A Whooshing Sound.

 

     You look like your anger; face pressed against the windshield of your car, flying through the intersection in an utterly absurd state of motion; your body hugging the steering wheel, but it is your expression that will remain. 

     Things are not well in the city of angels, Los Angeles, California; now an overmarked third world country where the locals are rude, inexplicably arrogant and proud, strangely unaware of the poverty lining up the sidewalks. Perhaps it is the reason they demand that their movie stars show up on television perky and happy. Always.

     The postcard for the anger is you, and I ask myself if I would have felt different if you were a good looking girl but the memory of the speed in which you passed by me brings me back to the reality of you condition: you are as ugly inside as outside, lacking any empathy to your fellow bystanders as you hurled your 3 tons object a foot away from each and everyone of them. 

     Your face registers with me as the second ugliest face I've seen in my lifetime; the first being of a mother sadistically mocking her own daughter. Faces one can't forget but ought to try; so I search my memory bank for the face of my mother and find nothing but one scene that never fades: 

I'm sitting on a bench. You are tying my shoes. I, too young to understand the importance of that moment, didn't memorized your face; instead I look down at my shoes.

     One bunny ear. Two bunny ears. Cheeky to cheeky now. Embrace. Zig and zag. Pull it apart until I feel the pressure on my little feet and hear the sound of the leather coming together. A whooshing sound. 

A sound film editors know so well: : "Gimme a whooshing sound." ask producers worldwide. I know why. I know the feeling they are after. 

In each encounter with the sad, the angry, and the ugly, I crave it more and more.

Tick Tack

      Be what you will; whatever life asks of you. Don't conform, don't try to blend, life favors the creatures that flow from one moment to another; it is art, don't for a second think that flowing means being unaware, or worse, uncaring about this moment, which is life itself. 

     When things come, watch them, feel them, experience them as if life, as if this moment is water in a bathtub: step in, lower yourself in, submerged to the bottom of it and stay there until gasping for air; air being the day to day of the same day, the things you do again and again and again without any form, without providence, without care, without soul.

     Be what you will, because whether you want, you see, or wishes, it is all that you have and at this precise moment, if you move your eyes from this screen and feel, you will notice that you are. You might not yet be what you wish you were but you are, and that is something; to be in this world is, in these days, unappreciated; preference given to what you want to be or think you ought to be. 

     But being is not a cul-de-sac, it's not a destination, it is a tick on the lifeline of every human; you never arrive at being. You live it day to day to day, and you tack here and there, make amends, cut yourself, cry, laugh, hurt, and die. And at that moment you cease to be, but you are not quite there to see.

     If you believe in life after life you will continue away from here: this plane, this place, this stage of being to something I don't quite ponder too much about. 

     I am busy being here, busy trying to be me; desperately trying to like whatever that turns out to be.

                                                                         

Straw Hat

     

     From my window I can spot you, daily. You left your things behind; things you no longer need, things you outgrew, things you carried around and finally today, it became too much for you to carry.

    Your footsteps barely carry your weight; it seems from up here, where I watch you visit this café; an oasis for your kind: their kindness, their non-judgmental service of free ice water, as cold as the Los Angelinos came to be; with their supermodel stares, as they meet and greet each other right next to you ; praising each other dogs, while you sit listening, your presence not sensed. 

     Is there such a thing as hope inside of you? Any expectation for kindness, a "Hello" perhaps, a sense of normalcy, of belonging to this city, of making through the night.

     It's dark outside, as dark as the moment that parted you and yours. How long will your steps last when already burden by days and nights, by dragging yourself and your things across town looking for a place to rest.

     If the life of a homeless person is not a testament of how human beings are coded for survival, even in the most abhorrent of circumstances.

     At some point in your day, you seem to remember how they treat you here, behind the counter, the sense of normalcy and acceptance you must derive from this place to end up here nightly. Even if the reality is that we don't care; we don't acknowledge you, and perhaps it is the reason you come here. 

     There are so many homeless in Santa Monica now that our eyes have become accustomed to it; as irises adjusting to darkness. And if being around us, unnoticed, makes you feel less alone; well,  it is the least we can inadvertently do.

Me and I and nothing.

 

     I long for myself; for the time when I was without the need to be. Anything. An open horizon, sun and oceans, an ocean away from where I stand: terra firma. Due in part for my inadequacies as a human being, and the voices of others who told me what a man was suppose to be. I long for myself; for the time when I was without the need to be.

     I run outside myself, looking for a chain, a path that leads to me, an ephemeral being that I can't find  in the real world but that I feel intensely within, a being in communion with the world around me and paradoxically, with nothing.

   These searches take me nowhere; except to a sea of men and women who think they are and that know it all. They are exhausting, these men and women. Bending my ear, wanting to be heard, desperately trying to validate what they think they know. 

     All I know is the stress and confusion of being.