The Philomel

the creative blog of the philomathean society of the university of pennsylvania

[thephilomel]

Morning, July the 25th

Of ants along this piece of wood lit embers by the sun - a forgotten fire dropping ashes to the moss bed. Of new buds bursting in cloistered courtyards and rising with the wind. Of morning arching over this red brick wall. Of the sky equal in day and different at night. Of this language I don't know but like to grasp in the palm of my hand. (Ludovico Settembrini & Kazemsi)

[thephilomel]

Till Death do Pets Part

When I was twelve, my pet tortoise of six years died, presumably of eye cancer (though it was a pretty amateur diagnosis on my part). While I wept uncontrollably for my lost companion, my father struggled searching to dispose of poor, straightforwardly named, "Nofur." He had no idea of a location, if any, where my friend could be legally buried.

Family legend holds that Nofur eventually set sail down the East River, delicately wrapped in a Dagastino's grocery bag. He was like reverse-Moses, floating to his Atlantic doom.

For those fortunate enough to live in the suburbs, pet memorials often offer a cathartic experience. Enveloped by trees and nature, the bucolic American Christian suburbs can provide a satisfying backdrop for a final farewell.

"My family had a backyard so we were able to bury our lizards under our Holly tree," said Sean Youngstone, of Richmond, VA. "We had little ceremonies for each of them, complete with adorable Catholic prayers and crosses made from sticks."

And in Cape Cod, MA., an Atlantic peninsula known for its cranberries, historic lighthouses, and white people, one can provide a goodbye for the humblest of pets.

Rebecca Van Sciver of Cape Cod Massachusetts shared a similar anecdote to Youngstone's.

When her friend Tatiana needed to say farewell to her goldfish,  Van Sciver helped "put him on a piece of tree bark and set him aflame in the lake...[She] used nail polish remover as accelerant, and put him out to sea in flames like the Vikings of Old."

(The goldfish could not be identified by name, though. Van Sciver does note that his title was likely Cantonese).

"We were weird kids," she concluded. Why she used the past tense remains unclear.

But these stories illuminate a tale of two cities, the curious, often- unspoken problem New Yorkers face. Without backyards, pet parents are often left searching for the proper place to let their animals find eternal rest. (And yes, digging your own Central Park burial plot is illegal).

Among frog owners, burials at sea seem to be preferred. Caroline Goldrick of Washington Heights remembered her own ordeal with her pet frog from her college years. Rhinegold's cherished life, and sudden death, still resonate with Caroline, now a circus and clowning teacher at a local Manhattan elementary school.

"My two roommates and I adopted some reptiles as a bonding experience. Pamela got a lizard. Sita got a snake... Rhinegold was great. He would sit on my computer screen, the way frogs do. It was the first Apple computer. His aquarium had a [climate] regulator in it. That's where he slept at night, at the foot of my bed. Frogs need a very specific temperature to survive."

But a northeast city, as Goldrick learned, is not an ideal environment for frogs. One night, she discovered Rhinegold, stiff as a board. It was just too cold for the little guy.  

"Honestly," said Goldrick, "We did not know what to do with him. I wanted to honor him with some ritual. Some ceremony. He was only with me for 2 months, but  still."

Later, Goldrick and her roommates collected at the bank of a river, and labored to respect Rhinegold's passing into the next life.

For Goldrick, the experience was certainly moving.

"I had wrapped him in some beautiful print fabric I had, tied a string around it, attached a rock to the string and threw him in the river. I actually cried. No joke. There is a picture of me with him on my Facebook page [that] I posted a couple of months ago."

After a pet dies, the ASPCA recommends freezing his or her body; following, former NYC owners can choose from a host of tri-state burial services, which can charge exorbitant prices.

Only 30 minutes from midtown Manhattan, the family-owned Hartsdale Pet Cemetery, founded in 1896, is the world's oldest operating eternal resting place for man's best friend.  

Hartsdale boasts an impressive resume. It's ranked one of the top ten cemeteries in the world (including ones for humans), serves all religious denominations, and even offers irrevocable trust funds managed by independent trustees.

The L.A. Times has reviewed the grounds, noting "from the moment you walk through the iron gate, pass beneath a canopy of shade trees and take in the thousands of graves planted with pink begonias, it becomes clear that Hartsdale is not your usual cemetery."

But these services can be expensive. Hartsdale charges a general maintenance fee, in addition to the cost of burial. Extra "flower plantings, holiday decorations or monument repairs," push the price tag of a using a pet cemetery even higher.

For a cheaper option, the NYC Department of Sanitation advises: "On your neighborhood's regular trash pickup day, place the animal in a heavy-duty, black plastic bag and put it in your usual collection spot. Tape a note to the bag stating 'deceased animal inside.' "

But for pets like hamsters, goldfish, and even chickens, this situation can be upsetting, awkward, and logistically challenging.

Many individuals struggle preparing their animal's body within the home, before even having the chance to follow Department of Sanitation policy. This, as Steven Adler of Providence, R.I., explained, can lead to familial conflict.

"Back when I lived in New York, we had gerbils as pets. One passed away, but we weren't quite ready to bury her because we didn't know what the procedure was."

To give themselves time to cope with their pet's death, the Adler family placed the gerbil's corpse in a tin container. The makeshift coffin was stored in their home's basement freezer.

But temporary solutions, for former pet-owners, can become long-term challenges.

Adler continued, "My mom is a huge procrastinator, and a few weeks later we still hadn't buried Peanut. Then, my grandparents came to visit --and my grandfather is famous in our family for his midnight snacks, [which is when] he wakes up, half-delirious, strolls to a fridge or freezer and basically just raids it. Needless to say, finding a frozen gerbil in a cookie tin was enough to shock him into being awake. Thankfully no damage was done to Peanut; just to my family."

And the law has certainly made progress towards respecting the intimate relationships between man and his best friend. Recently passed legislation in New York permits pets and their parents to be buried together, allowing for a more modern spin on the Ancient Egyptian funerary custom.

Environmental yuppies can also find refuge in compositing, recommended by the Cornell Waste Management Institute. A recent report emphasized that this strategy is low-cost, kills pathogens, and is "relatively odor free." Many veterinary offices also offer cremation, as another option.

Sometimes, the online community can serve as a resource to humans found suddenly without their pet companions.

Sites like lifehacker.com or hamsterhideout.com offer internet group pages where humans can collaborate on how to pursue the best farewells.

I got the chance to sit down with my ex-boyfriend, Julian Rosenblum, who looks back sadly on his rushed goodbye to his fish, Alpha Betta II, whom he honored with the internet.

To retroactively remember his pet, Rosenblum created a community Facebook page in late 2010. The site was a definite success, collecting 14 likes in its tenure, including Rosenblum's mother, who does PR and received a degree in Music from Yale.

To this day, the About Page continues to celebrate Alpha Beta II's life, captioned: "He's a betta fish. And he's amazing."

But sometimes, saying goodbye to pets  must happen before their death.

Anna Blech of Battery Park City remembered, "The only pets I had were two frogs when I was little, which were from this company where you were supposed to get tadpoles and then they turned into frogs. We'd done the caterpillar turning into butterfly ones several times already and then we always released the butterflies.. But then on 9/11 we had to escape and couldn't bring the frogs."

A few weeks later, the Blech family returned to their apartment to find that their pets were still alive.  However, Anna's parents had decided to leave the city for few months, until the neighborhood recovered. The frogs, however, would not be relocating with them.

"We left them in the hallway in their big tank in the hopes that someone would take them home...hopefully someone did."

Though I know I will never see Nofur again, I am comforted knowing that he swims beneath the deep, somewhere beyond the East River. So while I'll never know his fate, whether it be something like urban turtle soup or to eternally swim with the fishes of the sea, I am fortunate enough to have gotten a goodbye. Some of us never did.

[thephilomel]

(Designed by John Sim)

[thephilomel]

Flyover State

I am in a flyover state Of mind, So instead of writing I imagined

     i.         Morningside Heights: Tea laced with rosewater, chive, chocolate cinnamon,

Finishing my statistics class at That grand old university; it’s my brother’s university my uncle’s university my father’s university and the castle in Manhattan my grandfather dreamed of (that university) working late nights in a Hunt’s Point Deli     He wore cool, poor man’s cardigans.

    ii.         Maybe I was to be shipped off to California because I’m the girl SanFran has the second highest population density in the continental United States

College is too liberal For my family's taste. Still:

Lined with nostalgia my manifest destiny I put my vinyl in my suitcase songs for a new world.

(I’ll buy clothing when I get there).

[thephilomel]

To Canetti

Where only parched sounds can last - there proud pines overlook  a few shrunken stalks, and the cardoon violet.

The late afternoon with its promise of bells, of the mass you will abstain, opens over the peaks as a small trove

empty of gold. The honorable hosts of loyal spruces quiver in their restless calm like waiting soldiers. The tense rope of the hours and this circle

of mountains call a gathering to gaze at the strength of old roots in hard valleys.

(Lodovico Settembrini & Kazemsi)

[thephilomel]

They found this journal buried in a glacier.

They brought it to me to transcribe the handwritten scrawl into something more digestible for the Company. Now, not only am I actually interested in such historical texts (which I might add is especially notable given how mercenary most people are here), I am also contractually compelled to do whatever “academic” (scare quotes are indeed to denigrate what passes for such here) work the Company asks of me. This, I suppose, is the nature of deeply unequal financial arrangements.

Without further ado, I present the unaltered text of his mysterious journal. I’ve annotated in certain places to elucidate it or in some places my orthographic choices. I estimate, based on the wear and style of writing, that this journal was written between twenty and thirty years ago. An exploratory team sent out by the Company found it half-encased in glacial ice about 4 klicks northwest. It remains remarkably preserved: 5x7 inches, about 100 thin pages, bound in some now ancient-seeming leather (goat, of all species).

As you’ll soon learn, the text inscribed in the journal is… well. I do not know exactly what to think. Is it the ravings of a madman, or deeper insight into our world than may be comforting? Best for you to decide.

Signing off,

Ignatius D. Messner

August 12[1]

I’ve begun this journal because the world must know. The. world. must. know. This thought has consumed my thinking for days by now and I recognize the melodrama but cannot resist. The world must know! Oh reader, oh unknown reader, writing that gives me the greatest joy. I have stumbled upon a great truth and a fearful one. The world beyond our huddle of glorified tents is more dangerous and grander than our puny primate[2] brains can imagine.

I write this—whole again, vibrant, but that story will come—by light modulated through a thin pane of glass-like ice inches above me.[3] I sit on a makeshift throne of ice below this window to the outside world, but even though it would take almost nothing to break the seal and emerge back into my old world, I do not want to leave. There is something down here. I must find what it is.

The light fades through my celestial window, more quickly than natural, so I must wait to convey what I have discovered here.

August 15

The human mind is small. This I have said before. I will try to write what I have seen these past few days.

Underneath the veneer of sense our icy environs show for us is something more.

6 days ago I fell. I went out alone with a bounty from the Company[4] hoping that my fortunes would turn.

I found something better than money here. I fell into a deep crevasse, perhaps 15 meters. I awoke in the dark to a brush against my lips, feelings as consciousness returned a broke body. My left arm and several ribs were broken, and it pained me to put weight on my right leg.[5] I was in a crevasse barely wider than my body and the temperature was falling. In that moment I gave up hope. I tried to fall asleep and hoped that hypothermia would take its course mercifully and while I was unconscious. But as I teetered on the brink of wakefulness, a glint in the dark caught my eye. Fearing that my mind was lost, but also feeling strangely compelled, I tried to position myself to look better. The glint came from farther down the crevasse, which bottom was sloped slightly downward. I lifted myself and tried to get up and walk forward as much as I could, falling every third or fourth step. As I moved the glint in the dark stayed far away, winking occasionally. Still considering this my last hours, I followed it forward. The crevasse narrowed until I was sidestepping as opposed to walking, and presently I came to a hole in the wall, through which I still could spy a distant glint. Being reckless at this point, I decided to squeeze myself through the hole, which was just large enough. The illusion created by the hole was that the crevasse was similarly structured through it.

I write illusion because this could not be farther from the truth. I emerged from the hole onto a bridge of ice just wide enough for two. Around me—blackness.[6] Utter and complete blackness. I peered downward and could not make out a bottom to the pit. But the sound—the sound was all around me. A low-pitched hum had begun even before I passed into this cavernous space but now it was all encompassing, feeling it in the depths of my abdomen.[7]

Layered on top of this was the sound of dripping, both the pop of drops departing their provenance and the sound of them plopping something, somewhere. I could not see any place but the bridge for the drops of what I presumed[8] was water to make such a noise. This prompted me to peer into the blackness around the bridge and look more closely for the source of such noise. As I peered, a golden glow arose all around; the source of which I soon saw was drops of liquid falling from an invisibly distant[9] ceiling. The drops fell in uniform, rhythmic sheets, lighting the room (but only dimly) in waves. I reached out to have one fall on my bared hand.

As it struck my hand its light flashed and went out. It drooled around my two outstretched fingers like honey around the finger of a hungry child. I brought it closer to my eyes, looking for clues as to its composition. It was not homogenous. Contained in the drop were myriad flecks of color, almost invisible but giving it an inexpressible, diverse color.

Having no other options, and knowing that my death was probably at hand, I went to taste it. It did not taste like anything but fire. Fire and iron pain that spread from my mouth on a warpath to my extremities.

I lost consciousness again.

August 16

When I awoke, I was healed. But different.

Here I must briefly intervene. After these two entries, there are some pages ripped out. The explorers report to me that they changed nothing and didn’t even open the journal,[10] so we must surmise the author removed pages. But even more distressingly, on the fifth to last page, in an even more spidery scrawl, I found the following undated and final entry. I present this without comment because I have naught to say.

it has been years. it has been hours. it has been days.

the drops turned me into a creature of the ice and dark, slithering through her chambers looking for clues dying.

at the end of the road there is a door. the door is black. black rubber. it grows from the ice.

opening the door requires sacrifice. what that is i will not tell you. can not tell you. i should not be writing.

on the other side of the door is a row of black mirrors. oblong little black mirrors. in the mirrors are life. on the other side of the mirrors on the left wait shadows of the people you have met and loved and hated, living their lives without you not knowing that she watches from below. on the right wait people you have never known. maybe they are the ones you would have known or could have known. i dont know.

through the hall of mirrors (because it deserves such a grand title) is the machine room. pipes of the black material run from building sized machines of infinite complexity. every effort to stare, to figure out the cause/effect relationships that drive the mechanisms leads to an infinite regression ending inevitably in paradoxical loop. An arm moving an gear that is in turn moved by the arm. they should not work but they churn tirelessly. noiselessly.

the machines are black with red accents. they are powered far beneath the ice. the planet itself feeds them. the tubes go everywhere.

after the machines is the long hallway. i spent eternity there. you know you are halfway when the nausea begins when there is a light finally.

the end of the hallway  is where she lives. her dome room is bisected by ceiling and floor ridges of  the black ice rubber. the ceiling is a rugose black twisting tubes and wires in a design beyond ken. a note. the black rubber is ice. it borders seamlessly with that we consider real ice. but it is ice that has been changed. she has probably touched it and morphed it to her design. or maybe it is the real form of ice: truth crystallized. the black rubber deforms to the touch. it swallows my appendage. but it remembers what it must do and returns. it is cold.

in the center of the room there is a nexus. tubes large and small of the black rubber converge from the roof and ceiling, infinitely complex tendrils, on a figure encased in ice and blackness. this is Her. She waits here for me. i know it is her because she told me. only her hand is visible outstretched in frozen mandate. she is one within the nexus of tendrils. she runs the machines. she watches the mirrors. she feeds me the dew.

she has no eyes but her glare is piercing. she has no skin but her caress is all around me. she has no mouth but she tells me

The abrupt end startled me out of my reverie when I first read it. I was absorbed entirely: what did she say? who or what is she?

Finally I found the last piece of writing. Etched seemingly by fingernails into the inside of the leather back cover is

  I AM DEAD

  And at the bottom of the page,

  (she says)

[1] As any explorer will know, this month might be the most comfortable temperature-wise for expeditions on the ice, but it is also the most perilous. Glaciers melt in unpredictable ways, shifting and sliding over layers imperceptible to even the most perceptive, rapidly opening and closing crevasses, developing patches of weak ice… only a fool goes on the ice in August. We’ll soon learn that indeed—the author may be the greatest fool to ever live. Cf. Glacial Traverse Almanac 47th ed. for more.

[2] Or “primitive.” Unclear.

[3] Almost from the very beginning, the author makes bombastic claims. Ice thin enough to let in light like glass does is not allowed by currently understood glacier physics (cf. Glaciology, Ice Seismology, and Hydrokineticodynamics by the reputable E. A. Wils).

[4] Yes, the Company used to post bounties for certain samples and products attained outside the confines of our settlement—back when they could still hide the death tolls. Cf. the Company Archives in their headquarters on Ascent Street—but good look getting access.

[5] Probably—in my oh so expert opinion—a nasty contusion on the upper leg. After a 15-meter fall, the author is lucky he or she ever woke up.

[6] But how can the author see the ice bridge if the room is so black? What species of darkness picks and chooses what it obscures?

[7] “The sound of shifting ice,” the relentlessly rational reader might say. I certainly did too. But as this author reports it, it was one constant, unjarring pitch, which is characteristic of no type of ice I nor any other has encountered.

[8] Prepare to be surprised.

[9] But he fell only 15 meters?

[10] Uncurious buffoons.

[thephilomel]

Cosmonot

Laika was the first animal in Space. She was a dog that had been picked off the streets of Moscow. Because others willed it, Laika was torn from her home. Laika found herself in a foreign environment. Alone and scared. I wonder if she saw the Earth. I wonder what she thought when she saw the Earth? I wonder if she smelt space? I wonder if she was terribly alone? If she was terribly scared? I wonder if she ever understood. Why she was there or something greater.

Within five hours of being in space Laika died from overheating.

(CHesketh)

[thephilomel]

Stanley A Boorse (Dec. 11, 1912 - Jul. 11, 1984) was Artist Emeritus at   Widener College.  From the Delaware County Daily Times:

Artist Stanley Boorse recreates on canvas such realistic scenes of unadorned nature, using only land rocks, trees and water, that the viewer is tempted to toss a pebble into the silent, reflecting pool in the picture. Known primarily for his water colors, the artist has been experimenting with acrylics and has used salt, knives, sand and laundry starch in addition to the more conventional artist's materials. A former English teacher at Nether Providence High School, Boorse retired in 1970 after spending 35 years in that profession. 

[thephilomel]

july

I see you on a hammock,-- royal, and yellow, and striped. You're swaying now, floating in a snowglobe of golden flakes.

They hang around you and glide away when your limbs move like a field of tiny jellyfish. Auditorium of fireflies

this kind of beauty follows you around

The sun seems to set first for me these days Perhaps when it comes back, tomorrow, or, ... I could hear all that you'd like to share.

(BGolombek)

[thephilomel]

Ice (Melting)

Look at this clenched river:

digging its way

grinding its own ice

forming and warping

into the cool frame of vapors

from chimney flues.

                 This strolling

of fawns I cannot spot

- neither day, nor night -

abandons the path and leaves

squarely a crooked trail,

where the pines’s jade does but announce

this snowy breath.

To caress pages does not give

a marbled relief of your face smiling,

only a sense of time, which here inscribes,

among wood knots and these peaks,

thoughts into landscapes.

(Lodovico Settembrini & Kazemsi)

[thephilomel]

A New One

Is this nostalgia? The repeating flow of images that draws forgotten places, faces, to stick them under skin.

These splinters penetrate one by one, each hidden angle, like sparks, unearthing that tablecloth and table; that midday; that hammering sun; that sea sand; that bedroom; that heat scent, all quivering amidst the rumble of winter evenings.

My disconcerted tongue stumbling on unexpected edges, already habit; my room, a new one.

(Lodovico Settembrini)

[thephilomel]

#TeenageWriting

Penn students are well-known for being professional, ambitious, savvy, and intelligent. Penn students are not well-known for being brilliant teenage writers. John Scalzi thinks teenage writing sucks. This blogger is inclined to agree, and members of the Philomathean Society are no exception to this rule.

With a great deal of glee, this blogger proudly presents selected excerpts from Attack of the Entorians! Featuring: a dog named Dogman, environmental terrorism, political snark (from aliens!), and attack narwhals.    

...As [Mark] emptied the can into the dog’s food bowl he heard a strange noise coming fromthe next room.  Mark left Dogman to eat his food and stepped into the living room.

He gasped.  The TV was bleeping out strange green characters that looked like something cross between Arabic and Japanese.  He tried turning it on and off and changingchannels but the strange letters simply stayed on the screen and refused to bechanged.

As Mark hit the caption button subtitles came up along the bottom of the screen.  He began to eagerly read them:

“...inhabitants of the planet Entor of the Falsuth system in the Horse Head Nebula intend to turn this planet known as Earth into one enormous ocean so that it can be properly populated.  We are aware that only one intelligent species will perish, and a minor one at that. This species, Homo sapiens, on average uses only 10% of their capable brainpower and their politicians use only about 1%.  They constantly slaughter each other over petty issues such as territory and power. Before we have completely flooded the planet with synthetic rainfall we will take five human youths hostage for tests and then harness the extreme power of a creature currently inhabiting a remote lake in Scotland by the name of Loch Ness.  This broadcast has ended.  Thank you.”

...

In a small glass room at the bottom of the spaceship sat two aliens, Entorians to be precise.  They were shaped like dolphins with gills and no dorsal fins or blowholes. Their front fins were divided into four digits with which to grasp things, but that was only apparent when they used them. They were sea dwelling creatures, which explained the fact that (a) the ship was filled with H2O and (b) they were trying to turn the Earth into a giant water hole.  They were both underpaid technicians that should have been monitoring weather patterns on the planet Entor.  One had just broadcasted a warning to the intelligent beings on Earth besides humans, the Earthorns.  The other was drawing moisture from Antarctica and Greenland to dump as much water as possible all over the western hemisphere.

...

Suddenly, two narwhal guards that had been floating near the ceiling of the chamber angled sharply downwards with conical tusks pointed straight at Dr. Cloropis. For the first time, Mark saw fear in the doctor’s eyes.

“Stop!” he cried. “I come in peace, knowing the wrongs that my people have committed against your planet. We beg you to aid us in convincing the other Entorians to restore proper homeostasis to Earth.”

(Jacques Armstrong)

[thephilomel]

Seven Conversations with Neil

(Originally published in the Penn Review)

Now,when I think about that first summer in the city, it’s not the work that I was doing (even though I suppose that I liked the job alright) or about the friends that I made (even though I guess I liked them too). It always cycles back to the building I was living in, or the cat that I had found, or Neil. It’s funny, because living in that building was chance more than anything else, and the cat was sort of an accident that I never meant to keep, and I suppose Neil was a little bit of both.

The apartment, for all its faults, had good rent, and it was close enough to the subway. The cat was bearable, especially when he would quietly sprawl across the rug in the sunlight, looking like someone had spilled tea across linoleum. That’s when I loved the cat best. Neil, as much as I complain about him sometimes, was pleasant to be around.

So, Here is the record of my summer. I picked out seven conversations with Neil, which you can print off and put into a manila folder, and you can label it as “mistakes not to happen again” with a felt tipped marker. And we can keep it for posterity in a filing cabinet designated for “all of my great loves”, so that you can remind me that I ought to know better, or that I should have learned from the last time.

                                       Seven Conversations with Neil

1.

The apartment number, 9, reflected with a bronze shine. I knocked on the door, one-two-three. It was late at night, and the sound carried down the hall.

“Hello?” He opened the door. “What’s going on?”

“Hi! I’m Number Thirteen— would you mind if I got onto your balcony? My cat’s gotten out.”

“Huh?” He blinked once or twice. “Oh. Right. Sure, come right in. This window is probably best for the fire escape.” He gestured at the one next to the air conditioner window box. “The air conditioner is broken, so it should already be open.” It was the same way with all of the air conditioners in the building that year – everything was perpetually broken. We had learned to accept it, and to prop the windows open when it became too warm.

I slipped through the open window, had to duck down to keep my head from hitting the window frame. Whispered to the cat, “Come on Jeel. Over here. I’ve got treats.” And when the cat started walking towards me, it became “Good kitty, good boy. There’s a good boy, very good Jeel.”

“Jeel?” He reached his arms out, and took the cat as I slipped back into the room.

“Short for Darjeeling.” I took the cat back. “I’m Andy, short for Andrew.”

“Neil, not short for anything.” He extended a hand, and I took it.

2.

“I can’t play guitar very well.” I was self-conscious to be caught singing, but of course, the whole purpose of singing on the fire escape was to be caught.

“It sounded just fine before,” Neil said with a shrug. He took a drag from his cigarette.

“It’s out of tune.”

“The singing was fine.”

“I’m out of tune, too.”

“Could have fooled me.” He shrugged. “What was the song?”

“Moon River. Breakfast at Tiffany’s, you know, the one with Audrey Hepburn?”

“So here you are, singing Moon River on the balcony, waiting to fall in love with the next cosmopolitan person who comes to call?” He might have scoffed a little bit, but he also smiled a little bit, and that’s what mattered to me most at the time.

“Something like that.” I lit a cigarette of my own. It was a habit that I had picked up that summer, from living where I was and spending my time the way that I did. If you ever wanted to meet neighbors, you had to be on your fire escape smoking. It was the sociable thing to do.

He took a final drag, than crushed the cigarette into the sand-filled flowerpot on the stairs next to him. He waved, and then he ducked back inside.

3.

“What?”

“You left your book on the fire escape.” It was early in the morning, and it was a peculiar thing to talk on the phone with Neil.

“Why didn’t you knock on my door?”

“I’m already out of the building.”

“And you saw the book?”

“I’m looking at my room from the street, and I saw you left your book outside. It’s gonna rain, make sure that you pick it up or it’ll get ruined.”

“Got it.” I replied.  He hung up his phone. When I climbed out onto my balcony, sure enough, there was my book. And, on the sidewalk, there was Neil.

“Thank you.” I called down, and waved a little bit.

“Don’t mention it.”

4.

“Andy,” Neil said on a Saturday afternoon. It was an overcast day, about to rain. “Andy, I don’t know what it is about you.”

We didn’t say anything else for a long time after that.

5.

Wouldn’t you like to dance, the girl said. It was all dim lighting and ambient music, and her lips were moving and her dress glossed like liquid paint around her figure as she swayed a little bit to the sound.

Maybe later, Neil replied. He took another sip of his drink.

I might not be around later, the girl said. There was a pout in her voice that Neil chose not to indulge. But you’ll know where to find me, she added in parting. She walked away, and the swaying of her body deflated a little bit as she tried to recover her bruised ego.

“She was pretty.” I said to him off-handedly. Because it was true, she had been quite pretty.

“She’s not my type.” His glass had sweat a little bit in his hand, and left a damp crescent moon on the bar. He smeared the watermark across the surface with the side of his hand.

What is your type, I thought about asking, but stopped myself for fear of being too blunt. But there was a moment there when he looked at me, and thought that it was an answer.

6.

 “Why Darjeeling?” Neil asked from the couch. The cat was lying across his lap, and he scratched it behind the ears.

“He’s the color of tea.” I shrugged, and sat across from him. His legs were on the table in front of the couch, so I set the glasses down carefully where he wouldn’t knock them over.

“But doesn’t it just reek of colonialism?” I pushed him a little bit with my foot, and the cat rearranged itself. The ice in the glass cracked hollowly, and Neil laughed at his own joke. His foot stayed on mine.

7.

“I’m moving out in September.” Neil said. The heat had driven us onto the fire escape again. The sounds of traffic and the whirring hums of the air conditioners from other buildings filled the pregnant pauses.

“That’s soon.”

“I got the job last week.” It was the type of bourgeois profession that everyone in the neighborhood would be judgmental of, and that everyone in the neighborhood would eventually go on to pursue.

“Congratulations.” I said dryly, more vitriolic than I may have intended.  

“It’s not so bad.”

“It’s still bad enough.” It wasn’t really the job that bothered me, because even then I had acknowledged how funny it was for all of us to be so resentful. But there wasn’t much of anything else that I could say.

“I’m sorry.”

“Me too.” Only I didn’t know what it was precisely that we were apologizing for.

(KKelly)

[thephilomel]

William Hogarth (November 1697 – 26 October 1764) was an English painter, printmaker, pictorial satirist, social critic, and editorial cartoonist who has been credited with pioneering western sequential art. His work ranged from realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of pictures called “modern moral subjects”. Knowledge of his work is so pervasive that satirical political illustrations in this style are often referred to as “Hogarthian.”

[thephilomel]

preschool

the boy in front of you

nearest

comes so close to the grass

as he turns, whips, darts

in some new direction

unpredictable to the universe

of potential taggers

that his shoulders, 

you'd swear

trimmed the blades of grass

picked up clumps of spattering soil.

You're learning; 

excitement bleeds in you

you think,"Oh, that!"

(BGolombek)  

[thephilomel]

haiku

lydia, love,-ly,

inside, out; skin the endless

line of symmetry

[thephilomel]

Milpitas

A Love Letter

Milpitas, my suburb, my city, named for “little cornfields” by a Spanish ranchero, went the way of most unremarkable Bay Area cities in the decades following incorporation: grew a few freeways, a few square miles’ worth of cookie cutter condo housing, and, most recently, three new elementary schools over-filled with children of first-generation immigrant families trying to carve out a little space. Sure, there are some Yelp-famous banh mi shops and greasy taquerias balancing out your Walmarts and Safeways and outlet stores, but its true beauty mark is a direct result of the same indelicate slap-dash population growth creating construction careers and mayoral migraines by the thousands. Milpitas stinks. No signs needed: it announces itself with a wave of gently putrefying landfill stench, reaches in through the A/C as you drive up from the south. Welcomes you home.

It’s almost been home ancestrally, if a couple of generations count, and I wish it were true that I could feel it in my bones. My parents grew up each a few blocks from the house they bought together at 23, but you wouldn’t know it given a side-by-side movie of our respective childhoods. Other than the odd grey-haired teacher recognizing my last name on the attendance sheet, telling me how much of a smart-ass my uncle was, I’ve never recognized my own furtive wanderings in my father’s stories of exercising comfortable manipulation in a known world: block parties, stealing fish from the reservoir back in the Valley hills, selling newspapers to the older folks who’d forget they already have a subscription. Every time I’d think, okay, I have the run of this place now—these are my friends, this is how I talk to their parents, these are the parks that get crowded with old ladies doing tai chi at dusk—there’d always come up a new frontier. Learning basic Spanish for when my new soccer coach would forget, in his excitement, to translate: ¡a la derecha, páselo, corre! Trying new foods: “Jeez, not foh like dough, phuh like duh. Like pho-k.” Saying the wrong thing. Little clues, like those friends who’d have nowhere to go after school, that betray an unspoken gulf.

It’s a great way for a curious kid to push boundaries without sacrificing any real security, even if in early adolescence, each slip became a little less like an opportunity and a little more like a mistake. I grew up one of the two or three whitest kids in any given room. Don’t get me wrong: I didn’t have it hard. Stereotypes where you’re embarrassed to wear an Old Navy coat with fur on the collar because Julia, the cool girl with the inch-wide hoops and like-new Vans in your eighth grade science class, tells you it makes you look like a rich lady who likes opera aren’t nearly as bad as stereotypes where Julia can’t wear her hoops without some pervy old gym teacher talking about how they make her look so mature. There are worse things than being assumed too nerdy, too uncool, a bad dancer—not that I could do much disprove those. And still, beyond the angst and the social crises of looking for group security in every face without always finding it, I found some familiarity in the discomfort of dissonance, and excitement, too: the little adrenaline rush of walking through the seedier parts of town at night; falling in love with the transient process of acquaintance, the sketching of parallel lines between histories that bent and knotted in such unlike ways.

The world’s not a Barney set, though, and there’s been no time in human history where people who look different, talk different, and are raised different can exist together without tension. Julia fell in with a guy who had pretty brown eyes and repped the norteños. I don’t know if she ended up graduating. The little things that were curiosities in middle school—yeah, those ones are the Viets who front like they’re gangster—became stark divisions, class lines drawn. And somewhere along the line, you get tired of breaking down boundaries. Who needs that headache, when there are already so many people who are taking honors classes like you, or who play football like you, who listen to K-pop like you, who smoke weed across the street like you do?

A few blocks from the high school, there’s a strip mall. This is the old, steady part of town. My parents got their prom photos developed at People’s Video, would play arcade games at the Golfland. Over there, surviving for twenty years despite the chains popping up a half mile in every direction, is a pizza shop. Pizza Box: famous for their 40-inch, square King Kong pie, and for the old Chinese lady who’s been the half-deaf pizza dictator for as long as anyone can remember. Ordering in for late nights working on the school newspaper, we used to argue over who would call, because it would always be the angriest interaction you’d have had with a fellow human for at least the week. Sometimes she gets your order wrong—extra olives on the combination instead of none, a large instead of a medium—but everyone knew to keep mum and thank her for it, because it was still the best pizza around.

Sometimes you have to deal with a little ugliness for what’s really special. Maybe everything special depends on the ugliness. I still get nostalgic for the first rain of the season whenever I catch a hint of garbage with undertones of garlic. I breathe in, taste its peculiar beauty.

Turn over your couch cushion—look deeply and harshly into your family history. Fuck your lover for the first time and feel the beautiful pain. The most precious of memories all have a rotten thread, woven in.

(Steezy Kicks)