There are ladders growing
from the ground
like telephone poles.
Climb to the sun
Climb to a cloud
Climb to the smog
Climb to nowhere.
*
Music is no longer
a fist
It is an open palm
petting your hair.
*
There are no grails here
Only red plastic cups
13 December 2008
03 December 2008
Where I Work
It's a long corridor, a hallway to nowhere, with a window at the end facing a wooden fence. Our apartment is a commercial space between a Karate Dojo and a Mercedes Dealership ("Just like us" I tell people, although I'm not exactly sure what that means). It once was a coffee shop, although it was meant to be an art gallery, with lots of wall space and hardwood floors.
I wouldn't write about it otherwise, but I feel that I have an uncommonly good workspace, which, unfortunately, means that isn't usually conducive to work. There's more pressure because I can't make any excuses ("Uh, my roommate wouldn't leave me the fuck alone" "The guy next to me wouldn't turn down his fucking headphones").
I used to write in Coffee Shops (Luck Bros. in Grandview Heights, Ohio is a great one) because as David Mamet brought to my attention, if you sit around the house all day writing people will wonder what the hell you're doing, how come you're not out at a real job, but since my brother was kind enough to let me move in with him and he's never home, I don't really have that problem.
It can be a very lonely place. Sometimes I feel like I'm sitting at the end of a gun barrel. Sometimes a birth canal.
02 December 2008
The Wine Key
His desk was an emerald city of empty wine bottles, with one serving as a vase for a long dead rose. All the water had been sucked up or evaporated and the stem was stiff and crooked but still had little pricks and thorns sticking out.
He was not picky about wine and had an unopened bottle of 2005 Australian Shiraz ($6 at the gas station) sitting next to a plaster effigy of a religious figure. He couldn't tell you who exactly, but his Uncle said it was St. Joseph, and people commonly buried his statue in their yard if they wanted to sell their house. He took the bottle into the kitchen but couldn't remember which drawer the wine key was in because it was one of those utensils of very specific purpose, but vague genus and species. He looked in the silverware drawer, but it wouldn't be in the carefully shaped trinity of slots in the tray and he didn't see it in the little trough next to it where the wooden spoons and ice cream scoops and spatulas all ended up. It wasn't lurking underneath with the saw-toothed knives and graters. He looked in the drawer with the utensils made for bigger jobs; ladles, cleavers etc. and amongst the add-on pieces for various electronic apparatus' (beaters, blenders, bowls), but he could not find the key.
Wine Key. What an appropriate name! he thought. It unlocks a whole other world to you; A world of squashed grapes and finely chosen adjectives, of breathy, poorly thought out declarations of love, of headaches; A world of years or centuries of dirt and rot and wisdom.
He didn't know how on earth one would open a wine bottle without a key. It seemed like a fairly dumb business decision, to only sell wine to people who could afford a key, but then he thought the cheaper wines all come with the more user friendly twist off cap. Could he bite the foil seal off? By god, he might have no alternative. He picked up a steak knife and thought about the logistics of prying the cork with it. He figured he could probably push the cork down to bob in the purple sea if he had no other choice. He looked in all the drawers many times hoping the key would appear, even the ones filled with phone books and take out menus and rusted batteries. Maybe he could just break the bottle off at the neck, like they did when they christened a boat, and carefully decant the wine into a separate container, an empty vase or an old milk carton.
Then he spotted his brother's tool box laying on the counter. His brother collected arcade machines and their living room was something of a workshop where he Frankensteined old Ninja Gaiden cabinets to Bad Dudes joysticks and Street Fighter II: Turbo motherboards. The toolbox was open and he saw the spiraled metal probiscis of the drill sticking out.
He grabbed the drill and pumped the trigger. The bit squealed and spun around and he felt joy rush through him. He pressed the tip to the soft cork of the wine bottle and the drill ground through with ease. He popped the cork out with a deeply satisfying "thunk" and took a swig.
He opened the cabinet to find that all of their glasses were dirty. They didn't have any proper wine glasses, but their commemorative Muppet and Wreslemania cups were all in the sink brimming with a green stew of who-knows-what-refuse amongst the pans and stink of rotten tuna. He looked in another cabinet and found a measuring cup with a stout. He took it down, poured himself 100 mL of wine and went back to his desk.
He was not picky about wine and had an unopened bottle of 2005 Australian Shiraz ($6 at the gas station) sitting next to a plaster effigy of a religious figure. He couldn't tell you who exactly, but his Uncle said it was St. Joseph, and people commonly buried his statue in their yard if they wanted to sell their house. He took the bottle into the kitchen but couldn't remember which drawer the wine key was in because it was one of those utensils of very specific purpose, but vague genus and species. He looked in the silverware drawer, but it wouldn't be in the carefully shaped trinity of slots in the tray and he didn't see it in the little trough next to it where the wooden spoons and ice cream scoops and spatulas all ended up. It wasn't lurking underneath with the saw-toothed knives and graters. He looked in the drawer with the utensils made for bigger jobs; ladles, cleavers etc. and amongst the add-on pieces for various electronic apparatus' (beaters, blenders, bowls), but he could not find the key.
Wine Key. What an appropriate name! he thought. It unlocks a whole other world to you; A world of squashed grapes and finely chosen adjectives, of breathy, poorly thought out declarations of love, of headaches; A world of years or centuries of dirt and rot and wisdom.
He didn't know how on earth one would open a wine bottle without a key. It seemed like a fairly dumb business decision, to only sell wine to people who could afford a key, but then he thought the cheaper wines all come with the more user friendly twist off cap. Could he bite the foil seal off? By god, he might have no alternative. He picked up a steak knife and thought about the logistics of prying the cork with it. He figured he could probably push the cork down to bob in the purple sea if he had no other choice. He looked in all the drawers many times hoping the key would appear, even the ones filled with phone books and take out menus and rusted batteries. Maybe he could just break the bottle off at the neck, like they did when they christened a boat, and carefully decant the wine into a separate container, an empty vase or an old milk carton.
Then he spotted his brother's tool box laying on the counter. His brother collected arcade machines and their living room was something of a workshop where he Frankensteined old Ninja Gaiden cabinets to Bad Dudes joysticks and Street Fighter II: Turbo motherboards. The toolbox was open and he saw the spiraled metal probiscis of the drill sticking out.
He grabbed the drill and pumped the trigger. The bit squealed and spun around and he felt joy rush through him. He pressed the tip to the soft cork of the wine bottle and the drill ground through with ease. He popped the cork out with a deeply satisfying "thunk" and took a swig.
He opened the cabinet to find that all of their glasses were dirty. They didn't have any proper wine glasses, but their commemorative Muppet and Wreslemania cups were all in the sink brimming with a green stew of who-knows-what-refuse amongst the pans and stink of rotten tuna. He looked in another cabinet and found a measuring cup with a stout. He took it down, poured himself 100 mL of wine and went back to his desk.
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