I sized these photos for computer desktop use. On the photo site smugmug, select “Original” size to download. Please let me know if you use one, I’d like to know…
An almond fell off the spoon, bounced on his right shoe, and landed on the dusty pavement near his customer’s foot. Diego plunged the spoon in his bucket again, hoping to remain steady if another explosion startled him.
Every year, the firecrackers of December penetrated Diego’s mind to haunt him. Signs of celebration for those who lit them, preparing for Christmas and New Year, they awoke in Diego the feelings he had tried to put to rest for many years already. The peddler of nuts – cashews, almonds, macadamia, etc. – not normally affected by the noises of everyday life in Guatemala, the passing of trucks, tuk-tuks, and buses, could not blend the explosions into his soundscape.
So many years had passed since the end of the war and his daily nightmare, that he had managed to forget most of it. He could now make a modest living from the sales of nuts to passersby, mostly tourists with little else to do than considering the flow of good deals coming to their eyes. Over time he had learned a few key words in English – the names of the nuts, their prices, how good they were in flavor and health benefits. He had also learned to classify his prospects, between those who wanted to taste but would never buy, those who made small purchases to get rid of him, and those who bought and wanted to talk, happy to find someone to exercise their Spanish with. He had difficulty recognizing someone he had met before, and sometimes they remembered him, even calling him by name, telling him how they enjoyed the almonds or the macadamia, volunteering new information about themselves, and asking more about him and his life.…
A meteor shower of little effect on the planet
In beholders’ eyes became
Highness expressed in a chaotic display of lights
Bulbs over ideas
Disco ball over dancers
At dawn shut
Leaving traces on neurons
Re-ignited.
Click Here to Download the PDF
BEFORE THE THEATRE PLUNGED into complete darkness, a serious voice asked the members of the audience to turn their cell phones off, and to unwrap their candy now, rather than later, when the urge to cough would warrant it. To Dorothy, these were somewhat contradictory life instructions, for what should one do with the unwrapped candy? It probably mattered less than the annoyance she felt at her husband consequently unwrapping a piece of gum, because of how he chewed it – with such an extreme jaw drop that one could hear the clicking of his overused masseter muscle, and observe his ears as they moved, as if directly attached to the jaw. Years ago, they had laughed together at his ability to move his ears, and even parts of his ears, independently…
Download the PDF (4 pages, printable on two-sided letter-size paper, or display on your computer)
I GOT STUCK IN THE ELEVATOR, somewhere below the fortieth floor of my attorney’s building. I did not panic, of course, but strangely enough I had a sense that the incident could have been related to something I did. I am not superstitious, and not even religious, so I rarely attribute an event like a power failure in an elevator to a higher authority. Yet, when you are inside an elevator, you can’t resist the thought that you are at the mercy of an invisible force…
how the first draft is born
“… That’s him on the photos there,” he said, designating the photos on the wall behind the computer.
“You guys were cute,” said Marc.
“Yeah,” Peter said, thinking of the past tense in “were cute.” He paused in his work, his hands supporting him on the table, looking at the back of the frame, having one of his moments, as he called it. At the beginning, those moments came at any time of the day or night, on the street, at a store, on a bus, whenever. Over time, their frequency and intensity reduced, but they’d still come at unexpected times when he’d talk about those days, or just when he thought of something, a scene in a movie, or even a song he’d hear.
few years ago, I left the world of technology to study English Literature, read more fiction, and write. I got rid of the old Sears TV with its rabbit ear antenna, and after moving to Berkeley, no longer saw the need to shop in the electronics stores. This year, I tried to update myself with an iPod, but found that I actually liked to hear what was going on around me on the street and on BART. So I don’t really qualify as a technologist, if the prerequisite is to also be a consumer of technology. There are plenty of guys who will talk to you about the latest and greatest this and that, and to prove their point they’ll grab a device hanging on their belt.
I buy books, and take pleasure in finding them at a used bookstore or among remainder stacks of unsold first editions. I think I qualify as a scavenger of sorts, letting items cross my path rather than running after them. I think that’s why I prefer the local, independent bookstores around here to the mega-stores or the online options. I think most of my online purchases were of first and rare editions. Still, I considered the book reading device that Amazon offers, because the concept of a portable library appeals to me. I just look at that particular device, however, and think I’ll wait for a solution that integrates my current needs. I think if the Kindle can be made to be thin and large enough to be fully portable and readable, computer manufacturers will come out with alternative versions that will incorporate the Kindle’s features with those of a general-purpose computer.
I’m not sure that book readers follow the same patterns as music listeners, but if they do, I’ll probably be a dinosaur with the book reading device as I am with the iPod. I’m sure there are all these people who have never set foot in a small, independent bookstore, except maybe while on vacation, who are avid readers. They’re the ones who are too busy with everything they have to do, and for whom ordering books online is as convenient as selecting the videos they’ll want to see on Netflix. They’re the ones who will end up with a book-reading device, but I just think that device will be a computer that integrates other functions.
Clearly, there are features in the Kindle that are absurdly designed to keep its audience in the captivity of Amazon, and those features (a cell phone connection, for example) will turn out to be too costly. All those customers already have a computer, an Internet connection, and a cell phone. Many joined the iPhone bandwagon (talk about being costly and keeping a captive audience), and that device is nothing short of a miniaturized computer. Most new computers sold, apparently, are notebooks. I just see these converging somehow into a device that I think was designed back in the 1990’s (on paper), consisting of a letter-size device displaying full pages and on which users gestured to enter their commands. In the kitchen, they became the cook book. At the office, those who needed to type just had to set it on a docking station with its keyboard and mouse. And of course, it integrated the video phone device.
I’ll just wait until Apple comes out with such a device, and they’ll probably have the equivalent of iTunes for books. If they don’t, maybe another major manufacturer will have it, and others will follow. The interest in the device will be greater than “just books” too, because all the documents, service manuals, legal briefs, newspapers, etc. will fit in.
Meanwhile, I enjoy the variety of hard covers, paperbacks, magazines and newspapers that are still available and can be lost or damaged with no tears shed.
Exploring ideas and directions for the novel project…
“Even though I have a boyfriend,” he said, “you can kiss me now.”
The invitation, as strange, dangerous, and illicit as it sounded, could only be accepted. I acknowledged it first by a discreet kiss on the cheek, on his left side, my right side. Our arms soon followed, and like an airplane on its approach to landing, my nose guided my lips to that mysteriously sensitive area under the ear, where they dwelled for a while, tickling the thin layer of skin, muscle, and nerve. With an unconscious decision to move on, again led by a nose excited by the softness of a fair skin on which only the suggestion of a beard manifested a pleasant resistance, the lips found each other and locked in. It felt as if they had been measured for each other.
“Oh, if only…” my head started to reason, raising the alarm that the moment was about to end. I tried to ignore it, tried to think of a mantra as one does when practicing yoga. Nothing could be done about it. Here was the young man who could easily have been my son, and as infatuated as I could be with his youth, this kiss, to be savored eternally, was all that I could get.
“Thank you,” I said, withdrawing, but resuming our tender embrace with a regular hug.
“Don’t,” he said. “I wanted it just as much as you did, and…”
Our faces still close enough to feel the molecules of air moving with the words, I smiled. Or perhaps I beamed, who knows. We touched noses as if we were Eskimos.
“And I love you,” he exhaled.
Tears always came out of my right eye first. It was getting wet upon hearing those words.
“I wished I had a rational response,” I started, “but I don’t. I’m not going to tell you that we can’t. I love you.”
These words, prohibited for more than half of my life, then liberated like a volcano, still provoked more tears in the right eye, and the left eye followed. I could become a mess. Was it possible that a classical return to my teenage years, statistically proven to be the banal destiny of men passing by mid-life crisis, could be viewed as negative? But no, I had told myself already, I was not that common. This, I was sure, was different. Granted, I had a repressed youth and worked hard to conform to the world’s expectations of me, to find myself wanting the freedom of a vagabond life, one with so light a baggage that my older body would not ache to carry it on.
We sat next to each other on his couch, holding hands. His boyfriend would be back from work soon, and everything would be back to normal. This word, “normal,” held its own irony in my head. Normality was a big planet around which we orbited, and on which the weakest had crashed. I had decided that to be normal was simply a temporary state while you orbited around a group or an individual, considering whether or not you wanted to keep going on that interstellar journey of life. The truly normal crash landed early in life, while the rest of us kept bouncing around, sometimes traveling in lonely directions, feeding on the excitement and resting in a vacuum.
“I don’t want to mess up your relationship with Diego,” I said.
“You’re not,” he said. “Diego likes you very much, and he knows you and I have a special relationship.”
“But…”
“There’s no ‘but,’” he said. “You’re family.”
“Which is where it scares me in many ways,” I said, “as for me, a family has a forced kind of relationship. For many of us, family was where we couldn’t be ourselves.”
“Okay then,” he said, “you’re a very special friend.”
We took our hands back as we heard the door opening, with Diego pushing his bicycle in. He left it in the entryway to come to greet us.
It’s just an old sweater of yours
That I found
In memories of our common past.
Little did I know you would appear in a plastic box at the back of the closet.
I thought I’d return it to you
Wrapped in a cut paper grocery bag
Write your name and the last address I have for you
Take it to the post office, take a number,
Ask for nothing special
See it thrown in a bin full of other packages
Should I include a letter?
What would it say?
I saw you receiving an unwanted package and a letter maybe,
Throwing this sweater in a bin for Goodwill
With all things from me, the past, this town.
Your scent having long left the soft wool,
Chased away by mothballs,
I washed it in cold water and delicately
Dried it flat and for a few days
It lay near the back door
The object of my curiosity, softer to the touch of my passing hand
Until each of the threads caressed my arms and my nose:
We were about the same size, remember?
A thrift shop find, I’ll say, on its way to becoming vintage
And being revived to witness more seasonal changes
To re-visit long forgotten senses and impressions
Never captured in photos or scrapbooks.
It’s just an old sweater.
I’ve started working on this project again, after nearly two years. I think my attitude towards it has changed, and I’m more comfortable with it. One important detail is that I got excited reading the drafts, posing the hard question: which draft will I take, or should I just rewrite these anyway? How do I deal with the complexity of a novel, writing chapters not in order, filling blank chapters that I may not be as excited about as others… So today I decided to turn off the Internet and the phone (that was easy, if you know my aversion to the phone), and work.
Here’s an excerpt, just a paragraph really. The story is about a painting of a young man after an encounter, and how the painter falls in love with his art and his subject.
He woke up at ten past ten, the hands of his alarm clock spread in panic. He had to open his shop at eleven, and he was sure there would be a customer waiting at the door as there usually were on Friday mornings. He also remembered that he had a few small frames that he had promised to finish by the end of the week. He needed to get up.
He made a detour on his way to the bathroom to see his painting in the living-room, and was struck by the scene of the painting itself in the midst of the makeshift studio with his clothes abandoned on the floor, as if the artist had left this world to enter the painting, mimicking the fantasy he had had the night before of embracing it. The artist putting all of himself in his art, or his art swallowing him. The living-room as it was, including the image now on the easel, would be the inspiration for his next tableau. He made a note to get a new canvas today, a larger one to contain that new idea.
And here’s the same scene, in the artist’s journal style:
The true revelation came in the morning. I woke up late and needed to rush to the shop, and on my way to the bathroom I looked at the scene I had left. That was what I needed to paint next! There were clothes on the floor, shoes and jacket abandoned behind the easel, pants and shirt and underwear a few feet before it. It was – and would be, on a new painting – as if the artist had stripped naked and entered the painting, putting all of himself into his art. Yes, that’s what the painting showed: all of myself. And then the scene before me just represented a kind of miracle. If I remembered catechism, I would be able to give a name to the transformation of a body into spirit. Maybe it’s transcendence, transfiguration, or something like that.
I had to leave the scene intact – even my footsteps on the rug felt sacrilegious – get a new, bigger canvas from the art store, and start on number two of my new series inspired by that chance encounter of the beautiful young man at a café in the Marina. My muse.
I felt so excited that I wanted to calm down. The rational voice in my head kept repeating that I had to come back with my two feet on the ground because critics would demolish it, dismissing it as juvenile and grotesque, not worth even the price of the materials. I hushed the voice as much as I could, because for once I had painted something for myself. It would not be for sale and subjected to other people’s judgment. For the first time in my life I didn’t need someone else to validate my art. This definitely felt good.
Reason came back to haunt me with money matters. Of course, art was only a black hole sucking cash in. My mother had warned me about it, and the irony of it was that I could set up the framing shop with her inheritance. That too wouldn’t figure in the recommendations of a “business for dummies” book. The fact was, at the moment, I had no money to buy more supplies. If only Sam could reimburse me now for the cost of his gigantic frame, I could borrow from the store’s cash flow. I should have asked for the money up front. I decided I would call him.
