Welcome to "More People Like Us", a [something something] sort of travel blog.
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Pinioned #prose #flashfiction #BeginningsWithNoEnds (Taken with Instagram at Natoma St.)
Overgrown and Underflavored: A Story of (Some) California Citrus
Notes on what might be a good journalism piece, were I journalist. I guess I could get off my hump. Go to Frezno. Track the story down. But that’s another story…
What I was wondering, just now, sitting on the steps of a church at 24th and Valenica and eating a fruit that was not a tangerine nor an orange, but a South of The Border Citrus of Unknown Variety purchased at some Mission Street Produce Store.
Actually, I do know the name. Or, at least, I did. I’m just forgetting it now. Something, “Maaaa—nnnnnnn—”, but by now we’re into Malkovich territory.
Sitting on these steps and wondering to myself at the variety of this foreign fruit, which was neither tange nor orange, and thinking to myself that it was perhaps also worth accounting for the fact that this was more than likely not the pinnacle example of this fruit, it being sort of pulpy, sort of fibrous, I got to thinking then about the California Orange; or, at least, that particular variety of orange which I’m speaking about now, what I refer to as the California Big Bad Orange, or BBO for short.
I’d never encountered the BBO before coming to California, but I’m fully cogniscent of the many things that have changed in my daily routine from, say, what it used to be in the Midwest or even overseas. Having lived one year abroad, and the rest in Ohio, I can say with near supreme confidence that the BBO is by far a strictly California thing; and, by that, I don’t necessarily mean regional, either, I just mean as recent for me as my move out here.
So, by California, I’m actually saying any orange produced since 2001, though the phenomenon does seem to manifest itself most frequently in California. Having encountered one solid BBO in Ohio, on a visit back to see the folks, I am completely open to striking the territorial designation from the name altogether, and just sticking with something temporal like the Post-Millenial BBO, or the New Aesthetic BBO, or even the George W. BBBO. Its moniker is of little importance, however; what’s so offensive about the BBO is its complete and utter failure as a fruit.
You’ve probably experienced it yourself… You’re at your local Mexican grocery store, or at the farmer’s market, and it’s 2002 and you’re browsing in the citrus section and you notice somehow, inexplicably, that the oranges are bigger, and they’re cheaper too, and you’re thinking to yourself on your wise little budget that, ‘well, here we go now that’s progress’, but little do you know as you carry that weight home with you and put it on the shelf and wait for the perfect snack time to ripen, that you will peel that orange, and the first thing you will notice is that the skin is extra thick, and you will feel a bit cheated because you didn’t really get that great of a deal on the actual fruit itself, and then you will bite into the thing and that’s when the real great disappointment will begin, because it’s tasteless, worthless, sort of like eating the paper cups from leftover parties that served that orange drink from McDonald’s.
The Original California BBO (Artist’s rendering)
Why is this happening? What has changed? Is it Big Agra-business? Is it fertilizer? Is it that we’ve bred the biggest with the biggest and now we’re left with a bunch of dumb, tasteless linebacker sized fruits that can’t give us anything?
Well, that’s my question? Am I the only one who’s noticed this? Was it because my mom shopped at Kroger’s? Were we sheltered? Were we lucky?
Yes and Yes, but I don’t think that’s what’s really afoot here. There’s a story here. Giant, tasteless fruit. As if the growth gene had been switched off and the organism started cannibalizing the tastiest bits of itself to build more skin.
That thick thick skin.
Is it the weather? Climate change?
Is it the polar bears?
No, it’s probably not the polar bears. More than likely, we can be sure they have nothing to do with this.
UPDATE:
My good friend sez it’s all to do with NAFTA, and a growing crop of poor produce from South of the Border.
So there you have it:
-The NAFTA BBO!
—Thank you, Progress.
—-You’re welcome, citizen!
Modern Monster Squad
The rocker creaked by on the aging cruiser, clad in black leather, with a full head of metal hair hanging and bunching at odd backwater angles. In the front basket of his Dutch bicycle, a brown paper sack with his 22oz special from the local market and a transistor radio bleating out some deep, anonymous hip-hop. Something about the confluence of cultures merging towards us occurred to me then, and I can’t quite put it into words that mean much more than a feeling but let’s just say it felt alright to see that. He made an impression without stopping, without trying, just pedaling past, this modern cultural Frankenstein.
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Eating the Blood Root
The chocolate edibles slid over our tongues and you barely tasted the psilocybin. The trees soon became like soldiers, or posts with flags on them like you see sometimes in those period movies about the height of Britain. As we stomped across the small grass our nerves became aware, our senses attuned, so that blast of open air and sea breeze of the beach was like laying underneath some giant cover on a giant bed and thinking it’s night time and then having the blankets drawn back to reveal beautiful, brilliant sunlight.
We walked and talked and rocks and birds and seeweed spoke aloud as well, we all singing the desperate fragile lullaby of the universe. Singling like old blues singers about a Mississippi the size of everything, the great water. The waves sung back, their elegant whitecaps dancing and hanging there for us, momentarily, as our mental cameras took still photographs of their fractal brilliance.
Towards the end of the night the wind picked up, and we sought a few stray logs to sit down upon. We imagined, out there, near the water’s edge a fire burning and all the babes of 1950’s Bunny Surfer Wonderland were there. That Frankie guy too. And there was a speaking stick and they all took turns, and some blond guy grabbed it and started jumping over the fire with it, dancing with it, letting it carry him in a different way.
As the light falls from the sky, a calm sets over us and we are humming with the kids swaying there in some imaginary past tense, some dream we share together.
We walk back through the forest slowly. There is a bathroom at the beach entrance. I walk in and flip on the light, the smell is startling. The process of having a poo is peaceful and almost reassuring. I breathe through my mouth slowly. I am one and all and now…
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A Soldier in Love
Sam Samuels sat in the core of a hundred miles of wires, of over two thousand meters of tubing, of 500 kilotons of weapon, and he watched reruns of I Love Lucy. The engineers had been kind enough to share with him their rigged wireline from the surface. Occasionally, now, he gave them rides back into town.
He liked to watch Lucy. To kick back and laugh. When it was over, Sam kicked off the TV and did his hourly check. The next show didn’t interest him much. He liked the old stuff. Like The Three Stooges. They were on just before the end of his shift, but until then he usually let his mind wander to the tune of the light arrays blinking. Or he often fingered the photograph, which was tough and worn for that reason, of the girl back home; she was not far, it was not even more than an hour’s drive and he’d be home. And the fingering was irrespective of how it was going with her. It was just sort of habit. But, by the way— since you’re asking— Sam wasn’t doing so hot. He loved Karen. With all his heart. But sometimes…
Maybe it was all that reefer. Or maybe it was how she got it. Something. She wasn’t the girl he’d hooked up with, and not in that casual kind of way how the relationship settles into the day to day and you’re not having sex as much anymore. Well, that’s your fault.
It’s not your fault, he told himself.
Then, on the other hand, there was definitely something wrong: another guy, or just another calling. He trusted her enough, he thought, as he rubbed the picture in his pocket again tonight. He was just bored, and the mind got to wondering when one was bored.
He needed to take a walk. He swiped the keys off his desk and stood up, checking his pistol was secure, again, out of habit.
Of course it was secure.
The white linoleum under cold fluorescents ticked with every step of his boot upon them, the air, kept equally cool and sterile by the re-conditioning systems, seemed always a bit unsatisfying to the soul. But the exercise was real, at least.
He walked and walked, and knew the way to take so that he could keep walking and never have to turn around. He followed the tubing on the walls, certain colors leading for miles it seemed until they led off occasionally into sudden orafices, forcing him to find another tube, another pair of wires, another clanging pipe to marry his path to. A low thrum beat throughout the whole complex. Sam was not sure sometimes if it was inside his chest, or his mind, or far far below, in the belly of this massive structure.
He didn’t know much about the capabilities of what sat like a tarnished obelisk all alone in its hibernation chamber, awaiting the day that was to come. He just fingered the photograph of Karen, and appreciated the fairly easy paycheck that came in every two weeks.
But he was ready to die for his country. Knowing that his position was both more and less secure in certain respects didn’t matter. He’d given up thinking about the actual warhead so far below after the first few years. It seemed to him, these days, like a steadier, more disciplined turn as a security guard. And how quick that had happened. The whole place finished in ’58 and he’d been here since ’62; and that, already, going on four years ago. It was tough to imagine these things being here forever, but the birth of his buddy Carl’s baby girl had left him thinking. How something told him this place would outlast him by several generations. How it would be ingrained, and accustomed to, and no one would ever ask just why they had a cruise missile pointing at some strategic target halfway across the world. He’d never thought of these things, or this job, or anything else they were doing in the greater, eternal sense, but ever since she drew breath this would have been here. There was no before, for her— and therefore no after, either— there only was the is.
All over the world babies were being born every day and every minute, and not a one of them would ever know a day when the pointed spears weren’t thrust towards the sky like deadly tridents. It didn’t matter whether or not they ever thought about it, it still was.
He knew how best it was to just try and forget. To wash your hands and hope for the glass half-full, and on the weekend to buy yourself that new washing machine when you need it, instead of six months down the road when you can finally afford it. Because thinking about the complexities and the consequences of such things would make you crazy.
Sam rounded the turn that would lead him back to the office, and checking the time found he had four minutes until his blessed Stooges. Almost like he planned it, he thought.
The chair moaned as plopped down into it. He switched on the set, and it’s ghostly tubes warmed slowly to life. Larry slapped Moe. Curly mugged the camera and ran around the sofa to avoid the same. And Sam Samuels thought to himself that he wasn’t quite sure what was more difficult: understanding a woman or a nuclear warhead installation.
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Random Vocabulary Musings After the Open Mic
I like the word “slapdash”. The way it rolls off your tongue.
“Litany” comes in a close second.
Followed only by “cannoiter”. Though I’m not even sure that’s a word. Google says its not. So that’s that, I guess.
Two for two ain’t bad…
EDIT: “sussurus” wins hands down. Thank you, Evelyn Waugh.
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Quick Frag
The event was timed precisely like a Swiss watch on a metal chain, a timepiece hanging in a blank, dry room, the background out of focus, an eye scrutinizing the face and waiting, watching, while the hands slowly circle.
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Hipster Rain Dance.
To be repeated in toneless refrain whilst standing on your favorite street corner:
“Dear Rain, I like the fact that you have gone away, and allowed me to enjoy my daily activities in dry fashion— which means I won’t have to wear that ugly jacket mom bought for me— but I hear that there are some animals and plants and other things that rely on you. I haven’t really seen very much of that lately, but I think I remember a chapter about it in my high-school science text book. So, come again some other day, I guess. But only if you want to. PS - I also need an excuse to stay inside for a week and you were pretty good about giving that to me last year. Thnx, Winter/Tucker/Cody & Jade”
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TRU MineCraft
For two years I never truly saw the sun. I was in the mine before it came up, and not out again until after it fell for the evening. My complexion suffered horribly. I began to crave the comfort of our bathroom heat lamp.
My best friend throughout was Paul, who went with me neck and dirty neck, every inch down through the coal dust that coated our bodies. The soot grew so thick at times you were overwhelmed no matter how many years you’d got used to it. You could get accustomed to breathing it, and accustomed to blinking out the big bits, but when it caught you right in the eye it was unavoidable pain and then you had to take a moment to get on up out of the pit and walk down either to the hose or you had a bottle with you if you were smart.
I came to Pennsylvania not to marry myself to the mountains, or the people. I was traveling, the nicer way in those days that I referred to my being unemployed. I’d caught a train from out of Jersey and got spooked somewhere along the line at 5AM by the cracks of the bull sticks close at hand. I don’t care how low I get, but I’ll never join up with those men.
Sunup found me a road, and I was lucky it was summer so that I could buy a bit of fresh food and find a nice place to sleep right outside town. At the saloon was where I met Jim Deevers, who was mine boss at the time.
Then I met Clara, and had a reason to come back out of those pits everyday. Which, ironically, sent me back into them for longer, in an effort to work our way out of this.
This morning I had grit in my coffee. But I won’t blame any one specific thing for what’s happened. Not the pebble in my eye on the elevator, or the stubbed toe. It was just a shitty day all round. You know the type. The ones where you just wish you’d stayed in bed and waited for tomorrow. But then where does that leave you? If you start listening to those sorts of voices, then who knows how long you’ll hang about in your pajamas.
So, no, I don’t blame the new guy for putting a bit too much powder in the charge. It sat there for five days and who knows why today was the day it got picked up, except for the fact that, again, it’s just one of those days.
I sit in constant darkness with Paul. We don’t speak. We don’t move. Our backs are flat against the wall of the tunnel. On the other side of this collapse they are drilling feverishly towards us, and this comes across to us in here like the sound of a small gnat buzzing just behind your ear, right where you’d like to slap it but you can’t get there fast enough.
Dipping in and out of sleep from the darkness and the not talking and the not moving, you sometimes snap out of it and think to grab the bug which is making this noise; and then the at-turns-dry/at-turns-sticky sensation of real fortune sinks in and you remain fast where you are, breathing shallow, trying not to panic.
Trying not to think about what’s just beyond your hands if only you reached out, if only you turned on the light.
“I think the one thing that I’d like to most tell the world was that I loved a woman. Not terribly perfectly, but flawed and honest and true. She was my saving grace, I am not ashamed to admit. And if I die in service to that grace, I will have died a good man.”
I am whispering this aloud. “Shhh,” Paul hisses for me to be quiet. The whine of the drill and the blackness is all there is.
Fat Chances
I cannot describe to you the feeling of making love to wife, and neither would I ever desire to in most circumstances. But for the purposes of this analogy it would indeed help to know the rapture of making love to a woman that is 365lbs. How when you gird up the loose flesh beneath her arms it feels like gathering a big quilt. How you can wrap your arms around a body all the way and there is still so much more to go.
The dream was like that. I was not myself any longer but something made of light and sound and touch, and I ached to wrap my arms around this truth so big I couldn’t bear to ever understand it.
The next morning on my way to work I kiss my wife goodbye, saying nothing. I drive to work, and in the parking lot encounter a homeless man slumped near the entrance to the stairwell. His head is bowed over, but I pause, hesitating a moment. He looks up. I have only what I have told you to tell him.
After I finish the story the man says to me, “Buddy, that’s one damn beautiful dream. I loved a big girl once and you’ve made me remember something I think I’d damn near forgot. Thank you for that.”
I nodded, stunned, and gave him a dollar. I was starting to sweat.
“You’re welcome,” I told him. “And God bless you for understanding.”
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Bulletin Board at Muddy Waters
Remember you proposed to me in that jacket? Remember I was wearing that when we bought the dog?
There is Djembe drumming, Dentistry for Fearful Patients, a new Improv troupe being formed, but what grabs me most from the coffee shop’s bulletin board is the ad for the lost jacket.
“Obviously,” it says, “This jacket is important for me, otherwise I wouldn’t be offering a reward for its return”
“It was taken from an otherwise innocent pile of coats at the BunchaLizards show last Saturday,” the author continues. I imagine the shock. The freezing walk home. The pitch forward into black nothingness with mascara still on. I picture the next morning’s Mimosas tears, a few hours spent stunned, hungover, and then feverish, after which comes the waiting and then, finally, the coldness of acceptance over the last mid-afternoon smoke before her shift at the St. Francis.
It is Doreen Roberts’ idle suggestion on her way to the bathroom that sticks like spit on a hot griddle; that sticks and sizzles and is gone with just a trace of residue; and, afterwards, she is thinking, “Why not? I did love that jacket like a puppy.”
She’ll make a flyer, she decides, on her walk home through the bronzing twilight. She is consumed, then, with finding the best picture, the perfect words, not too sappy and not too forward. How much does she have in the rainy day mountain trip fund? She settles for a snap off Ebay, because putting herself in the picture invites weirdos, and it’s too hard for her to think about locking eyes with herself a few weeks down the road when she comes in for coffee or a library book.
She is stapling. She is hoping, but not desperate. Whatever happens, if it’s to come back to her now or not, she’s done what she can.
And it’s not a question of giving these things, like our cars, or our phones, or our jackets, a spirit they don’t really deserve, at least from my perspective. The Japanese give even their garbage cans personalities. What I can appreciate is that it tells a story—and not a history of a trend.
And pretty soon her phone is ringing. It’s been ringing night and day, actually. Prank calls, jokes, hostage scenarios involving the jacket and some vaguely racist impressions of Middle Easterners. She is half-way to regretting putting up the flyer in the first place as she stares down at the unfamiliar number with the 415- area code. But this time, this call, she hopes… will be for real.
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“Swiping the Thigh” : My TSA Experience
My intention was not to fall asleep at all. But I was infected with Vegas, filled with its ridiculousness. And I was three quarters into an oversized pint of Johnny Walker Red and just coming back from having a joint outside on the street and eventually wandering (or was it escaping?) out to the only place I felt safe, the grassy area beneath the tall hotel street sign.
But I did fall asleep; and woke confused to my alarm an hour later. And at 6AM I put on my coat and kissed her goodbye and stumbled out into the fluorescent hallway, dragging my luggage behind me. In the taxi on the way to the airport, I ate in desperation the other half of a leftover 1AM club sandwich purchased in the all night American Diner- her last hurrah, but not mine.
And then struggling to the gate. At least check-in was easy and clear.
I get round then into the cattle call and spot the machine. The millimeter microwave scanner. Otherwise known as “The Penis & Titty Cam”. The giant, imposing thing that looks like a portable gassing station for a lot of very well justified reasons.
And I don’t mean to sound like an asshole, or a liberal, or anything thereafter in between, but personally I like to trust the large number of the world’s preeminent scientists when they draft a minimum of two letters to US Science Advisor, John Holdren, to halt the use of these machines until further testing is done. What I am not inclined to trust is a political agenda.
So I see that there’s two lines, one for the regular metal detector on the left and one for the millimeter panic machine at right. I maneuver it just so, hesitate a moment while the person ahead of me moves forward, and shuffle forward into the left hand lane. But at the very last minute, after I’ve de-shoed, and my tubs are filled with open laptop and the contents of my pocket, she looks at me and tells me to go to the right: to the other machine, the millimeter wave. I jump. My gut sinks. On looking back, I have to laugh, because my first reaction is to act completely guilty, saying, “No, I want to go through that one,” and trying to push through to the traditional metal detector.
She rises to meet me, to block my passage with her hand. Her gaze, too, changes. I’m glad I got to see that. The flexing of some muscle, even in this woman- especially in this woman!- the result of: training, or empowerment, or the true nature of the threat these people do indeed face everyday? Because god knows I wouldn’t want their job.
Suddenly, her partner, a black woman who is working the other machine, is stepping in on my right.
“Sir,” she’s saying, “Sir, please come over here and go through this machine as the other TSA agent has instructed.”
“No,” I keep saying, “I wan’t to go through this machine.”
“Sir, you have to follow the instructions of my fellow TSA agent. You cannot go that way.”
“Sir, you CAN’T go this way. SIR!”
Until finally, I say- like speaking the magic words- “I’d like to opt out.” And it’s as if time has stopped. They wind down. Back up. “That’s exactly what we needed to hear,” the black woman says.
“We got a Manual over here,” she shouts. “Can I get a Manual over here at C5?”
They speak into walkie-talkies, the line backs up like a snag in a rope. They take my luggage, walk me through the proper metal detector anyway. People are grumbling, and I am absolutely not looking back, lest I greet that kind of negativity in my hungover state. I just want to get on the plane, to my family vacation, and hope to find the least uncomfortable position to fold myself into for a two hour crashout. But now I’ve become a ‘Manual’.
I am led to an unused scanner lane and told we will wait here for another agent, this one a small Filipino man who soon approaches. “How you doing?” the first agent says, stepping back. The Filipino man is donning latex gloves beside me.
“You all good here?” says the first one.
“I’m all good,” the second says, stepping in, snapping the gloves tight as he speaks this appropriated phrase. “Okay,” his voice rings, slightly sonorous in a way that makes the encounter all the more surreal. “Okay, here first I will ask you to spread your arms.”
Other traverlers are passing through the lanes. I’m looking back at the ones looking at me, at the line of near parishioners attendant to that despicable machine.
I don’t like it.
“Okay, I am looking at your arms now.” He’s sweeping them. “I am moving onto your torso. Okay. Okay.” He’s moving about my waist, feeling my waistband in and out. “Okay. I’m going to be sweeping the thigh now,” he says, and I know that that is straight out of some training manual:
“Sweeping the thigh…”
“Moving on,” he says, afterwards. He clears one leg at a time. Once he’s done with the right, he works his way up the left until one more round of “Sweeping the thigh. Okay. Sweeping. The. Thigh” His hand is going up and down my leg. Me: hungover, tired, waiting just to plop down into that airplane seat.
Soon he is finished. My things have been brought over. I am allowed to dress at my own pace, refitting the brace I have on my wrist, and slowly tying my shoes.
You go, get drunk, dance your head off, and when you’re ready to fly out, you get your balls felt up right before you board the airplane.
What happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas?!
Yet they have not embarrassed me, as was (perhaps only arguably) their intention. And I didn’t have go through that fucking sketchy ass machine- which was certainly mine.
I still feel it there, in the back of my mind: “Sweeping the thigh. Okay… Just here now: sweeping. sweeping. sweeping the thigh…”
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On the BART 01.06.12
What work we all put into being painfully vain, or proud, or beyond that. How hard is it to say to the person sitting next to you, “I love you”? Not because I know you, but simply because you exist.
Watching Charlie Kaufman’s, “Synechedoche, NY” I think midway through that he wrote this as a warning letter to himself and others of similar inclination. Don’t miss the days’ passing. Don’t spend the whole time hurrying backwards through what once was.
Wherever you are, and whatever you are doing, you must remember that you are free to give up, to change. It might not be smart—and by that I mean easy—but if it’s True you will benefit; and so will a cosmic ripple of those around you three times out.
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