(no subject)
Walking back to my office behind Seattle Central I passed a woman in a green Urban League t-shirt and a string of red beads I played the eye-contact dance with. Smiled hello; when we crossed wakes I caught the head-splittingly strong smell of sandalwood, maybe her soap, and it occurred to me that I like my vanity (I was coming back from the barbershop, where I'd exchanged one overpriced hair product from another and they were playing Diamond Dogs), the feeling of being both light and sharp, like a knife. I tried to run my eyes over everything, paint filling in pocked concrete foundations, queen anne's lace in a yard, a busted Sparks can, a big ugly car.
And I like not being afraid of strangers. In Eliot Weinberger: "Consciousness is the conjunction of an observer, usually timeless and immaterial, and an observed that is fixed in a body in time. Unlike Rimbaud's famous 'I is another,' I are an us." Followed by my selves-- you know this feeling? Like a string of those cellophane balloons for graduation or a baby shower you buy at the grocery store? One goes to god when you die, one comes back as a tiger or crow, one becomes someone born in your circle of friends. When someone's rude, one quivers. One likes feeling seen.
Last night as it got dark in the park, a young guy's little dog-- one of those lithe waggy beer-commercial dogs-- was barking his head off at a football-sized black decorative rock in the park fountain, scrambling up to the fountain's lip and scrambling back with fright, seeing it, maybe, in his failure of perspective in the steady flow and splash, as some little shelled animal racing upstream. Yap yap yap!
My mom's boyfriend for a few years was this tall, silent social worker named Juan with a fat cat named Bessie Smith and crates of records. I lived with him in the Vietnamese part of Seattle and spent days at home staring at the ceiling. He'd just vanish for a day or a few days and come back still silent. I remember now and envy that ability to disappear into no-story; what I think of when coworkers disappear (like I did) for trips to nowhere in the middle of the day.
And I like not being afraid of strangers. In Eliot Weinberger: "Consciousness is the conjunction of an observer, usually timeless and immaterial, and an observed that is fixed in a body in time. Unlike Rimbaud's famous 'I is another,' I are an us." Followed by my selves-- you know this feeling? Like a string of those cellophane balloons for graduation or a baby shower you buy at the grocery store? One goes to god when you die, one comes back as a tiger or crow, one becomes someone born in your circle of friends. When someone's rude, one quivers. One likes feeling seen.
Last night as it got dark in the park, a young guy's little dog-- one of those lithe waggy beer-commercial dogs-- was barking his head off at a football-sized black decorative rock in the park fountain, scrambling up to the fountain's lip and scrambling back with fright, seeing it, maybe, in his failure of perspective in the steady flow and splash, as some little shelled animal racing upstream. Yap yap yap!
My mom's boyfriend for a few years was this tall, silent social worker named Juan with a fat cat named Bessie Smith and crates of records. I lived with him in the Vietnamese part of Seattle and spent days at home staring at the ceiling. He'd just vanish for a day or a few days and come back still silent. I remember now and envy that ability to disappear into no-story; what I think of when coworkers disappear (like I did) for trips to nowhere in the middle of the day.