Under a Ceiling Fan

After watching the third and last installment of Hiroshi Inagaki's Samurai Trilogy, I sat in silence musing upon the fact that during the entire film, the swordsman never drew his sword except during an ambush battle. The ceiling fans were whirring and I shut the windows and turned off all but one light. A strange, low buzzing bleared through my ear.

I knew that sound.

The lamp lit the corner of the ceiling and I noticed a zipping, flitting movement. I tried not to react as I observed it, kept my breathing steady and relaxed my muscles. Motherfucking mosquitoes are here. We have a duel scheduled right this moment.

I fought my emotions as my mind flashed back to the terrible time a year ago, when I was laid up with a fever in the back of a diesel truck traveling two hours north on an island in the Philippines. I thought I was going to die in a strange room, within concrete walls and unfamiliar sheets under a ceiling fan keeping an anxious beat, in front of a faded picture of a weeping Jesus. My sweat was running into my eyes and through my hair. I heard whispers of "You think its the dengue?!? I heard you can only get that from the green mosquitoes in the morning..." being spoken in Visayan in the room just outside my door, and wondered if I was just dreaming as my kidneys screamed and writhed in pain. Just two mornings before that, I had been at the top of my health. I emerged from swimming laps in a pool in the mountains of Cebu City and was drying off when I was bitten.

I got over my fever, but not after vowing to destroy any mosquito who crosses my path in the future. My mind flashed back to another time, many years ago. It was a particularly rainy summer, and my window screen had a crack in it. At night, they would sense exactly where I was and would just zoom straight through and feast upon my blood with wild abandon, as I would thrash and scratch in utter torment. I had already been suffering from insomnia from being bit by mosquitoes all summer, one early morning when I heard that familiar buzzing careen past my head. I had to get up early the next day, so every moment that I stood staring at the dim lit walls left me sweating with increasing anger. "Die, Mosquito! Die!!"

It was a lost cause. I was defeated by the fact that my room was so messy that there were way too many places for a clever mosquito to hide. She taunted me when I tried to ignore her. There may have been more than one - I wasn't sure. As the long hours of the morning wore on during that battle, I was certain I began hallucinating. I didn't actually get any sleep that night, and counted 13 new mosquito bites the next horrible morning.

"You are not winning this one", I told the mosquito hopping predatorially around the corner of my room. "You have no idea what's in store for you, trying to come in here looking to bite me. You are a dead mosquito."

Across the air I lept over the cushions. I noticed a spider web and took a break to dust the ceiling. The mosquito hovered just beyond my reach in the lamplight.

I had a paper towel in my hand from dusting down those hard to reach shelves and I noticed it moving when my the light got blocked by my arm. It was getting chased by my shadow! They hate the dark!! I guided it closer to where I could leap. I didn't want my roommate to wake up so I decided to keep it absolutely soundless. I snatched the mosquito out of the air, opened the paper towel in my hand and saw it's smashed remains.

I flushed it down the toilet and came back to find another smaller mosquito bobbing around. This one I smashed with my foot against the wall, as slowly as I could get away with.

Scratching

Kelly just showed me this clip of Mike Realm video scratching along with the sounds; he has some pretty sick skills:

True story!

I had to change the homepages of my browsers to something less controversial. All winter long, I'd began each day with electric jolts of agony as the news sites that I had them set to bleated the bleakest news about the state of the world I lived in.

Millions of jobs lost across all sectors of the economy!!!

Trillions and trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars lost - evaporated! - or stolen - or devalued

freefalling!

with no end in sight

at least for several years!


I don't want to get into the specifics but the term hemmorhaging money paints the picture and psychically I felt like I was dying. Especially when I had these news items burned onto my retinas first thing in the morning before I even had time to eat a banana. A case of writers block developed as I focused all my writing energy into pitching myself to jobs that I never heard back from. I became a creative letter writer, and for the most part nothing worked from every angle.

Almost 40 days ago now things began to change with the season. Today is Good Friday, and I just realized the whole timing factor. It was at the end of Ash Wednesday that I quit smoking tobacco and boarded a plane bound for San Juan with my roommate after staying up all night. One of my best friends was getting married, and Ranee and I were meeting up with about six of our girlfriends down in the Caribbean to help properly usher in this fantastic new development in her life.

I packed a blunt as we packed our bags, intending to get the two of us healthily mind froze as we took a 3AM train to the airport but she rightly thought it would be a terribly dumb idea before checking into the airport, so I had to smoke the whole thing myself. I put my hood and sunglasses on and tried to be inconspicuous and when we made it through to our gate I passed out with my headphones on. The guy checking tickets called me out from my bleary looking eyes and told me to check out the dinosaurs in the airport. Leaving Chicago I was just completely numb, pale and zombied.

What can I say- it had been a long terrible winter.

After my time in Puerto Rico, standing up for one of my closest friends as a tribute to beautiful people to undying love, my outlook on life changed. I spent my first day there getting thrashed by the ocean. That island has some sick waves! Just standing up was hard - the water was so powerful and I was so small against it. Every time I stood up I got knocked on my ass. Two minutes after wading knee deep into the water I found myself face smashed against the sand, my sunglasses gone forever. Every time I get into the ocean she always takes something from me. Once it was my shorts, another time it was my shoes, two t-shirts a different time, my bracelets... I'm not counting though, because the ocean always gives me so much more back.

As I found myself getting thrashed by the sea in Condado, San Juan I was moved to tears with joy. What a strange situation for my life to have gotten into - there in the water I felt a familiar feeling of having been compelled to the shores of a beach, getting bathed in the salt water of the ocean sea. Water I could effortlessly float in with the sun melting onto my skin.

As a transplanted tropical person, being 100% islander biologically and born and raised in the most inland city you could get in N. American, it rouses the deepest primal instincts to be on the beach and in the water. My hair suddenly gets curly from being bone straight, my skin gets soft and loses the dry unbalanced texture it gets in the winter and springs to life like a fish changing colors in the humid air. I feel like my most natural self, and that the ocean likes for me to be playing in her and occasionally summons be through strange trips. It was not the first time I found myself deliriously frolicking in the water for hours, wondering how I even got there.


I had read a Kurt Vonnegut quote a few weeks before I got there: "Strange travel suggestions are like dancing lessons from God." I giggled over this as I floated on my back and felt the anxiety that had stopped my mental gears from turning float away like rust getting rinsed by a powerful solvent as the waves sent me tumbling and I had to keep getting back up.

We were staying at a resort that was also being visited by some famous NFL football players who were all set up in a huge posse at the side of the beach. They gawked at me diving headfirst into waves and letting them carry me super fast up the shore, as they tentatively toed the sand ankle deep, I observed from far away. They never got further in than that because the force of the water was banging.



The night before I left the island, I found myself strolling a street called the Paseo De La Princesas with my beautiful new friend Lana, as she explained the law of attraction to me. We laughed about how I had visioned some bogus things that wound up coming true prior to the trip, and I was convinced I should start thinking about the kinds of ways I use my mental energy. I was even more convinced when several people that were unconnected to each other also mentioned the same arcane principles in the course of the next few days - including a cop from Jersey who sat next to me on the airplane home. Spooky!


We walked along a wall that was built to protect the city of San Juan from the pirates and freebooters from marauding the town, because they were a major problem for the city. They must have raided it pretty hard, because that wall was solid and fitted with some serious looking cannons. You can tell how strong the offense must have been by the size of the defense. As a local pervert frustratedly escorted Lana and I through the city gates as an increasingly sullen tour guide as it became clear that we weren't going to take up his offer of letting us stay at his house, I breezed through the streets and felt the weight of the remnants of those times and wondered why I have always been drawn to the territory of these pirates - like the time I found myself swimming in the precariously jagged caves of the Baths in Virgin Gorda, where their single masted sloops hid as they scouted for booty. One day will it all make sense? I pictured Old San Juan lit by torchlights, shot at by cannons on square rigger ships, the gates finally bashed in by those relentless motherfuckers.

Isla de Encanta, indeed.

Winter has arrived

The snow was coming down heavy and steadily a few days ago when I split up from my friends at Union Station and rode the train out of town. There was a weather alert across the country for the winter storm that was passing, which explained the hundreds of people covering almost every inch across the great marble expanse of the Great Hall, splayed out and camped with their luggage trying to get home for the holidays.

I stepped my way through all the travelers after my roommate and I jumped out of the taxi and dashed onto my train with minutes to spare. I put my hood up and my headphones on and left the city. The drive to my family's house was through the rapidly falling snow, which had followed a couple of days of subzero temperatures. The snow was so thick on the ground when I arrived, that I wished I had brought my snowpants and gloves so that I could go and roll around in it.

My dad pointed out a bird to me in the corner by the edge of the woods, a larger bird about the size of my hand and forearm. I caught it landing and we watched it with its head down, poking at the ground with its beak.

"That's a Kestrel. I'm thinking about making a nest for it."

"What do you make a Kestrel's nest out of anyways?" I wondered out loud.

"A box. Where it can lay eggs."

I envisioned that, and watched the bird lift off after a minute and spread its tail like a fan as it shot upward. It had distinct white markings spread across the tail when it fully flared.


And today I've been watching a fawn. On the drive from the train station, we saw a small herd of deer hanging out in the front lawn of someone's house. This is where they go when they are chilling. This one has been standing at the edge of the woods, in the same place where I saw the falcon. There is a runoff of water from where it drains from uphill there, and it seems to be the spot where animals like to gather. I had my camera close by and got a quick snapshot. An hour later I went back to the window and she was still there, joined by another.




The weather warmed up and the massive piles of snow that have accumulated all over the house have been collapsing like bombs as they slide off one part of the roof to another. Anything above freezing here outside of Chicago feels almost balmy. The sound of the water droplets from melting ice and the sight of icycles liquifying has set a rhythm to the day.

Croak!!!!

My voice is croaky, because after a strangely silent and numb couple of months, the narrative stream of consciousness has returned between my ears. I am not sure how other writers find their words, but for me they come from a speaking voice that has always existed in my thoughts and I just write the words as they come along. When I was younger this voice was often at odds with my actual speech voice - I was shy and introverted and often couldn't get my thoughts to converge with the words coming out of my mouth, and so many years people assumed I was borderline autistic unless they happened to be a penpal. I was the master of the passed note in my school days; that's how I made friends.

Anyhow, the past few months have been like the end of V for Vendetta when the fireworks explode the parliament buildings all over town to Beethoven's 5th symphony. It was like a spectacular destruction of my life as I knew it and was comfortable with on many levels - professionally, romantically and domestically. I took solace in knowing that as things came up with me to figure out and work through in my life, the rest of the country and world was going through similar crises and transitions.

A global financial meltdown and new president later, we are piecing together a new plan for the future. I am glad that my soul is coming down from being stunned into shock so many times and my writing voice is returning - the other day I was walking with a dear old friend and found myself fumbling for the pen I had kept handy for that moment, when my thoughts returned.

What makes a human have ability to formulate intellectual ideas above those in a more primal survival mode is being able to clear your mind enough to let those thoughts rise, I suppose. I knew that I was in a transition phase during the past few months, and gripped my mental cap nervously as I assured myself that the silence in my head would pass when I could finally stop freaking out.

So on this Thanksgiving I would like to check in and apologize to this neglected project for my inability to croak out anything positive or good to hear the past few months. I would like to express my thanks to my brain for snapping out of the shock, and my gratitude at being a little older now and having the perspective to know how my creative cycles work - as opposed to dramatically perching on a bridge assuming my soul was dead forever. I have been musing upon cycles in general - as this may be a time of downswing in my life and in my world, there will be a future for which we should focus on positioning ourselves for. Can't wait to see what happens.

Grant Park Victory Rally

Election Night 2008

In the spirit of moving forward, the United States elected Barack Obama as the President of the Untied States of America. This ended a very long process - years of the primary race within the Democratic and Republican parties and a very condensed past few months of heavy campaigning by both parties. I believe the whole country must be relieved that we have finally come to a conclusion.

I watched John McCain's concession speech from the counter of our local pizza spot, as the camera flashed to glimpses of the Obama rally taking place downtown at Grant Park. As he gracefully stepped aside in the race for the presidency, it became more and more apparently to the jubilant crowd in Chicago that it's hope for change was not quite as audacious as it had been in previous election years.

An image gently weeping Jesse Jackson marked the remarkable and historic shift in social and political possibilities. As I crossed the intersection of Congress and Michigan Ave. after jumping on the train to head to the rally, this thought occurred to me again when I realized that I had crossed the site of the riots of 1968 during the Democratic National Convention, 40 years ago. how the world seems to have changed. I heard the crowd roaring when I stepped out of the subway a few blocks away at jackson and Wabash, and knew the victory speech had begun.

The crowd in Grant Park was elated, full of smiles at random strangers, exchanges of hugs and high fives. No one was more enthused and proud than the city's African American population who represented themselves, bearing signs proclaiming "Yes, we did!"