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No one must know my terrible secret...

House of Noh!

Monday, December 26, 2005

A weird looking, stinky dude came into the Laundromat I frequent a few nights ago. There were about twenty people, including me, washing our clothes. This guy asked everybody in the ‘mat if they wanted to buy some socks. Everybody but me. He even leaned across the laundry cart I was using to ask another guy if he wanted some socks. I was standing right there. When it became apparent he wasn’t going to ask me if I wanted socks, I even caught his eye and gave him a come-hither-sock-salesperson look, as if to say, “I might be in the market for some socks.” The guy ignored me. He brushed past me without saying a word to me to ask another person at the Laundromat if they wanted to buy some socks.

I was being mean by trying to tempt that sock salesperson because I didn’t want to buy any socks from that guy. I just wanted him to ask me if I wanted to buy some socks. Then I was going to point my finger in his face and shout, “No way! Jerk! I’ve got all the socks I need!” Then I was planning on doing an obnoxious touch-down dance to get everybody’s attention in the ‘mat and cock my thumb at the rejected sock salesperson and say “Merry Dissmas!” about him to everybody else.

I’ve written about sock salespeople in this journal before, and the terrible trauma I suffered at their hands. As part of a sociology class during college, believe it or not, we took a field-trip to Chicago. In the loop my class was set upon by a gang of aggressive street vendors selling socks. It was terrible. The whole time I was clutching my hair with both hands in terror and screaming, “Nooo! Nooo!” We could hardly see out the bus windows on the ride back to our rural Michigan college - twenty four packs of all-white tube-socks stacked in the bus like a warehouse crammed full with toilet paper pallets.

But maybe I shouldn’t categorize the sock salesperson of last evening in the same group as the vile tube-sock selling salespeople of the loop. And also, the whole time the guy was soliciting sock sales in the Laundromat, at no time did he even display any socks. I was watching him like a hawk. The only possible place he could have even had any socks was in the creased and dirty hefty bag he carried. Whatever the bag contained, it was in wad form. If he did have any socks in that bag, I suspect that they were the unmatched discards from the dumpster behind the Laundromat, where the attendants throw away orphaned socks left in the dryers at the end of the day. And I’m sure selling new tube socks is an entirely different industry from the selling of unmatched discards – like with completely distinct federal sock regulations and separate trade journals published by McGraw Hill under catchy journal-names like “Tube Sock Round-Up” and “Socks Stock.”

If you want to see pictures of my bicycle, some were posted today at Fixed Gear Gallery (12 -25-2005 grouping).

Coming up soon is Zen Camp, which is an overnight affair at the temple during which we meditate while layered up in heavy winter sweaters and lick our bowls out clean during dinner and drink tiny little cups of tea at intermittent intervals and I suffer drastic, acute, throbbing caffeine withdrawal without the four cups of tar-thick coffee I am accustomed to drinking in the mornings. I expect the following exchange to occur, after which it will probably be another two years before I am welcome at the Temple again (and then not really).

Me: (to tea dispensing zen initiate) Can I have another cup of tea, please?

Tea Pourer: (courteously) May I offer a suggestion? Why don’t you use this as an opportunity to anticipate another cup of tea at a later time?

Me: Why don’t YOU use this opportunity to pour some fucking tea in my fucking tiny-ass tea cup. Seriously. My head is about to split open. I command you to satisfy my gluttonous American lusts for stimulating beverages! Pour me another cup of tea now!”

Tea Pourer (runs away with tea pot)

Me: (bitterly) You bastard!

Then the Tea Pourer will come back with the monk in charge, and the monk in charge will remind me that Zen Camp is entirely voluntary, and suggest that I leave. But I’ll just sit in my pathetic imitation of lotus position behind a couch in the basement and ignore them and I’ll be like, “Shh! I’m meditating!” whenever they try to say something to me.

Then I’ll sneak off during a sitting. I know where they keep the tea leaves, and I know where they keep the water: the kitchen! Then later on, when monks go into the kitchen to make some tea or prepare a meal, they’ll be like, “Somebody drank all the tea!” and “There are human gnaw marks in all the tofu cubes in the refrigerator!”

When I hear them bemoaning the loss of their precious, precious tea, I’ll be like, “heh heh heh, heh heh heh,” in a very satisfied and satiated way.

And when the monks hear me laughing behind the couch in the basement, they’ll come over to confront me, but I’ll be sitting there on the carpet in my quarter-lotus position and I’ll ignore them and just be like, “Shh! I’m meditating!” I think that’s the rule: that you can’t kick somebody out of Zen Camp as long as you’re meditating.

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

It was probably only my second or third time ever in Chicago - I was on this job interview and these two guys from this (now defunct) firm took me to lunch. They knew I was from Michigan because they had photocopies of my resume. "Michigan is full of survivalists!" this one guy told me. He said it like an accusation, like he thought I was a huge, inbred jerk for being from Michigan and he wanted me to know it.

I guess that “survivalism” has varied connotations, depending on who you talk to. And the term carries a lot of baggage. There are survivalists who are good people, and there are survivalists who are bad people, I am sure. All it takes to be a survivalist, however, is to merely believe that our society is on the verge of coming to a cataclysmic end and think that stockpiling equipment and skills designed to assist “survival” in the impending post-apocalyptic era is well-advised. It’s a lifestyle choice, really: living in a basement house and sleeping on two pallets of empty sandbags pushed together and slowly training your body to drink ever increasing amounts of your own urine without deleterious effect. It’s a hobby. Some people like white water rafting, other people like collecting stamps, others enjoying burying boxcar loads of ketchup in secret caches against a bleak future. And when some voracious bacteria consumes the world’s petroleum supply and society collapses, we'll see who's eating their tubers and wood grubs well seasoned with tomatoey goodness for the next fifty years (survivalists) and who's eating their tubers and wood grubs dry (asshole interviewers from now defunct law firms in Chicago) and getting scurvy.

So when this dude mentioned Michigan's survivalists, I was just like, "there’s some in Michigan, like many other states, what's your point?"

The interviewer saw that he had failed to raise my dander. He tried a different tact, an even more potent barb to prod the mental flesh of the Michigander. "I think that gun control is a good idea," he told me.

"You're entitled to your opinion." I responded, trying to stay in control, for like, five seconds. Then I lost it. "Guns!" I shouted. "Guns! GUNS GUNS GUNS!!"

Then I broke down into tears, and the other guy who took me to lunch, the one who realized that goading is not a successful interviewing or recruitment technique, rubbed my back while I sobbed into my napkin, which I had place on my lap at the beginning of the meal per the instructional video cassette titled "so you're a hillbilly and want to eat at a job interview,” that I had watched sitting in a plastic chair in the small career center library at my school in preparation for the interview.

A few months ago I was interviewing again. "I can tell you're from Michigan!" some dude told me.

"Oh yeah? How's that?" I asked with traditional Michigander wide-eyed naivete and trust.

“’Cause you're a stupid asshole!!" he told me.

Well, this last interviewer made an ass of HIMSELF. Times have changed. He doesn’t realize that being from Michigan is cool now.

I was just talking to a woman a few days ago, and in the process of polite conversation she bragged about her boyfriend. "He's from MICHIGAN!" She told me. "He's got the whole Michigan thing going on!”* The Midwestern worm has turned; Michigan is trending toward coolness. More and more people, even in Chicago, are down with us Michiganders. They are learning to appreciate our honest nose blowing into comically oversized handkerchiefs, our “smoked chubs,” and our many, many peninsulas.

* Through the course of our conversation, I was able to translate her idea of “the whole Michigan thing” as being the wearing of a beard and having a belly button that smells like sweet and sour sauce.

Friday, December 09, 2005

My Grandma’s got a special bag for casseroles. It’s made of nylon. It’s insulated. It’s got two straps that, held together, form a balanced carrying handle. My Grandma can bake a casserole, zip the pyrex up in her special casserole carrier, grab her aluminum hospital cane and tie her crinkled clear plastic head scarf on her head and go out and bust through some snow drifts and then drive 50 miles. Then when she unzips that mutha at Aunt Henny’s house the tuna noodles are still hot as fuck and everybody even Uncle Earl is totally blown away and shits their pants. And by 50 miles, I don’t mean 50 miles in 2005. I mean 50 miles in 1938: My Grandma doesn’t drive anything more than a two-lane road. And she sure as fuck isn’t about to ever start making left turns.

My grandma told me about her new bad eye this Thanksgiving.

I sort of expected her to get all angry and defiant and stab herself in her new bad eye with a corn cob holder, just for shits, because she’s a bad-assed old bitch who speaks her mind about drunks and democrats. She’s had to be that bad-assed, at least as far back as she when she buried her first husband who would get drunk and pee all over her back under the blankets at night and she spent two years living in a house the two of them couldn’t afford coal for during the winter while he died of gout at 28 and he wailed and shouted day and night for her to stab a steak knife in his swelled feet they hurt so bad.

But my Grandma doesn’t get all angry and defiant about her new bad eye. And I’m a little shocked that she’s just kind of sad when she tells me about it. I guess that there’s this big black spot in her middle of vision for one of her eyes. She says that she can do her puzzles, but not as well as she used to. And the doctor won’t let her drive (and this is in part because everything was going fine at her last doctor’s appointment but then my mom had to open her big mouth and tell the Doctor how old my Grandma was and the doctor said she shouldn’t drive anymore.) The worst part about her eye, my Grandma says, is that she says it might happen to her at any time, in the other eye, and then she’ll be blind. I guess it just sort of happens all of a sudden and there’s no warning, and it might not happen for the next ten years or it could happen in the next half an hour.

Here’s another thing about my Grandma: She’s got a pie carrier. It’s made out of nylon, and has two handles. It looks sort of like an abbreviated insulated pizza bag. Except it’s for grandmas. And pies. It holds two of them (pies), each in a pie-shaped Tupperware. Both barrels of her pie carrier loaded with homemade crusts and hand-syruped fruit fillings, she’ll clip plastic green earrings to her ears and walk across grass in high heels and over a rough-hewn timber bridge above a creek at a roadside rest stop in Paw Paw Michigan and pull two totally undamaged, halo-crusted, still-warm magnificences out of her pie carrier and the entire congregation at the church picnic even her little hobbit-shaped minister will be totally blown away and shit their pants.

It must have been over twenty years ago that I think my Grandma started noticing that when she loaded her pie carrier with a fruit and a gourd, I always picked the pumpkin pie. Ever since, when the pies start going around the table my Grandma shouts, “pass the pumpkin to Brian! He likes the pumpkin!”

And sometimes when she’d get a chance she would (already knowing the answer) ask me what kinds of pies she should bring to the next holiday gathering and I’d thrust my fist in the air and shout, “Pumpkin! Thundercats ho!” Then I’d run off and hit my head on a table and she’d show up that next holiday gathering with a pumpkin pie in her pie carrier and make sure it got to me early in the passing. I was just thinking, is all, and I think this Grandma’s pie thing is my new version of self-respect that I need to be faithful to.