> tapioca world tour

Halloween happens in cyberspace, too.

everything’s dying, and i skipped church again.
in the car, the light turned green but we just sat.
people started beeping but the weather
was arresting. that, and the shadows of our
individual thoughts dancing on the glass. it caused
a calm inertia. i could have sat there all day.

at the restaurant, in a trick of coincidence, you walked in with a new lady.
we said our awkward hellos and introduced our new significants
without acknowleging just how significant this event was,
as if we’d each gotten lost on different roads to neighboring cities and suddenly
were asking directions at the same gas station, nodding cool hellos.
thinking about it on the sidewalk later, the indian summer sun
bleeding over me, i felt the ache that comes from

letting hollow spaces stay empty: specifically, that our
story never had a moral so we let it end, quietly.

i remember the size of your back, and how it doesn’t matter now.
i’ve packed my affections in little brown boxes and
shipped them off to someone else,

and i’ll do it again, and i’ll do it again, maybe,
with — (yes, certainly) — regrets but also
with a warm jacket on and enough cookies to last me through this tired infant winter.

If Emerson College was good for anything, it was for their insistent curriculum which instructed that, in the entertainment industry, you must kill or be killed. Trust no one, but shmooze. Shmooze your face off. Exploit your contacts later. Networking is gold. Never forget that, people. Think only in terms of your own success, and step over anyone for it.

So it seems my old friend (and one-month sophomore year shmooching partner), Opus, is taking all of Emerson’s teachings to heart. What I find most hysterical about the following email he sent me, in addition to the fact that it’s a form letter he sent to everyone else, is that it serves as a reminder that I’m just as shameless as him, because he’s stolen my idea: Back in the 90s, I wanted to write a book entitled, “Kissing Opus Moreschi”. I thought it just sounded like a cool title. But the bloke has beat me to it:

Hey there,

Remember me? It’s Opus Moreschi. We had some manor of
romantic relationship in the past. I hope you remember,
otherwise, I am embarrassed for myself.

I’m currently meandering my way through a series of comic
essays that I hope to gather into a book called “My Life (In
Alphabetical Order)”. What I hope to work on now is chapter
G (girls) or possibly R (relationships) or S (sex). I have to
see how it all turns out.

With that in mind, I am taking a page from the book of
Broken Flowers and contacting some of my exes. I wanted
to ask you a few simple questions to get some material for
my essay. I won’t be using any real names and your
anonymity will be preserved.

If you could answer these following questions, I’d be very
appreciative. Make them as short or as detailed as you like.
Also, please be frank and brutally honest - I can take it.

1) How did we meet, and what was your first impression of
me? How was the wooing process?

2) How would you describe our sex life and/or sexual
encounters?

3) How did I handle the breakup? How was I after the
breakup?

Thanks in advance for your help. I’ll autograph you a copy of
the book if the damn thing ever gets finished.

–opus

PS - If you can get this to me by the end of the weekend, I
would greatly appreciate it.

We practised dying last night on the living room floor. We’d walk along like nothing was wrong, and then — BANG! — we’d be dead. It would be from a gunshot, or a flying knife in the back, or maybe the effect of poison. Whatever the cause, we’d collapse — or lunge down to the ground — or skid our limp flesh across the kitchen. The kids were much better at it than me. It also took me longer to get used to the morbidity of the game, although the kids seemed to love it. They died and died and died again. I wondered why.

Because this is something we don’t understand:

How someone could be here, then suddenly not here anymore ? If we turn it into a funny game, something tangible, something we can act out, then get up and walk away from — it makes it a little less scary.

gas leaks, broken bike brakes, a
doctor’s appointment,
the smell of fried anchovies;
last night,

i tried escaping. halfway up the street and
almost crying, i realized it was cold and the walk would be
too long. turned around and gave myself a talking to:
this is not constructive. this attitude won’t do.

now the flesh on my thighs is sticky
from where peppermint tea is seeping through my jeans.
the sky has been a warm, dense yellow for days and
i’ve hardly even noticed.

tonight we’ll have cider, and cookies,
and discuss none of this.

The thing about working on a human rights website is that, whenever there’s a natural disaster, you have to scramble to update all the articles about relief efforts on the site. And, since Armageddon has begun, there is no shortage of natural disasters in the world right now, hence no shortage of articles, hence my wrist hurts from typing all day, and everything is becoming blurry from staring at the computer screen.

Yes, saving the world is tedious, and totally doesn’t pay as much as, say, marketing candy bars or programming all the computers at the Pentagon (congrats, Brent; you will always be more successful than me).

But I don’t mind.

In other news, it rained really hard yesterday. I got soaked. So did everyone else. Larry and I posed in our fishermen’s finest, waiting for Ry to get off the phone. This has been a long week.

No, really. Go on — test your knowledge.

This was based on a conversation in the lunchroom re: mens’ communal bathroom etiquette.

Apparently, men and women have totally opposite bathroom etiquette. Men say as little to eachother as possible, whereas I look under the stall door, identify the pair of high heels or sneakers, and call out to the person:

Nguyen, is that YOU?? Wussup, yo?! Wha’s goin on, dawg?

Guys just don’t do that.

New York was, as usual, a 36-hour adventure that felt more like 360 hours. Aside from getting stuck in the rain at midnight without really knowing where I was going to sleep, until N. and J. saved my soggy ass from a cold night on the street, things were cool.

I got to see S. for a glorious day of rain and self-portraits…we went to the Photography Expo at Javits Center, which was filled with shiny new Nikons and Adobe staffers. That was followed by Zak Smith’s art exhibit, which was a major reason I went down to NYC. It was pretty cool. His stuff looks totally different in person than on a computer screen. And, as he pointed out in a blog comment that sat in my spam filter for 6 months, he only uses acrylics, not oils or watercolor. Knowing that, his stuff seemed more impressive. I remain convinced that Zak is one of the pioneers of our generation’s nonexistant urban art movement. Wait, let’s take back that sentence. It sounded really pretentious, when the fact is I have no idea what I’m talking about. I don’t know about art; I just know when I like something. I don’t really know why I like it. I can’t describe what I like about it. And for some reason, despite the female portrait theme of young, hot and possibly strung-out women blinking apathetically through his paintings, or maybe because of it, because he’s found a way to mix edginess and uncertainty with utter realism (and express it two-dimensionally), or maybe because he doesn’t care to impress anybody, so much so that he titled his exhibit “Exquisite as Fuck” — maybe that’s why I like Zak’s art. If you like art, you should go down to Frederick & Freiser Gallery and see it before Sunday, when it’s over. Ok?

Then what happened?

Right, the story of the weekend. After dinner with multilingual Flo & funkmaster poet DeWayne, but before meeting smart cyber-pal G., I met with a successful independent world-traveling documentary producer to learn about the business. He told me what I expected to hear: you don’t need a master’s degree to be taken seriously as a filmmaker; you just need to make great films. Also: you have to sell your soul to the corporate TV networks if you ever want to be able to feed yourself and make documentaries on the side.

“Sorry,” I said. “I can’t do it. I’m incapable of working for anyone I don’t respect.”

To that, he laughed out loud. “Then you’re in the wrong industry,” he answered. Then he asked how old I was.

I’m 27.

He’s probably early-40s, but he didn’t offer up much personal info to me, and I didn’t ask. But before leaving the large leather chair in his spacious Chinatown loft, I asked him: “So in this field, do you have to be single forever?” It was a serious question. “Well,” he said. “It certainly helps. It’s hard to find someone who will trapse around the world with you.” (That’s a conclusion I came to long ago.) “But generally you always end up hooking up with crew members,” he continued, “so you’ll never be lonely.”

“Speak for yourself,” I said. “That’s not for me.”

And it isn’t. Call me crazy, but I’m a big fan of monogamy.
So the struggle to become a successful control-freak global multimedia producer continues. All aboard, people.

Fast-forward to this morning.

Ry had to get his wisdom teeth out, por fin, and long ago I’d volunteered to play Mom. So I took the day off work and brought him to the Doc and watched him drool blood and act totally incoherent, poor thing, and while I shopped for gauze, he waited patiently in Brooks Drugs reading all about Bono until the blood started dripping onto the pages of Rolling Stone. Whoops.

I took him home, got him soup, canned peaches, soy milk, yogurt, applesauce. We watched a dumb movie. He was there for me when I was toothless, so now I’m here for him. I’m still here: rainy Davis Square. Exhausted from late nights. There’s just one more thing I’d like to point out:

Everyone has been extremely pleasant today, I’ve noticed. Even drivers. People are saying “Please” and “Thank you” and “Pardon me” and making jokes and giving me discounts off groceries. The pin on the checkout clerk’s sweater even said “Life is terrific!”

Because it is.

Big Brother’s still alive and well in Washington:

Secret Code in Color Printers Lets Government Track You

San Francisco - A research team led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recently broke the code behind tiny tracking dots that some color laser printers secretly hide in every document.

The U.S. Secret Service admitted that the tracking information is part of a deal struck with selected color laser printer manufacturers, ostensibly to identify counterfeiters. However, the nature of the private information encoded in each document was not previously known….

To those of you who are standing up to this human infestation of moral rodents, the Bush gang, I salute you.

That’s from a forwarded lefty email by a pretty angry lady. There’s too much ‘ennui’ among the democrats. If they could just get a little more emotional — or scheming, rather than emotional — maybe something would happen. Democrats are like that brooding kid in high school who never cut his hair and only carried a single pencil to class and would sit in the middle row, drawing three-dimensional octagons with shadows. You run into the kid ten years later and are surprised to see he’s got on a collared shirt and is working as a mid-level programmer in some corporate office, the kind with $1500 single-cup-of-coffee machines in the kitchen, although he still wears Docs and hasn’t shaved for at least four days. He’s had the same girlfriend for eight years, she still works at the video store, and they’re never getting married. But they have two cats, and on weekends they make waffles. When they argue, he stops talking and “goes for a walk”, and then she writes him a letter summarizing her feelings, and then he responds to the letter with his own letter after an evening of silence, and then the next day he calls her at work and says, “Are we cool?”

“Yeah, we’re cool,” she says.

That’s what Democrats are like.

It’s cold, and I’m hungry. We’re in the depths of autumn, and the kids and I spent the afternoon in the park, throwing leaves at eachother and playing “castle” (they made me the slave in the dungeon, go figure)…

The move took about 13 hours, more or less. D. sure has a lot of stuff. But, regardless of the lack of heat and food and the barking dogs upstairs, it’s nice here. Nice to finally have a place I can live in, instead of just room in. I’m just real tired, and a bit hungry, and I’m going to watch ‘Baran’ without E., and contemplate ways to get to Islamabad to visit Haniya and volunteer with reconstruction. That said, anyone have extra flyer miles they can lend me? It’s for a good cause…

I feel the need to document my last night in the old place. It’s been six whole months, which is longer than any of the other five places I’ve lived since England last year.

Maybe it sounds twisted, but I thrive on moving. It makes me feel like the nomadic essence of my soul is still intact — that I’m still not tied down to any one place, that I still have the ability to pick up and move whenever I like. It’s something I inherited from my mom: less a fear of standing still (though part that), more an itchiness to continue exploring. Life passes so quickly and the world is so huge — why not see as much as possible? Not that Somerville and Cambridge cover such a vast range of Planet Earth, but you know, baby steps…

I wish I could tell E. which song to play first when he DJs the wedding he’s attending right now in Cali, but he’s DJing at this very moment, I think, so it’s too late to shout over the midwest, “Hey! Play Love and some verses by Iron & Wine!” Oh well.

Last night I had a repeat of a dream I’d had some months ago.

I dreampt I was back in Newburyport. It was 1991 again and I had to babysit for A. and W. at 5p. But I wasn’t 13 anymore — I was 27, as if I’d gone back in time, and the kids were 5 and 7 again. I was hiding in the bushes outside the house, looking up at A. and W., who had climbed a tree. I wasn’t sure if I should let them see me. I knew they’d recognize me, and recognize the fact that I was not the actual me they knew, but the me from the future. I heard their mom inside; she was in a bad mood, still dealing with the separation from her husband. I caught W.’s eye in the tree and I knew she knew who I was. I got up and walked into the house, I think I talked to their mom first but I forget what was said.

Then I talked to the kids. I explained that lots of things were going to happen in the next fourteen years — that their lives would be filled with some really hard times, but things would always get better. I thought of their parents’ divorce, their mom’s next boyfriend, their breakup, then her future husband. I thought of A.’s drunk driving in high school, his car accident after that, his academic trouble in college, his best friend’s impending suicide. I started to cry when I thought of this last one. I couldn’t tell them all of this, but I think somehow they knew I was trying to warn them of something, and in fact I might have been communicating all of this silently. We were supposed to go to their soccer game at the park, and I knew I’d see Jeremy there — A.’s wonderful, gorgeous and brilliant friend who, at 19, would become too sad to stay alive. Then I thought of his wonderful little sister, who would trade her best-friendship with W. for popularity in high school until they virtually became strangers. I thought of how she would look at her brother’s funeral, her face buried in her knees. Now we were all crying. It was terrible.

Why did I have to come back and warn them about the future? I just felt there was a need to tell them that there would always be hard times ahead, but they’d get through them and be fine. That’s what happens to all of us. That’s what life is.

The only really cool part was the sensory aspect of the dream — I could see and feel everything as if it really were 1991 again. W.’s short white-blond hair, how small she was then; her brother’s tendency to really cry when he got angry and stop speaking when he got sad; the way the sidewalk cracked on Orange Street; the bushes in front of their old house; even the tiny white pebbles from the fishbowl which we threw onto their gravel driveway when the fish died — those white pebbles stayed there for years. In the dream I noticed them again, checking to make sure they were still there, spread out in a small circle, and feeling relieved that some omens still exist, that my memory isn’t fictional: that we really lived there then, that we really looked like that and ran around and played in the street, not thinking about such trifles as the future, so mundane and unknown and irrelevant.

It just kind of bothers me that I’ve had nearly the same dream twice. Makes me want to scoop up W., now 19, and together go visit her brother in Vermont. I don’t know why.

Thursday evening. Probably. At my *new* flat near Harvard Sq. Dinner included. All mediums encouraged. Yes, very very exciting, I agree. Please come.

Aren’t these plants so incredibly cute? E. and I found a horticultural diamond mine in the form of a dumpster behind the Harvard Square flower shop. He got three or four large beauties that have completely revived, J. got some potted thing, I got a potted thing (though its prospects look bleak), and E. and I also grabbed these cacti relatives, oddly reminiscent of the Kalanchoe from days of yore. They live on the back of the toilet now, resurrected from a slow death in a smelly dumpster, and they’re so cute it makes me want to cry.

like in england, this not a hard rain; rather, an extended weeping that sweeps everything, particularly the inner parts of your gut, wherever lays rooted your own sense of self, that humble garden of kinesis that encourages you to find light and grow into a plump red thing, without fear and without apology —

like an old truck, like a dying beatle, like a slow dog in a low boat gliding to nowhere, this rain serves no purpose but to exist in spite of its uselessness and the feeling of nothing that it brings. grey is a collected lack of color that spreads across the sky like moldy jelly on soggy toast. but we eat it because there’s nothing else to eat.

first we think of the saddest things: the nadir of our loves, our lives, because a long rain is heavy and heaviness shares a bed with sadness, because now the bed is empty and we’re alone and outside it is raining.

next, we think of anything else, because up is the only remaining direction, because we don’t want the wetness to win. so we imagine the sun burning through our closed eyes, and we remember small boats on big rivers, and our grandmothers, and painting, and a song on the radio, and the color of a golf course, and what would have happened if that other thing hadn’t happened instead.

we watch movies. we win at scrabble. we play dice until midnight like the night we first learned how. it was snowing then and the sky was of a similar dim slate hue. we played for hours that night at a large table and held onto eachother later while sleeping on the floor, because it was christmas and we felt mutually alone.

now we read books. and pay bills, and write well-belated birthday cards and letters of forgiveness, and we contemplate the future since that’s where we’ll be when this rain finally ends. it will be full of light, we tell ourselves, because it will.

So, I just did a little poking around the back-end of this blog, only to realize all the comments from the past year have been quarantined due to spam.

So if you’ve ever tried to leave a comment and it didn’t work, I’m sorry. Try it now. It should work. You just have to confirm them via email. Thanks for reading, for rizzo.

Thanks to Kate and her marvelous movie recommendations, and thanks to E. and his suggestion to open a netflix account, I just saw the movie Paris, Texas and it was great. Some of the best cinematography I’ve seen. Real simple shots. Really good dialogue. Great acting. Go rent it, people, if you haven’t already.

So the anti-hipster triumverate of E., Joakim and myself went to a postmodern artist’s lecture last night at the Institute for Contemporary Art to hear Julian Opie, one of Joakim’s favorite artists, go on and on about the Baroque and 19th-century Japanese woodblock printing roots of his cartoon stick figures (most of whom are young, female, and attractive), and how he “doesn’t draw anymore” because “the screen is my notebook” etc etc., and how his “films” of stick figure cartoons walking or blinking are designed in Flash by “some of my computer friends”. So, really, Mister Opie, all you do is draw vector stick figures on the computer? Yes. And I make a lot of money doing it, he’d tell you. Granted, some ideas were cool — the digital art/changing landscapes theme, capable when you have an LCD display instead of a canvas. I like innovation. I like technology. I like art. I just don’t like postmodern Brits, I guess. It made me recall all those hours I spent last year in Roscoe Building at U-Manchester, resisting the insistent urge to hurl myself out the window in protest of the didactic and pompous anthropological discourse, or film discourse. Maybe I’m the snob. Maybe that’s my problem.

Halfway through the lecture, when Opie was explaining how he posed his Japanese friend with a staff because “there was something so warrior-like about him” I leaned over and whispered to E., “That’s a colonialist pretension!” to which he responded by cupping his hands over my ear and emitting a long, hot breath of air which made me break into giggles, which, I realize, was a rude thing for me to do at an artist’s lecture, especially an artist of Opie’s stature, since he’s getting more and more commercially popular by the day.

I maintain unapologetically unimpressed with most of modern pop art, although I think it’s interesting, except for Joakim’s paintings, which I think are wonderful. And to the right is my Digital Portrait of the Artist in a Bar After Just Having Met Julian Opie.

Boston fiction festival seeks submissions
The Boston Fiction Festival is currently accepting submissions for live reading at the Festival in summer of 2006 and subsequent publication in our annual review, The Boston Fiction Annual Review. New England residents are strongly encouraged to submit, but all writers are welcome.

We are looking for lively, literary fiction. If we accept your story, you will be invited to come to the Festival and read it in front of an audience, so we are looking for stories that read well out loud. While we are not looking for genre fiction, exactly, we do welcome fiction with a strong sense of plot.

Submissions should be around 10-25 pages. (Basically, we are looking for submissions that can be read aloud in 10-25 minutes.) Self-contained novel excerpts and multiple story subs are fine.

Send submission, cover and SASE to:
Boston Fiction Festival
423 Brookline Ave. #376
Boston, MA 02215-5410

Website: http://www.fictionfest.com/submit.htm

nadir NAY-dir; nay-DIR, noun:

1. [Astronomy]. The point of the celestial sphere directly opposite the zenith and directly below the observer.
2. The lowest point; the time of greatest depression or adversity.

Nadir is derived from Arabic nazir, “opposite.”