Fresh Paint

The paint was always mixed on Thursdays, because that was the only day of the week that Mr. Nunez, the mix technician, was free to show up in his battered Ford van. He would drive up from the run-down section of town, the area previously known as Cross Bridge, with its towering factory houses hidden under crippling decay, a testament to the power of the now defunct brick oven industry. Ten years ago, a developer had purchased a block of buildings by the Turpentine River, and renovated them into upscale apartments for the newly rich leaving the city. Nick wasn't sure if the plan had worked. He had not heard of any magical social economic transformation, and he was hesitant to apply his dubious endorsement because he feared that gentrification would spell the end of the faded plastic cart parked next to the hospital off ramp filled with clementines and pushed by someone who looked very much like Mr. Nunez, only older and with far less teeth.

Nick tried to calculate how much money he had spent on clementines while waiting for green lights, but he quickly lost track of the numbers. The hazy fog which enveloped everything was not a new phenomenon, but he had recently begun to question its origin after several voicemails left by the "Offices of John D. Mintzhauser on the retainer of the American Society of Justice in Chemical Industries". Instead, Nick shifted his focus from the quantitative to the qualitative, and as he sat in the scuffed linoleum lobby with the breathtaking painting of the Hudson river, still waiting for Mr. Nunez to show up, he attempted to summon the image of Maria Sotomayor.

She had shown up last week to deliver the mail, and seven days later, Nick could still remember the moment he saw her. He could even remember the feeling of the mail in his hand and imagined that he could feel the warm imprint that her hand had left on it. She was not traditionally pretty, Nick could not help but notice her narrow eyes and wide mouth with thin lips. She was tall and skinny, but her arms with taller and skinnier still. Her legs, by comparison were wide and brutish, and when she walked, Nick failed to suppress the urge to draw comparisons of the equine variety.

In spite of all of this, Nick was captivated. It wasn't because of their conversations. As far as he could tell, she spoke very little English. No, it was the way her features changed and danced under the sparkling moonlight of her laughter. The narrow eyes took on a deep and mysterious aspect and the wide mouth parted to reveal milk-white teeth. There was a dance in her step or, perhaps more accurately, the echo of a dance, not ghostly, but warm and recent, as if she had just walked in from the set of some Broadway musical.

But most of all it was her hair. Her dark hair, which kept him up nights haunted by the image of the nape of her neck flashing, the pale skin shimmering under the cascade of an oil-spill pile of curtains cut loose from a tall window. Her dark and wet hair, so immediate and so honest that he could not help but imagine her washing it, working the immense lather of it with her hands. He could feel it on his hands, and he could scarcely think of anything else.

He realized he wasn't breathing, and inhaled a deep portion of recycled air, colored by the acerbic bite of latex so faint that if you so much as thought of something else, you wouldn't taste it.

"Nick, como esta?" Mr. Nunez walked in, balancing a milk carton full of paper towels. Nick had no understanding of the origin or role of these paper towels, but they remained a steadfast feature of Mr. Nunez's tenure with the company. Every Thursday, a carton of paper towels would enter the building and an empty carton would leave. Surely there was a magical chest located in some forgotten closet, a reverse Pandora's box, leading intrepid explorers to an alternate dimension filled with discarded paper towels. Nick shook his head to clear the fumes, "Hello Mr. Nunez!"

"Paint getting you down? You spend too much time in here."

"Well it is my company. If I'm not here, who else?"

"Ah, I forgot that the American dream works both ways. The man makes the company, but at the end of the day the company makes the man."

Nick laughed.

"You have a good laugh Mr. Nick. You should laugh more."

"I laugh." Nick tasted the lie, tried it out for size, and decided it was agreeable.

"You laughed today. That's a start. What's on the docket?"

"About fifty gallons of enamel, another ten of latex. Phil sorted them before he left."

Phil, the teenaged night guard with the face of a forty year old man, was the third and final employee of the Twin Rivers Paint Recycling Company. He had been working there for only six months, but had already proven himself to be as reliable as a mechanical pencil. Again, Nick had no definitive proof that he spoke English. His last name was Malinowski, and the wax paper that he would wrap his meals in often carried the strong scent of Polish surprise bread. Nick had assumed that all of the Eastern Europeans had moved away from the river when the Honda factory closed down. Now that he thought about it, Phil did have the eyes of someone who was the last of his kind. Beautiful, self-righteous eyes.

Of course Nick only saw him once every two weeks, when Phil would walk into his office, grab his check from the wooden mail sorter with the ancient U.S. Navy recruitment poster on the side, sit down and sign the check carefully. Nick wasn't sure why Phil sat down to sign the check, but he had decided that the extra two minutes they spent together every other week was a formative period of time, a relationship building period of time, that would ultimately result in a strong cross-cultural and cross-generational friendship.

"I just hope he didn't leave any of them upside down, some people don't put the lids on so tight." Mr. Nunez gestured erratically with the carton of paper towels and disappeared down the hallway.

Nick sighed and settled back in the chair in the lobby with the breathtaking painting of the Hudson river hanging directly behind him.

*******

What happens to the paint that is recycled? Is it re-used, is it re-mixed? Is it broken down into component pieces and put back together again in new and different forms? There is paint beneath the paint that drys and hardens on the walls, and that paint, when chipped, when broken laterally and shattered and examined in brilliant cross section can show layers and the dust and sediment trapped in those layers tells a story of the days and nights that have passed and the cosmic rays penetrate the lacquer and the top coat and atoms which have floated, isolated, alone, for countless eons, finally come to rest, to congeal and to exist. The earth was lifeless before, barren rock. There are barren worlds out there, barren worlds where nothing happens, nothing save the endless cycles of volcanic geysers erupting and hardening their molten stomachs, the soul of the planet onto the surface, the rock ground back into the core by waves and waves of liquid ammonia, or methane, or, in some spectacular cases, water.

And on these planets with liquid water, what are the chances that randomized components could be laid down next to each other in just the right way, ionized by just the right energy, that they form a membrane, a balloon. Self-contained. Life is nothing but shelter, reproduced. Ah, but that is the trick of it; this balloon is protected and is true to itself, but it is not life yet. It may draw some molecules in and expel certain others. But it is not life yet. Life exists past the teetering edge of death when those components, not all but some, which once laid down in a pattern to create a self-protecting, self-feeding, self-enduring organism, some of those components break away and rearrange to create something else. Something entirely similar and yet fundamentally different. Life comes and death follows, like a child dragging a cart in the sand.

Snow Melt

Well spring is finally around the corner, and boy am I relieved. This winter, which started off so mild and pleasant, really took a turn for the worst in late January. I may be suffering from seasonal affective disorder. I may be suffering from malnutrition. My classroom vegetables have plateued in their growth, probably as a limitation of their containers. I transferred three of the tomato plants into much larger containers on Friday. Only time will tell if this plan is successful. Tiny tomatoes are beginning to appear, which is good, but the pepper plants are still far too small. I was hoping to eat tomatoes and peppers together. I was not prepared emotionally for a world in which I would be eating them separately. I also think I let my arugula grow too long. It tastes rather bitter, and besides, I only have enough for like one solid salad. Or two smaller salads. I've realized that in order to make your own salads from scratch, you need to grow A LOT of greens. And maybe stagger the planting to avoid half the plants going bad while you harvest the other half? Oh well, notes for the future.

Also, for the future: My next motorcycle trip is tentatively planned for the second week of April. I am debating ordering new plastic fairings for my bike. I am thinking of selling it, in which case new fairings should probably be bought after the trip and note before in order to keep them looking good.

Here's what I read this week:

Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie. I liked this book because the dialogue was very convincing; something that I feel I need to continue to work on in my own writing. Hercule Poirot became increasingly insufferable as the story wore on. I am tempted to read another of her books to see if this patterns holds up across the series. 

Linear Lines

Recently, I was struck by the way in which love grows and fades. It seems to me not to be a gradual process, but rather happens in bursts of sudden movement and typically only when no one is looking. You'll be minding your own business, living your life, and the next thing you know, BAM, you've either fallen in love or fallen out of love with someone and the process is over practically before it began.

I've also noticed, and been troubled, by the way in which we make space for people in our lives at the expense of others. It is as if we have a finite amount of emotional energy (probably true) or a finite amount of time (certainly true) and we make subconscious decision about who we spend it with and, sometimes more importantly, who we spend it thinking about. 

I've realized that to say that you have fallen out of love with someone is not an entirely accurate phrasing. Instead, what I think happens, is you just make less time in your life for that person. It doesn't have to happen at once, just a little bit everyday. And within the moments that you think about that person, you still love them and care for them as much as you ever did. 

But the time for caring grows shorter, more fragmented, more periodic. Love becomes a disenfranchised and isolated thing, still strong, but disconnected from the roots of your life. Love, like a low-lying stretch of land encroached by rising sea levels, turns into islands, which break into smaller islands, which eventually disappear entirely. The love is still there, but you have to look for it beneath the surface of the dirty, shallow water.

Here's a picture of the book I'm currently reading. Believe it or not, this is the best pic I could find on the internet. Maybe I'll take a picture of my book, but its from the library and is lacking a cover:

Darker Dreams

At night he dreamed of unceasing discovery and of a flowing and continuous existence that embraced everything and allowed him to study and appreciate but also to build. For it is in building that we transcend, he believed, and it must be true. There is nothing worse than emerging from the long and grotesque embrace of consumption.The eating up of things and places and ideas and the sick realization grows deep in your stomach and eventually takes over your head, and you cannot deny the truth anymore: the universe is not an infinite space. Or, maybe it is, but our bodies and our consciousness are limited in such a way that space becomes finite. If we seek to understand objective truths, we cannot hope to begin to do so without first understanding and mastering the instruments of our own sensory aggregations. We cannot explore, we cannot build with these weights attached to the ends of our arms, to the ends of our memories. So, in this journey to understand everything, and in an effort to fight back the feelings of distrust and disinterest, however temporary, we must practice periodic self-annihilation. An annihilation of thought, of emotion. An annihilation of memory, of bias, and of belief.

Here is a photograph I took a year ago of a day very much like today:

True Love

Book 4/50: The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

This book has been the hardest for me to read so far. There was something frustratingly inaccessible about it, something which made it hard for me to enjoy. Perhaps it was the lack of traditional dialogue formatting. There was no indenting or quotations marks, for example, just words. This made it difficult because I would, on occasion, have to reread a passage to understand if what was written was being spoken or being thought. I will say that the first half of the book was much more challenging than the second half. Maybe I got used to the style. 

The more I think about the style, the more I realize that the distinction between spoken words and thought was made intentionally blurry, in order to reinforce or emphasize one of the themes of the novel (perhaps the only theme), which is the ceaseless continuity that connects seemingly opposing concepts: life/death and love/hate being the two most frequently considered. I suppose that good/evil is as well, but in more of an ancillary role. Much of the book is spent looking through the eyes of various characters as they struggle to recognize, and subsequently live with, the profound falsity of these dichotomies. 

The main character, in my opinion, is only the main character because the author chose to spend the most amount of time exploring his story. His mental and emotional journey is not unique but only a single aspect of a shared experience. This makes the book very wide-feeling, very inclusive, with all of the characters dipping into a thematic pool that is communal. I suppose this is not clear at first, and the exploration of these shared themes does not really carry any weight until you get to know the characters better. These are two reasons why I think I might have enjoyed the second half so much more.

At its core, this book is an exploration of human suffering, and the discovery of traits and virtues that inevitably accompanies such discovery. It's a love story, but unlike Submergence, which was a novel about two characters finding love for each other in a large, horrific, and fantastically complex world, this story is about love providing a portal into that larger and more complex world. So, I guess it sort of operates in reverse. And make no mistake, the world of this novel has more than its fair share of horror. 

As I finished the book, I was struck by one thing in particular. The tone of the writing as the character ages changes and becomes more melodramatic, more reflective, and adopts more of a stream of consciousness aspect. The character remains lucid in his old age and infirmities, but the memories of his life flicker back and play across his mind, and indeed across the mind of the reading audience. in broken fragments, mostly. So the audience is keyed into the character as they both work together to search for truths in the mish-mash of images, memories, and experiences. 

This is, perhaps, what I liked best about this book. I enjoy a story in which an old dying man looks back at his life for meaning. I appreciated it also in one of my favorite books of all time: The Untouchable by John Banville. I think I appreciate this in both books because I realize that one day I will be occupying a similar role. One day I will by dying, and searching for meaning in my life. I can only hope that I live a long enough and rich enough life to draw on such a wildly diverse and stimulating arrangement of memories, as the one painted here, in this book, in such beautiful and terribly stimulating detail.

Blank Page

A new semester. New students with easily forgettable names. Why do I remember some of them? What makes someone stand out in the mind of someone else? What makes me stand out in the minds of the people I meet? Do I stand out at all?

My life has become an orchestra of well polished compartments loosely fitted together. I'm good at teaching, reading, and writing. I make an effort to eat healthy and exercise, I keep my life clean, neat, orderly. I make time to draw and take photographs and play and listen to music. I try to be a good son, brother, boyfriend. I try to do some of these things each day. I cannot do all of these things each day. I have trouble connecting them together. I cannot seem to find the underlying tone, the rhythm, the pattern that will glue together everything else. Maybe there isn't such a thing. Maybe the problem is assuming that there is glue in the first place. I have tried my best to search for and collect objective truths, but maybe there is strength in recognizing the futility of such efforts.

I need to find my framework, my principals, my glue. Or, in the case that I have already found them, I need to figure out how they work, break them apart and rebuild them and learn to take care of them and check on them periodically. I take good care of myself, but in spite of this, I cannot stop searching for ways to take better care of myself. To stop searching is to stagnate and die.

Ultimate Questions

The days are slowly getting longer and even though the change in the lengthening of the day is not yet noticeable, the fact that it is happening is enough to cheer me up. Maybe that is the true triumph of Galileo and Copernicus and Isaac Newton. Maybe those ancient truths, those ancient strivings to understand came from a desire to breed joy in even the darkest seasons of our lives. Maybe the people of the past felt the wearing, tearing, icy hardening effect of the winter. Surely they did. 

The issue of the orbital patterns of moons and planets and suns is quite apropos  considering the book that I've been reading this past week. Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut is the third book I've read in 2015. It was a fantastic book and I know this because as soon as I read the last page I closed my eyes and wished that I could travel back in time and kill Kurt Vonnegut and write this book myself instead. I don't react this way after most books. I don't fantasize about the time-warp homicide of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I don't daydream about the temporal-rift murder of John Steinbeck. These are great authors and there books are among my favorites. Sirens of Titan is not my favorite book of all time, but I wish that I had written it. What does that say about me?

I think it says that we can find greatness in the mirror image of ourselves, but we can also find greatness outside of this mirror image as well. In other words, I believe that our dreams and hopes and aspirations are only a single avenue towards the true and the beautiful, and that it is possible to be inspired and to find greatness and wonder in the pathways that were previously unimagined and unexplored. It's just striking when you stumble upon someone who has so accurately captured the beauty in your own mind, who so expertly captures your thoughts, fears, fantasies, and dreams. It's striking when you find that you are not alone in your pathway through life, that people have traveled there before you and, likely, people will travel there again.

Kurt Vonnegut writes in what is often described as the "style of black humor". I don't see anything black about the humor, except for the occasional moment where something tragic happens and Vonnegut perhaps doesn't donate the socially prescribed amount words or time to reflection and mourning. But for the most part, his humor is light-hearted and vibrant, jumping, like a child. Surely this book is less "black" than Slaughterhouse Five. I thought it was fun, but not without gravity. It doesn't take itself too seriously, which allows it to ask questions which are perhaps more serious than what you find in other books. 

At the end of the day, this book is a story of a man who finds meaning in his life. And this story is about the fact that finding meaning is not always meaningful in and of itself. It is a story about the ultimate questions in life, and how the answers to those questions are not always the answers that we expect, or the answers that we feel we need. I think, at its core, this book is about the irreverence of life, and human life in particular. Human life is rare in the universe, exceedingly rare. And celebrating life, even life without meaning, will perhaps grant us a clearer view of the universe, at the end of the day, than sacrificing everything for the sake of meaning.

Additionally, this story is rather circular, and ends very much where it started, which satisfies a part of my reading conscience that is still child-like, full of wonder, and which appreciates a good fairy tale with a neat and organized ending. There is still a part of me, I suppose, which prefers a story that sweeps me off my feet, carries me to places far and wide, before returning me to the safety of my home. Like a good bed time story. Like returning home from a long and exhausting trip. Like pushing outwards against the cool expanse of your sheets, before retracting, withdrawing, and falling asleep.