. But move your mouse like on a Ouija board and you could speak with me. You could conjure me up. I lost every one of my real friends, but I had a box full of trolls and demons, like Pandora."

_________

I did that too when I was about 15. My friends used to give me a real hard time for not going out with them and starting to drink and date boys. I have stacks of journals from that time recalling my online conversations with people from across the country on IRC. I even had a couple of "boyfriends" in Seattle, of all places. :) At that time, I think I fell into online anonymity as an escape and a barrier to my adolescence. I was afraid of drinking and drugs. I thought all the girl-talk chatter surrounding me was dull and the older boys dangerous. I would rather spend an hour downloading Smashing Pumpkins images on our 14.4 connection.

Being in that caught-between generation is a funny thing. I've been online for half of my life, but not since I was five or six, like the Milennials. Unlike them, I suspect, I have a greater ability to shapeshift between identities. I can, and have, done Internet cleanses to wipe the majority of "myself" off the online grid. Then when it's time to network--for jobs, apartments, parties, partners--I get back on. I never want to be as trapped as I was before, like Sejal. Brooding teenagers have time to be ghostlike. Not me.

50 Ways to Leave Your Everyone

As an academic, particularly one that doesn’t have a permanent job yet, one of the only constants in my life is that most things are not actually constant at all. The main way this fact manifests itself is that I move fairly frequently-- every few years-- and have little control over where my next move will take me. There is a big part of me that likes this aspect of my work-- I don’t have time for claustrophobia to set in, and I’m forced to constantly adapt to uncertainty. Of course these are not always good things-- they cost me proximity to my friends, and most recently cost me a relationship. Ironically, that my major life displacements occur on a few-year timescale now, and do so somewhat dependably, seems like a kind of stability to me. At the very least, the fact that I know they’re coming makes them easier to ride out.

Until I was around 10 years old, life was passably stable. At the very least, I didn’t yet realize how my father’s death had spidered through the support beams of my life, structural damage that left no possible outcome but disintegration at the bone level. In the summer of 1990, my mother and I left to spend a vacation in LA-- which I now refer to as our “staycation”, on account of it lasting four and a half years. I have come to realize that the decision to stay, presented to me at the time as though it were a refusable option, a toy idea, was in fact cast long before our bags were packed. My mother was on the run from life in New York, and chose Malibu, CA as her safe house. In the subsequent years I became aware of how we’d bled dollar signs across the country and down the West Coast, but at the time it seemed only like the night-long exhalation of a leaking air mattress: you close your eyes on a soft surface, only to awake and find yourself on the floor.

Over the next decade, abrupt change became the constant-- I was never in a school for more than two years, and we moved between apartments like debtor pawns being chased by landlord rooks. I learned to adapt-- a skill I now think of as an asset, but one acquired under the duress of necessity. If you live in a hall of mirrors, distortions become normal, and so the perpetual unearthing of any taproots I put down became part of the everyday landscape. Even in the years since emerging from the carnival and seeing that time with a better sense of context, I still tend to explain it away as though it were a plate of bitter-but-character-building vegetables. This past weekend, I talked it over with a friend-- the only person I know whose life has been more nomadic than mine-- and he made a comment that has been ringing in my ears since:

“Some things that should hurt, don’t hurt anymore.”

It’s true-- I can leave people like they were paper dolls fluttering away in my rearview mirror, and though I suspect it should be harder, I’m not sure I wish it was. One of the things I so treasure about my friendship with Rachel is its uncanny ability to survive my tendency to fly out the window-- there are very few other people I can say that about. Maybe this is one of the reasons the topic of our writing together so appeals to me-- for me it’s not just about the ability to find real connection in spite of an increasingly digital world, it’s about finding real connection, period.

Clogging About Exhibitionists

Thank you, predictive text! Of course, more people clog than blog these days!



15th Ave., Seattle

The frequent failure of T9 makes for a lot of comedy on the Internet--see When Parents Text and Texts from Last Night--and a lot of confusion IRL. Not that texting isn't hazardous enough even when you do spell correctly, as I learned by starting a fight this week via text. I should've called instead. Plain and simple! I'm embarrassed by those times when, open as I want to be, I hide behind the built-in barriers of technology.

But this post is really about those who aren't hiding at all. Here are the texts between Lucianne and I on Thursday night:

RS: im being a big hippie this week. last nite i was out w my coworker while he was picking up boys. i made a sad lonely gay boy hold my hand. it was intense! i am like amma the hugging saint!

LW: haha! you ARE amma. i like the mential image of a mopey gay boy holding hands w you. just got off plane now waiting for bart to take me home. dude behind me had the fucking plague and coughed near my hair, yuck

RS: :) i'm at a punk show w my friend collette. her bf from the 80s band. older dudes smoking pot. AND a 24/7 couple: girl w her ass hanging out of a skirt, collared to her dude by a huge again WOO THURSDAY NITE!

RS: sorry, huge chain

LW: woo thursday! the new friday! ps there are drunk spanish girls arguing really loudly in heavily accented english about gays w children on the train

RS: omg! couple have their tongues down each others throats. clogging about exhibitionists

LW: maybe one of them is choking and it's a rescue mission. now guy on cell phone is complaining incredibly loudly about the foreign girls (who he thinks are german). hot mess express!

RS: haha

RS: oh shit. im about to get a ride home on a motorcycle

Some Are Struck And Some Sustained

I am facing down the world’s worst Caprese salad-- a misery of wilted lettuce, wan tomatoes, Italian dressing and dried flakes of basil. Less than 24 hours on the heels of the glorious one I had at the Capital Grille last night, eating it seems like trying to relive one’s dream date with George Clooney by picking up a guy at the bus station. This being an airport bar, I’m not exactly sure what I expected. My waitress is a beam of black-haired sunshine, gap-toothed and grinning as she chats with me about my travels. She mishears my destination of “Berkeley” as “Brooklyn”, and then becomes the second person in as many days to tell me I don’t sound like I’m from New York. Good thing I’m moving back-- my patina must be wearing off. The horror, the horror.

Rachel’s mention the other day of “single-serving friends”, that clever morsel from the opening sequence of Fight Club, keyed off of something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. It’s funny to me that while so much of the world has become increasingly disposable-- the idea of clothing lasting indefinitely seems long gone, for example-- we still place a premium on lasting relationships and denigrate those that are short-term. Don’t get me wrong, there are few things in this world more precious than a friend who knows you so well you never have to explain yourself. But at the same time, most of the other more transitory personal interactions we once had have been traded in for virtual ones-- we’d rather update our Facebook status than talk to the person next to us on the bus. There seems to be a general sentiment that a relationship that is not lasting, or god forbid ENDS, was not worthwhile. We even call romantic relationships that don’t end in the supposedly permanent union of marriage “failed” relationships. To me, there are a couple of things wrong with this point of view. First of all, it ignores the fact that all of our interactions, whether ended by someone getting off the train, by irreconcilable differences, or by death-- are transitory. It also equates the length of a relationship to its quality-- a mirage as any unhappily married couple can tell you.

Sitting in this airport bar, I am watching the room full of singly-occupied two-tops play out these brief connections. In front of me, a fresh-faced blonde dines alone. Moments ago, the table next to her was occupied by a father and his teenage son. The son was too young to be on her radar, but he watched her chitchat with the waiter, envious wheels turning in his head as though “fat latino guy who works at the airport” might be a valid career choice if it let him make time with pretty girls. The father and son, now gone, are replaced by her tomboy counterpart of otherwise similar age and blondeness, a talkative girl just in from Afghanistan. Today, transportation snafus have made getting drunk in the airport bar the best possible option for her. The two women light up a conversation, and they are what I love about bars, airport bars in particular (otherwise temples to terrible food and worse decor). My waitress appears with a second beer-- holding both my new and nearly empty glasses, I glug down the last sip and pass her the empty. “Trade ya.”

She grins ear-to-ear. “Trade ya!”

On the plane, a slim commuter craft with aisles barely shoulder width, I find myself seated next to Sandy, a firefighter from New York. Sandy is rotund and mustachioed, and there’s little room for the Holy Spirit between us as I wedge into the window seat. He’s been down in DC lobbying for aftercare for 9/11 responders, having lost thirty friends that day. I try to think if I have thirty friends to lose. Sandy tells me the effects of 9/11 are still rippling today-- that even the wives of firefighters who didn’t die tried to sue the city, after efforts to coordinate surviving firefighters to help the newly widowed led to healing of the Marvin Gaye variety. Having mistaken the buckle of my messenger bag for a stethoscope, a confusing conversation on how yes, I am a doctor, but not the useful kind, ensues. In the short hop between DC and New York I hear about Sandy’s family (his daughter is about to become assistant fire chief in Nassau County), his wife (who he stayed true to despite the yowlings of a merry widow in need of consolation), and his girlfriend from when he was twenty (who apparently looked just like me-- “Irish eyes!!!” he booms). Near the end of the flight he gooses my kneecap, which freaks me out, but then we bounce back to terra firma and the end of my single serving of Sandy.

Of the many people I have met traveling, few I ever see again-- and of the former loves, there are few I’m still in touch with. But does that make them only cast-off characters, my time spent with them a failure or waste? To my way of thinking, no-- like notes played in a song, some are struck and some sustained.

The Thuggin' Chef

What up What up What up!

That's what "The Thuggin' Chef" (AKA Darian) said to me on the bus a couple of years ago, and that's how he begins his Youtube-based cooking show.

This post is meant to bookend Lu's tale of her auspicious meeting with CJ Storey. The People You Meet on Public Transit could be (and probably is) a blog all its own. I once picked up a great zine in Portland called The Constant Rider. Fascinating stuff. So, I haven't had a car since moving to Seattle in 2004. Over the years I've taken various Metro routes through town, depending on where I work, on a regular basis. But by far, my routes to and from Ballard on the 15, 17 and 43 have introduced me to the most memorable single-serving friends.

Between those neighborhoods, it takes a transfer anyway you look at it, and about an hour each way. Reading, knitting, and getting into a full-length DJ mix is what it's all about. Unless you sit next to The Thuggin' Chef.

This man talked a mile a minute about his passion for cooking and Japanese culture (more specifically, his estranged Japanese wife and the time they spent together in her homeland). He was so all over the place that I wondered if he was who he said he was, or if he was just talking.

He's the real deal, ya'll.

He hasn't updated his Web site or Youtube channel since 2008, but there's some damn delicious-looking grub in the episodes that are up. I gotta track this guy down and see what's up. His enthusiasm is balls-out.

Here's my favorite of his menus: Paprika fried chicken, baked macaroni & cheese topped with parmesan and spinach, and cabbage & corn with crispy pancetta. NOM! Enjoy.