Tick Tock, Where's the Croc?
Mentor: In Homer's Odyssey, Mentor was a wise old friend of Odysseus who tookover as a surrogate father to Odysseus' son Telemachus when Odysseus sailed off to the Trojan War. Mentor was so respected by his young sprout that the Goddess Athena periodically took over Mentor's body when she had her own advice to give Telemachus. One who is Mentored: protégé, one who is protected and guided by another.
Mentor Relationships:
Mentor/Telemachus
Teacher/Student
Parent/Child
Laurel/Barrie
Hannibal/Clarice
Going through two new rolls of pictures, I discover puzzling duplicates.
I took the first when I was living in my horrid flat on Changqing Jie. In with the photos of my squalid but loved kitchen, BoYa (19) playing my guitar, and a Korean boy (21) modeling underwear, there’s a picture of me (24). I'm standing alone forward staring into the mirror, a luminous explosion at my temple. The second roll spans the past three or four weeks, mostly during my excursion to Anshan, and some taken up to the moment I walked into the Kodak booth.
Photos: sweating up a mountain, refereeing some international arm wrestling, and facing the mirror in my new apartment.
Who here isn't guilty of the occasional mirror photo, Tinkerbell shattering in the frame? I'm guilty of two, spanning mere months. Narcissus staring into a lake.
He comes back to the cooler side of town
But he lives in my lap.
Make me want you
Make me miss you
Make me wonder where you are
Then forgive you.
(Forever my fiancé)
She/He Lives in My Lap, Outkast (pronoun modified)
I like to watch the Korean Boy destroying my house; like watching a puppy fall over dizzy from mauling your slippers. I feel like I should try to help his exploration, but I don’t. It's human to passively watch someone sit in the puddle of water or touch the hot light bulb. He's trying to smoke one of my menthols, and he can't keep his eyes out of the smoke. While wiping his eyes, he knocks the cherry off his cigarette and it lands on his knuckle. He flips it off his knuckle and it settles on his bare toes. He's a gorgeous wrecking ball. This is my second dalliance with the Korean, and history repeats itself. I again sit down at my computer and he explores my belongings in his underwear. Why do I keep him around? Why do I keep that Smurf lighter that doesn't make a spark?
Because he’s interesting. I can’t keep my eyes off him as he stalks around my house breaking stuff and putting it back sheepishly. Sneering at the one rotten potato in my kitchen and trying to tell me, ME! how to cook instant noodles in my own house. I want to smack him with a rolled up copy of the China Daily. Just to set him aright. He’s just 21. From my lofty height of 24 years or so, and being a female (read, “wiser”) I feel a slight concern for his well-being. Slight. I feel more concern for his biceps.
The Japanese guy (26) with the chosen English name New Chance gets chatty once he’s down to checkered boxers:
"I want to go back home to Tokyo."
"Yeah? Why? You don't like your Pepsico job in Changchun?"
"No. Changchun bad. Tokyo better. I been here four years."
"Yikes. Can you understand my Chinese?"
"Yes. Can we have a family?"
"....."
“Come to Tokyo with me.”
“Where do you live?”
“Never-Never land.”
“How do you get there?”
“Second star to the right, and straight on till morning!”
“No, silly, what’s your address?”
“Don’t have an address.”
“Well, where do people send your letters?”
“Don’t get any letters.”
“Doesn’t your mother get letters?”
“Don’t have a mother.”
“You poor thing! You never had a mother?”
“I ran away from home the day I was born….”
Peter Pan, J. M. Barrie
Onstage, Peter Pan is traditionally played by a woman. The technical reason for this is women can sing Pan’s score better and usually have the lithe dancer’s ability required for Pan to fly, pun. The better reason is this: Peter Pan is neither male nor female.
Peter Pan also does not represent childhood only. A woman is closer spiritually to androgyny than a man. It’s easy for a woman to go from skirt to slacks. She can nurse a child and then pave a driveway without blinking. How hard is it for a man to go from slacks to a skirt? Since the bullshit dichotomy is so hard wired for men, it’s easier for women to sneak in under the wire, unless the men feel threatened. This flexibility in women goes unnoticed as long as it’s useful. The hyphenated hunter-gatherer qualification is more wholly applicable to women, whose Lord of the Flies feral society would never be as shoddy or fall as fast as William Golding’s did, as managed by young men.
Please read the following:
A narrow fellow in the grass
occasionally rides;
You may have met him, -did you not?
His notice sudden is.
The grass divides as with a comb
A spotted shaft is seen;
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on.
He likes a boggy acre,
A floor too cool for corn.
Yet when a boy, and barefoot,
I more than once at morn,
Have passed, I thought, a whip-lash
Unbraiding in the sun,---
986 Excerpt, Emily Dickinson
Sidetrack: In the existing manuscript of this poem, the underlined line reads “boy.” I was PISSED to find SEVEN versions of this poem online that change this word to “child.” I remember studying this poem in 1997 in Jon Hershey’s class, and discussing “boy” in this line. I thought I was losing my mind, and then I saw this footnote about this change. So it seems this editorial change was exerted as it was in keeping with the author’s sex. Lesser indignities have been thrust upon Shakespeare’s sonnets by well-versed college students.
The serpent, the most subtle beast of the land, cleft the earth into two parts-man and woman, young and old-- doomed to suffer in different ways forevermore. Until a reunion brings about a reprieve.
“Give me your hand, Wendy!”
Peter
Peter Pan represents childhood on the surface. So what, oh Deconstructionists, does childhood really represent? The answer lies within……
The Twilight Zone, The Movie:
“Kick The Can.” Set in Sunnyvale nursing home, this segment was directed by Spielberg. So what does one expect except something along the lines of an R.L. Stine novel.
For those of you who didn’t frequently shoplift from the juvenile horror section of Winn Dixie as I did, R.L. Stine published such nail-biters as “Fear Street” and “Young Girl in Tender Cashmere Cardigan Loses Her Way in the Dodgy Part of Town.” We see a slip of a town that grows on as the cloistered people who nourished it murmur in a house beneath cool, sad trees. The old folks converse, intrigue, and drool into their shirt pockets. A new resident, Charles Whitley, entreats the others to play a game called Kick the Can. Soon several fogies are kicking a dimpled tin can that looks like maybe it had those acidic black olives in it once, all around the front yard. The over-crotchety residents look on crotchety-ly.
That evening, a wondrous change overcomes the residents who played Kick the Can. They are transformed into selves so young they fit the swings near the home, and jump rope and shimmy up trees. Everyone is blissed until one girl says:
“My wedding ring! It fell off.”
This begins a recital of the disadvantages of being young.
“Now I have to grow up again.”
“I don’t wanna go to school all over again.”
Soon, all but one of the fogies decides to return to their withered selves in lieu of repeating their childhoods. Universalisms are breathed, the wise decisions are made. Except for the one boy who straddles the window, the simple fact that his hair tousles just so reminding the others what they’re really missing. He jaunts into the night with a gusty "Tally-Ho!" Prudent smiles fill the room.
Whoa up a minute, Spielberg! Is this more than a leitmotif? Could it be that you’re delving into the very depths of the human psyche, pontificating profundities about how youth has its own wisdom inside its impetuousness, and older wisdom has its sad clown smile, Zen-like advantage over sprightly youth? Does Spielberg ever say anything else?
Human capacity for beauty is only about the size of a shotglass. In religion and marriage, you play off your stimulation of this inadequacy.
30 minute's walk from my old flat over post-apocalyptic rubble and through Nietzschean God-Is-Dead traffic is NongHe GongYuan. South Lake Park. Charming, sprawling bridges and pagodas, bumper cars balloons dogs trees and lovely. Cotton candy is bride white in China. We rent a rowboat and I discover the pleasure of rowing a boat.
Genius. If I had discovered rowing when I was very young, I believe I would have done it competitively.
Back and forth, and sometimes inexplicably sideways on NongHe, displacing water with my arm muscles feels like my calling. A girl in white named Weiwei (21) sits behind me with Laurel (newly 78). A fine figured young man English-monikered Jerry (19) perches on the back of the boat (Prow? Stern? Bow? Swab?) and plays his wooden flute. The flute is sweet, even when there is too much da feng, which pushes the boat off course and thieves notes to play on Jerry’s flute itself. Laurel sits on the front of the vessel (Masthead? Maidenhead? MaidenForm? Three Little Maids at School?) and commands the sea. We teach everyone how to yell “Arrrrr!” and crook our fingers like the Haidao we are.
Hook and Smee co-opting a Lost Boy and Tiger Lilly for their own devious purposes.
Few people have done enough good deeds in their lives to deserve to sit in this boat and listen to this flute and feel this wind on this fine, fine morning in China. My cup runneth over.
it’s
spring
and
the
goat-footed
balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee
In Just-, ee cummings
“Boy? Why are you crying?”
Wendy Myra Angela Darling (11), Peter Pan, J. M. Barrie.
The Great Wall was fortified at ruinous expense by the emperor of the Qin dynasty and communicates Carl Sagan’s Numinous with a silent wrecking ball. Numinous: A somewhat religious term I have detoured Humpty-Dumpty style into my newsletter to mean what I want it to mean, as in “the dawning of awareness that in this universe, you are but a tiny little young piece of shit, you upstart, you.”
The steps are worn to slope in places. To say you’ve been is nothing. To say you’ve seen is also nothing. To be unable to say you’ve been and seen, though you have, means something. Suddenly the film in your camera is embarrassing.
Old age and wisdom are prized here even as Western influence is bulldozing China’s culture. I get huffy when Chinese people are surprised that I am so young and yet a teacher. What, can’t vibrant, naïve youths bustle through established methods and accomplish something in a hasty, vainglorious fashion? Like in movies? Of course they can, you think. Then the Wall looks into you.
Languishing along countryside it owns without question, it is quietly lethal and unconcerned. You could scream your troubles into its very stone, and it will remain dumb. There are runnels in the top to direct boiling oil down the sides onto the enemies without. How anyone with bad intent got close enough to this loping backbone for that is a mystery. So much pure straightforward function that was here before rivers I have swam in, and will be for a long time, torpedoes-be-damned, sobers me with a rollicking magnitude I was not prepared for.
In the Neverending Story, Atreyu (13) loses his cool when he looks into the mirrors before meeting the Southern Oracle. Why? They only show him exactly what he really is.
“The brave find that they are cowards; the wise find that they are really fools.”
The sun never shines straight at us. The mountains and trees and druidic fog diffuse the light that swiftly approached a Children’s Hour dim and we were all robbed of our shadows. I wrote on my hand: Qiaoqiao douzu Wo de yingzi. Quietly like a secret steal my shadow. I cried.
And God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where are you?
And he said, I heard your voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.
Genesis 3:17
We avoid climbing the Wall itself and detour up a path marked by a chain charmed at every link with gold padlocks, some with red ribbons for Buddha. At a cinematic rock arrangement, we peeled the three eggs we had and communed with the insects. I felt a little more comfortable out of the eye of the Wall.
Time enough to rethink blazing forward, youth and roses in your cheeks.
If growing up means it would be
Beneath my dignity to climb a tree….!
I’ll never grow up
Never grow up
Never grow uh-up!
Not me!
Lost Boy’s Song, Peter Pan, J. M. Barrie
In Chengdu, Alex (25) and Laurel and I waltzed in and out of Buddhist temples, sparkling streets, train sleeper bunks and bumper car rides so frequent I could feel my ears getting longer as I turned into a donkey forever. Laurel celebrated her 78th birthday in spite of that damned croc who swallowed the damning clock, on the bridge of LaiShan river. This river runs alongside the DaFu, the largest Buddha like, ever, man, carved straight from the rock of Lai Mountain. LaurelandBarrie, AlexandLaurel, LaurelandAlex, AlexandBarrie lazy-susaned together more or less regularly for the duration of this 712-day vacation. I had some of the best times of my life.
Each combination of young with old, male with female, and pushy with push-ee spawned fresh ideas and rubbed something new freshly raw. Sometimes one of the greenhorns suggested the path, sometimes the learned did the directing. We always held mostly unwanted mirrors up to each other’s behaviors. Eventually we made peace with our little differences, and our giant annoying similarities. But no one said reunions were easy.
-30-
* '30' is an old editing shorthand used to indicate the end of a manuscript.
Mentor Relationships:
Mentor/Telemachus
Teacher/Student
Parent/Child
Laurel/Barrie
Hannibal/Clarice
Going through two new rolls of pictures, I discover puzzling duplicates.
I took the first when I was living in my horrid flat on Changqing Jie. In with the photos of my squalid but loved kitchen, BoYa (19) playing my guitar, and a Korean boy (21) modeling underwear, there’s a picture of me (24). I'm standing alone forward staring into the mirror, a luminous explosion at my temple. The second roll spans the past three or four weeks, mostly during my excursion to Anshan, and some taken up to the moment I walked into the Kodak booth.
Photos: sweating up a mountain, refereeing some international arm wrestling, and facing the mirror in my new apartment.
Who here isn't guilty of the occasional mirror photo, Tinkerbell shattering in the frame? I'm guilty of two, spanning mere months. Narcissus staring into a lake.
He comes back to the cooler side of town
But he lives in my lap.
Make me want you
Make me miss you
Make me wonder where you are
Then forgive you.
(Forever my fiancé)
She/He Lives in My Lap, Outkast (pronoun modified)
I like to watch the Korean Boy destroying my house; like watching a puppy fall over dizzy from mauling your slippers. I feel like I should try to help his exploration, but I don’t. It's human to passively watch someone sit in the puddle of water or touch the hot light bulb. He's trying to smoke one of my menthols, and he can't keep his eyes out of the smoke. While wiping his eyes, he knocks the cherry off his cigarette and it lands on his knuckle. He flips it off his knuckle and it settles on his bare toes. He's a gorgeous wrecking ball. This is my second dalliance with the Korean, and history repeats itself. I again sit down at my computer and he explores my belongings in his underwear. Why do I keep him around? Why do I keep that Smurf lighter that doesn't make a spark?
Because he’s interesting. I can’t keep my eyes off him as he stalks around my house breaking stuff and putting it back sheepishly. Sneering at the one rotten potato in my kitchen and trying to tell me, ME! how to cook instant noodles in my own house. I want to smack him with a rolled up copy of the China Daily. Just to set him aright. He’s just 21. From my lofty height of 24 years or so, and being a female (read, “wiser”) I feel a slight concern for his well-being. Slight. I feel more concern for his biceps.
The Japanese guy (26) with the chosen English name New Chance gets chatty once he’s down to checkered boxers:
"I want to go back home to Tokyo."
"Yeah? Why? You don't like your Pepsico job in Changchun?"
"No. Changchun bad. Tokyo better. I been here four years."
"Yikes. Can you understand my Chinese?"
"Yes. Can we have a family?"
"....."
“Come to Tokyo with me.”
“Where do you live?”
“Never-Never land.”
“How do you get there?”
“Second star to the right, and straight on till morning!”
“No, silly, what’s your address?”
“Don’t have an address.”
“Well, where do people send your letters?”
“Don’t get any letters.”
“Doesn’t your mother get letters?”
“Don’t have a mother.”
“You poor thing! You never had a mother?”
“I ran away from home the day I was born….”
Peter Pan, J. M. Barrie
Onstage, Peter Pan is traditionally played by a woman. The technical reason for this is women can sing Pan’s score better and usually have the lithe dancer’s ability required for Pan to fly, pun. The better reason is this: Peter Pan is neither male nor female.
Peter Pan also does not represent childhood only. A woman is closer spiritually to androgyny than a man. It’s easy for a woman to go from skirt to slacks. She can nurse a child and then pave a driveway without blinking. How hard is it for a man to go from slacks to a skirt? Since the bullshit dichotomy is so hard wired for men, it’s easier for women to sneak in under the wire, unless the men feel threatened. This flexibility in women goes unnoticed as long as it’s useful. The hyphenated hunter-gatherer qualification is more wholly applicable to women, whose Lord of the Flies feral society would never be as shoddy or fall as fast as William Golding’s did, as managed by young men.
Please read the following:
A narrow fellow in the grass
occasionally rides;
You may have met him, -did you not?
His notice sudden is.
The grass divides as with a comb
A spotted shaft is seen;
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on.
He likes a boggy acre,
A floor too cool for corn.
Yet when a boy, and barefoot,
I more than once at morn,
Have passed, I thought, a whip-lash
Unbraiding in the sun,---
986 Excerpt, Emily Dickinson
Sidetrack: In the existing manuscript of this poem, the underlined line reads “boy.” I was PISSED to find SEVEN versions of this poem online that change this word to “child.” I remember studying this poem in 1997 in Jon Hershey’s class, and discussing “boy” in this line. I thought I was losing my mind, and then I saw this footnote about this change. So it seems this editorial change was exerted as it was in keeping with the author’s sex. Lesser indignities have been thrust upon Shakespeare’s sonnets by well-versed college students.
The serpent, the most subtle beast of the land, cleft the earth into two parts-man and woman, young and old-- doomed to suffer in different ways forevermore. Until a reunion brings about a reprieve.
“Give me your hand, Wendy!”
Peter
Peter Pan represents childhood on the surface. So what, oh Deconstructionists, does childhood really represent? The answer lies within……
The Twilight Zone, The Movie:
“Kick The Can.” Set in Sunnyvale nursing home, this segment was directed by Spielberg. So what does one expect except something along the lines of an R.L. Stine novel.
For those of you who didn’t frequently shoplift from the juvenile horror section of Winn Dixie as I did, R.L. Stine published such nail-biters as “Fear Street” and “Young Girl in Tender Cashmere Cardigan Loses Her Way in the Dodgy Part of Town.” We see a slip of a town that grows on as the cloistered people who nourished it murmur in a house beneath cool, sad trees. The old folks converse, intrigue, and drool into their shirt pockets. A new resident, Charles Whitley, entreats the others to play a game called Kick the Can. Soon several fogies are kicking a dimpled tin can that looks like maybe it had those acidic black olives in it once, all around the front yard. The over-crotchety residents look on crotchety-ly.
That evening, a wondrous change overcomes the residents who played Kick the Can. They are transformed into selves so young they fit the swings near the home, and jump rope and shimmy up trees. Everyone is blissed until one girl says:
“My wedding ring! It fell off.”
This begins a recital of the disadvantages of being young.
“Now I have to grow up again.”
“I don’t wanna go to school all over again.”
Soon, all but one of the fogies decides to return to their withered selves in lieu of repeating their childhoods. Universalisms are breathed, the wise decisions are made. Except for the one boy who straddles the window, the simple fact that his hair tousles just so reminding the others what they’re really missing. He jaunts into the night with a gusty "Tally-Ho!" Prudent smiles fill the room.
Whoa up a minute, Spielberg! Is this more than a leitmotif? Could it be that you’re delving into the very depths of the human psyche, pontificating profundities about how youth has its own wisdom inside its impetuousness, and older wisdom has its sad clown smile, Zen-like advantage over sprightly youth? Does Spielberg ever say anything else?
Human capacity for beauty is only about the size of a shotglass. In religion and marriage, you play off your stimulation of this inadequacy.
30 minute's walk from my old flat over post-apocalyptic rubble and through Nietzschean God-Is-Dead traffic is NongHe GongYuan. South Lake Park. Charming, sprawling bridges and pagodas, bumper cars balloons dogs trees and lovely. Cotton candy is bride white in China. We rent a rowboat and I discover the pleasure of rowing a boat.
Genius. If I had discovered rowing when I was very young, I believe I would have done it competitively.
Back and forth, and sometimes inexplicably sideways on NongHe, displacing water with my arm muscles feels like my calling. A girl in white named Weiwei (21) sits behind me with Laurel (newly 78). A fine figured young man English-monikered Jerry (19) perches on the back of the boat (Prow? Stern? Bow? Swab?) and plays his wooden flute. The flute is sweet, even when there is too much da feng, which pushes the boat off course and thieves notes to play on Jerry’s flute itself. Laurel sits on the front of the vessel (Masthead? Maidenhead? MaidenForm? Three Little Maids at School?) and commands the sea. We teach everyone how to yell “Arrrrr!” and crook our fingers like the Haidao we are.
Hook and Smee co-opting a Lost Boy and Tiger Lilly for their own devious purposes.
Few people have done enough good deeds in their lives to deserve to sit in this boat and listen to this flute and feel this wind on this fine, fine morning in China. My cup runneth over.
it’s
spring
and
the
goat-footed
balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee
In Just-, ee cummings
“Boy? Why are you crying?”
Wendy Myra Angela Darling (11), Peter Pan, J. M. Barrie.
The Great Wall was fortified at ruinous expense by the emperor of the Qin dynasty and communicates Carl Sagan’s Numinous with a silent wrecking ball. Numinous: A somewhat religious term I have detoured Humpty-Dumpty style into my newsletter to mean what I want it to mean, as in “the dawning of awareness that in this universe, you are but a tiny little young piece of shit, you upstart, you.”
The steps are worn to slope in places. To say you’ve been is nothing. To say you’ve seen is also nothing. To be unable to say you’ve been and seen, though you have, means something. Suddenly the film in your camera is embarrassing.
Old age and wisdom are prized here even as Western influence is bulldozing China’s culture. I get huffy when Chinese people are surprised that I am so young and yet a teacher. What, can’t vibrant, naïve youths bustle through established methods and accomplish something in a hasty, vainglorious fashion? Like in movies? Of course they can, you think. Then the Wall looks into you.
Languishing along countryside it owns without question, it is quietly lethal and unconcerned. You could scream your troubles into its very stone, and it will remain dumb. There are runnels in the top to direct boiling oil down the sides onto the enemies without. How anyone with bad intent got close enough to this loping backbone for that is a mystery. So much pure straightforward function that was here before rivers I have swam in, and will be for a long time, torpedoes-be-damned, sobers me with a rollicking magnitude I was not prepared for.
In the Neverending Story, Atreyu (13) loses his cool when he looks into the mirrors before meeting the Southern Oracle. Why? They only show him exactly what he really is.
“The brave find that they are cowards; the wise find that they are really fools.”
The sun never shines straight at us. The mountains and trees and druidic fog diffuse the light that swiftly approached a Children’s Hour dim and we were all robbed of our shadows. I wrote on my hand: Qiaoqiao douzu Wo de yingzi. Quietly like a secret steal my shadow. I cried.
And God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where are you?
And he said, I heard your voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.
Genesis 3:17
We avoid climbing the Wall itself and detour up a path marked by a chain charmed at every link with gold padlocks, some with red ribbons for Buddha. At a cinematic rock arrangement, we peeled the three eggs we had and communed with the insects. I felt a little more comfortable out of the eye of the Wall.
Time enough to rethink blazing forward, youth and roses in your cheeks.
If growing up means it would be
Beneath my dignity to climb a tree….!
I’ll never grow up
Never grow up
Never grow uh-up!
Not me!
Lost Boy’s Song, Peter Pan, J. M. Barrie
In Chengdu, Alex (25) and Laurel and I waltzed in and out of Buddhist temples, sparkling streets, train sleeper bunks and bumper car rides so frequent I could feel my ears getting longer as I turned into a donkey forever. Laurel celebrated her 78th birthday in spite of that damned croc who swallowed the damning clock, on the bridge of LaiShan river. This river runs alongside the DaFu, the largest Buddha like, ever, man, carved straight from the rock of Lai Mountain. LaurelandBarrie, AlexandLaurel, LaurelandAlex, AlexandBarrie lazy-susaned together more or less regularly for the duration of this 712-day vacation. I had some of the best times of my life.
Each combination of young with old, male with female, and pushy with push-ee spawned fresh ideas and rubbed something new freshly raw. Sometimes one of the greenhorns suggested the path, sometimes the learned did the directing. We always held mostly unwanted mirrors up to each other’s behaviors. Eventually we made peace with our little differences, and our giant annoying similarities. But no one said reunions were easy.
-30-
* '30' is an old editing shorthand used to indicate the end of a manuscript.