SUPER INCENTIVE

Look Lively

Ten-twelve AM, the line at the grocery store.  I thought this was supposed to be the Express lane?  Fifteen items or less, lady.  You look like you’re buying for a Firehouse.  I wonder if birds have any idea—okay look, I don’t want to alarm you, so stay calm, but there is a girl looking in your direction.  She’s at your three, and my God, she’s staring right at you.  Don’t look!  Whatever you do, don’t look.  It’s okay.

Do you have something on your face?  Feel around—quickly.  But be non-chalant!  There we go.  You look thoughtful and wise—intelligent even.  Okay, nothing on my face.  Is she still—holy shit she’s still looking.  What’s going on here?  Stay calm.  God, my shoes are so squeaky today.  I hate when my shoes are squeaky.  It wouldn’t be so bad but it looks like they just waxed this floor.

What is wrong with me?  Why is she looking at me?  She probably thinks I look weird.  Don’t just stare at me!  Come over and say something.  Wait, I’m supposed to do that.  I can’t do that!  I just got off work!  I’m still in my uniform.  Why today?  I’m so hung over.  And is she—yeah, she’s blonde.  Of course she is.  Is she, is she smiling?  Yeah, she’s smiling.  Smile back.  Smile back!  That was so unnatural.  You look like a fool.  Why is this line taking so—Christ, this woman has a coupon for everything.

“You got a coupon to save me some time?”

Why is everyone looking at me.  Did I just say that out loud?  Oh my God I just said that out loud.  The girl probably—she’s laughing.  Okay dude, just chill, let’s think about this.  Say something funny about the tabloids.

“Michael Jackson spotted in the Caribbean?  And he’s black again?  I love these things.”

Score!  She’s laughing.  Shit, and she’s handing the guy her money!  Come on, lady!  She’s walking out the door.  She’s walking out the door!  You can’t just leave all your stuff here, someone will—you know what?

“Fuck it.  It’s 2010.”

An Attempt to Incite ______

I sit down and I try to write and nothing comes out.  I am going through old things and am posting my favorites here in the hopes that maybe I can coerce some stimulating words into pouring out.

Some of these have been edited, and all of them now come with a brief italicized afterword.

The Way You Look When You Cross My Mind

I feel a little crazy when I think about you sometimes, because I know that if anyone were looking at me, it might seem strange to see a man grinning when he isn’t talking to anyone. I can’t help it though–-that perfect little shape the corners of your mouth form when you smile, it just gets me—well, it just gets me. And your eyes! They form these faultless upside-down crescents when you laugh! And the way you walk, it’s like no one’s looking even though I know that you’re precisely the kind of girl that made men’s sunglasses a necessity, because after all, we should only be so lucky to be allowed to look at you when you know it.

I know it sounds cliche, but really, how did your parents make you? I refuse to believe that such a simple, barbaric process could create a girl so wonderful, physicists and mathematicians and artists should spend their long hours looking for the process to duplicate you in your every aspect, because not even after a million times of seeing them, the corners of your mouth when you smile—well, they would just get me. All this searching for the meaning of life and the origin of the universe and this theory for this and that theory for that and it wouldn’t explain how you came to be so…

Perfect? Is that the word I’m looking for? No, it’s too plain. Alluring? No, not quite enough oomph. I could learn every language, speak every tongue, and never be able to come up with the sequence of characters to describe you in a word. The best I could hope for would be a sequence of words a thousand long maybe, and even that would seem insufficient. Even then, with a thousand words, how could I describe you, because if a thousand words forms a picture, and one picture of you would not be enough, how many words would it take to make a million pictures? Could I write that many? Absolutely not, but I’ll try to recreate you to the best of my ability.  Here goes nothing.

You are like a poem like none the world has never read, a song written in shimmering glass along the shore of an ocean; interim beauty that would pass before my eyes with the slinking waves of water. You are vapor, untouchable and gorgeous, moving with the wind. I want to breathe you, take you into my lungs and hold my breath until there isn’t life left in me to keep you in. You are a dream that becomes a nightmare when my eyes open to a world that isn’t as beautiful as the one my mind could manufacture. You are the delicate fingerprints on the glass of my car that spell your name when late night conversation condenses into fog. You are, I guess I can only plainly say, perfect.

This is why I smile when I have no one to smile at. This is the way you look when you cross my mind.

I was bored one day watching movies starring Charlize Theron, which included Hancock.  There is a scene where she is in bed with Jason Bateman, and there are several close-up shots of the two of them kissing and smiling in bed, all with a narrow aperture and cut together like fond memories.  It reminded me of what it is to be in love with someone, so I took that thought and pretended that I was.

House Of Ghosts

It’s silent here, aside from the usual sounds a house makes when it’s alone. I can hear the clock in the kitchen counting the seconds until bedtime; somewhere nearby I can hear the electric hum of a TV on mute. I can hear oxygen enter my lungs. There’s a strange feeling here in my house, one of an empty but lived-in quality. Obvious evidence of people other than myself lies strewn about everywhere you look. A pair of used socks lays crumpled next to the couch—a left over meal from a dinnertime unknown sits on the stove. There are used dishes in the sink. Splattered with sauces and oils and crumbs I’ve never tasted, these dishes do not belong to me.

This place is a house of ghosts, a place where images and evidence of passing phantoms collects and dissipates—a place where footprints and voices coalesce in manners unseen.

I wrote this sometime in early 2008 and sat on it for a long time because I thought that things worth reading had to be long and drawn out, but reading it now makes me realize that even small things can carry importance.  At the time of writing, I was working Monday through Friday from 6AM to 2:30PM and spending my time afterward losing the weight I had packed on in the few years after high school.  Because of my odd hours I would go to bed before any of my family came home from whatever it is their days are filled with.  Eventually I found it very strange to wake up to a house that was in a different order than I had left it the evening before and decided to manifest this weird feeling in the form of ghosts, because, well, ghosts were people just like my family once.

Particular Objects

I was riding around in a car drinking tea from my favorite mug, sitting next to a girl I hadn’t seen in a long time. We engaged in conversation about clouds and space and questions neither of us had answers to. There was no purpose for the drive, no destination. It was all just conversation and tea drinking.

From the passenger seat I stared out into the distance, both hands on my mug. I’d tip it just enough to let the tea softly burn the edge of my lips. I don’t like tea, I never have, but this was nice.

She sat in the driver’s seat, both hands on the wheel. She put the car on cruise control, and sat Indian style. There were no other cars on the road.

We drove through an empty city. It was a fairly plain urban landscape—it could have been Anycity, USA. It was lonely in a peaceful way; you could tell it was empty because everyone went on vacation.

We stopped to rest and when I got out of the car, I finished my tea and purposely dropped my mug. It shattered and porcelain scattered along the pavement. She asked me, “Why did you do that?” I replied, “I no longer love that mug.”

I smiled and walked away from her and refused to turn around when she called my name.

This was a dream I had several years ago.  I don’t believe dreams have any particular significance in our waking life, but interestingly enough I did eventually go on a short drive on a sunny day in San Francisco with a girl, and we did walk down a few blocks downtown where our friendship went undisturbed by cars or passersby.

The Monster

I’d like to share with you a secret.  I spend most of my nights chasing a ghost.  He is a phantom that enters and exits my consciousness; he tosses glancing blows towards my periphery and torments my ears with his whispers.  It’s a problem I’ve had since I was small.  He grabs my attention and as I turn to greet him with a blow he dissipates into a mixture of noble gases.

It started maybe when I was eight or nine, maybe younger but I can’t remember.  I woke up in a puddle of melted ice watching footprints that weren’t mine dance around the carpet in patterns that didn’t make sense.  I watched in galvanized fear as the feet came into view, as they shuffled towards my body, as my body went numb from the adrenaline, as the adrenaline kept my mouth from screaming.  The feet were pale and asymmetrical as if they were from separate people, sporadically moving and taunting me.  I decided that before they could touch me, I would run.

I used the shadows cast on my ceiling to warn me of his presence.  The shadows always give him away, because the phantom, he bends the light.  He bends everything I can see.  You can see him, but you can’t.  He’s a sort of tangible translucence—cold, warped atmosphere that moves with a human stagger and a smoke-like grace.  His movements—his movements and his whispers and his deviance are always what made me fear him most.

You can hear him chatter in the night, forming camoflauged syllables through the sounds of fan motors and creaking boards and wind.  If you listen close enough, you can understand what he says.  You’ll hear your name whispered, and you’ll hear him say hurtful things.  You’ll hear him plotting, scheming to rob your mind as soon as you are weak.

I was maybe ten or eleven, I can’t remember now, when I found myself awake and staring at my clock.  My eyes blinked and I watched the minutes change.  As my mind started to wander off I heard whispers coming from the other corner of the room.  Multiple voices, all whispering the same thing.  I could feel it again, the galvanized fear.  It took over my body and my breathing went shallow and I felt it.  I felt it get close.  I saw the light bend and I saw a hand and I felt its long, thick hair brush across my face.  Fingers traced along the back of my skull, scraping against my scalp, twirling my equilibrium until the room spun into midnight.  He was there inside my head, casting a nightmare that would plague my sleep for years.

The monster, he is rare and unique.  He waits in my room, under the bed and in the closet, staring into space wondering if I’ll ever again be open to infect.  He is the one responsible for the nightmares.  He is the one that whispers to himself in multiple voices.  The monster, he sits and he waits.  Relaxed and complacent, he is thick-bodied and pock marked, rugged and grotesque.  His human eyes never focus, the lids never shut.  He sits and smiles and whispers, his shapeless mouth always gasping for air.  He knows that I know he’s there, and he knows that inside of me, he is still my greatest fear.  He is paralyzing; my galvanized fear embodied in refracted light and fluctuating noble gases—a translucent image of nothing I’d ever want to see.  I think that’s why he smiles.

I wrote this a long time ago as a metaphor for a recurring nightmare I had as a child about being lost and alone and helpless.  That is all I can say about that.

Astronaut

I’m laying on my back and my stomach.  I feel light.  I see stars.  Where am I?  Maybe I’m laying out back, searching for UFOs.  I turn around and I see North and South America staring at me from behind a freckled blue veil.

Or maybe I’m just floating through space.

I shift my weight forward and I spin, and all the stars begin to blur into tiny line segments.  I see the Earth again.  I see the stars.  I see the Earth again.  There’s a quiet hum and somewhere on my suit, a soft blue light turns on and my uncontrolled spin turns into a comfortable slide through the Milky Way.  The light goes dim, and I’m slipping around, watching my house rotate farther away from me at 860.16 miles per hour.

From here, clouds don’t look as cute as they do during Spring.  Instead of rabbits and pirate ships and dragons, they all look like hurricanes to me.  They’re all jagged and violent looking, in a serene I’m-floating-through-space-and-having-a-great-time-so-I-don’t-really-care sort of way.  I think this is nice.

I’m inside my shuttle, hovering in Earth’s orbit, eating a midnight snack of freeze-dried vanilla ice cream.  No, wait, I wanted the ice cream.  I’m eating something else.  Besides the blinking lights of the control panels, it’s dark in here.  It feels like old powdered sugar and tastes like the smell of baby formula and cardboard.  I hold the package near the window, and the light rays bouncing off the atmosphere reveal the letters “M”, “I”, “L”, and “K”.  Oh, milk.  I really wish I knew which button was the light switch.

The great thing about space is that you don’t need chairs, so I assume what would be the sitting position with my old powdered cardboard formula and look outside through the window in the living quarters.  Although I’m not so sure of what time it is exactly (because to be quite honest, I’m not that great of an astronaut), I can tell it’s night time over the Pacific.

I can see neon and sodium vapor burning Los Angeles into the earth, and I can almost hear the electric hum of Vegas.  From up here, you can almost see all the people on the planet, marked by little white specks blinking under the heavy atmosphere of the Earth.  As much as I like this view, I can’t help but be disappointed, though.  I’ve never seen the Great Wall of China or the Giza Complex in Egypt, and I hear they’re both visible from space.

Since I was small, I’ve been in love with space.  Something about the idea of being weightless or the quiet solitude or the view from a point where you can understand and respect the sheer insignificance of human endeavor in the grand scheme of the universe or something about being in a realm of infinitely expanding unexplored territory where every object you see is a projected mirage of what it used to be—I don’t know.  It is all just beautiful to me.

And there you have it.  Although I have many more pages of writing, these were selected as my favorites and for their more narrative nature versus my more generally documentarian style.  I hope reading this and re-exposing my work to the public will have some profound impact on myself and all of a sudden writing will come back to me.  I’m crossing my fingers, but we all know that’s not how things get done.

I just finished watching Black Dynamite, a blaxploitation parody released in October ‘09, and I liked it so much I made this animated gif to share so you can let people know they managed to push the wrong button.