I’m moving again. I loathe the smell of packing tape glue and cardboard, cringe each time I hear the swish of an opening trash bag, see the wrist-whipped air balloon fill and collapse, a parachute aborted at birth. I think, “There’s still so much to go through, remember, and then throw away.” Gone, the romantic notion of finding my way by tossing a dart at the map, or the map at a dart. Maybe true from the beginning, co-conspirators or one and the same, the dart and map are now after me. I keep moving to stay one step ahead of everything I own that owns me; I’m getting slower by a second each time the ball drops on Time Square. Soon my lampshades and flowerpots will know what I know. And then it’s to heaven or hell, or wherever they send the undecided. I’m thinking Pittsburgh or New Jersey, maybe Indianapolis. Miami for those who sunburn easily.
A friend said of this site, “…in a year and a half, you’ve managed to leave out almost everything.” Tattletale.
On a pair of napkins tucked between the pages of a paperback book, Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, I wrote the following (year unknown, although best guess is 1999 - 2000):
” Today, as I was ordering a Happy Meal at McDonald’s, the man behind the counter asked, “Would you like a toy for a boy or girl?” Confused, I asked him to repeat himself. Again he said, “Would you like a toy for a boy or girl?” I answered “boy”, and when I sat down at a table to eat my mass-manufactured food, I found in my bag a little Matchbox car. A girl next to me, no more than 8 I’d say, had a miniature Barbie. I suppose she answered, “Girl.”
Polishing off my fries, I opened the first of 2 bottles of medications I take for depression. As I swallowed the first pill, I looked up and locked eyes with a boy who smiled at me, then looked down at his companion, an elderly black man confined to a wheelchair whose lap was filled with bags of food the two would soon eat. When my eyes returned to the boy, he was walking away, and painted in bright red on his black t-shirt was the message, “Don’t Trust Anyone.”
Sitting in McDonald’s, San Francisco, CA, USA…deciding my “chosen” gender, swallowing pills, being told by a child not to trust, listening to my favorite band on the overhead radio, I decided everything was common. Even defeat. There are no more corners for me to hide in. Not in McDonald’s, not in little pills, not in youth, not in music, not in gender, not in me.
I’m as common as the wind.”
After transcribing this I folded the napkins and returned them to where they were found. I doubt I’ll keep the book. It’ll end up on some thrift store shelf, and someone, someday will find my lunchtime ramblings, undated and unsigned, maybe even read them. As I sort through the past, 20 plus years of napkin poems, post-it epiphanies, crayon ramblings, journal entries written on any scrap of paper or porous dry surface I could find, I think about this future stranger, wonder what they’re doing now, what they’ll wear the day they go to the thrift store and find my napkin notes in an old paperback. Are they like me? Will they come home and write in their journal, “found written on a napkin in a book purchased in a thrift store” as I did more than once over the years?
I said to myself, as I sat in the living room surrounded by a dozen boxes of photographs and notebooks, “Hell, if my friends stood still long enough, I would’ve written on them.”
And then I thought about my friend, who encapsulated in a single sentence all I’ve been trying to say without saying it, and smiled. The only way to see what’s not there is to know what’s supposed to be there. My friend is covered in ink. As am I.
Ah, how sweet and naive, little ol’ me can be.
He said, “You look different.”
Well, I guess.
Praise and Blame