OMG (From the Cheersbro.blogspot.com)

The faces on the train can be so trying.

The advertisements you encounter before the morning rush are awful; from the crass and tasteless posters for horror films, the dregs of the underground product shilling, to the unsettling and truly very stupid ad for “Rescue Me”, the latter apparently some compellingly idiotic show about Dennis Leary’s distended neck. The atmosphere takes a slight turn to the more upbeat and jaunty as you exit the train: Hey! iPod ads! Colorful! All of the substance of a reggaeton song from a Newark summer of ’05! Drawing back into the trains, the most recent droll and insipid poster features a desperate woman, face oily and mascara running (undoubtedly the result of emotional feelings pertaining to the state of the MBTA), partially obscured by a chain link pattern. Captivity®! What the poster doesn’t show is that, if you panned the focus back a few feet, you’d notice the fact that the chain link pattern was a fence, not a wall of a cage, a seven foot tall fence at that, and the top wasn’t even that imposing, actually having those little twisty things that any eight year old can bypass without a scratch. Like the ones they have around elementary schools. And also relevant would be the fact that, like those school fences, there was a gaping gap about 15 feet down the fence. Captive, indeed.

Everyday the train rocks back and forth like the denizens of Central Square, caroming through the tunnel at a helter skelter pace, barreling around some corners only to stop for no apparent reason midway through the two relevant stations. The capriciousness of the train and its operator make each day a feast for the senses, and a fantastic workout for your core. For the bargain price of a $2.00 ticket ($1.75 for MBTA card holders, the gentry of underground transit) you can rock back and forth for as long as you can bear, shifting your weight in time with the lurching car. Crunches be damned: the green line is the low impact mama of the future. Focus your weary eyes on the gallery of advertisements as you sculpt your body. Learn Swahili. Teach English in China. Get that medical experiment easy money.

Teach English abroad. Sounds like fun. Screw you, mom and pop, and crusty high school counselor. College was a waste of time. I spent my childhood learning real employable skills. Mastery of English, bitches. Mastered it. Making loot and visiting foreign lands to teach them the native tongue. Figure the other skills I’ve picked up and honed over the years must be valuable as well. Figure I can cut them a deal for my expertise, you know, ‘cause I’m already acting as a consultant. Speculation skills, about all sorts of things, are a specialty of mine. Doesn’t matter how little I’m familiar with it. There’s that one. I can come up with opinions on the spot, at the drop of a hat, new and novel each time if necessary. I’m willing to peddle that shill at a reduced, package rate. I’m pretty well versed in websites, the internet. That fabulous beast. I can show the peeps of the world how to surf the web for hours. (Surf the web. Threw in a little lingo there. Free sample, to show them I’m legit.) Passive research. The World Is Flat. Pick up a copy of that tome on Amazon.com. In Mandarin. Cause I don’t have the time to be reading it to the client and, truthfully, English is a hard monkey to tango with. Your not going to pick up every little nuance if your not a native speaker.

My general cultural knowledge. Expansive. A vast pool of resources I’m willing to make available to the inquisitive soul who has a thirst for knowledge. I’ve got knowledge of comics, video games, and popular music from 1994 to 2005, inclusive, with the exception of Spring 2004, when I was studying other cultures abroad in New Zealand. I’ve read lots of abstracts on Lexis-Nexus, and I’ve got Swank’s password to the premium section of the New York Times website, so I’ve got that going for me (and for the client).

Teaching English to a non English speaker. Could there possibly be a more ridiculous job? And why, of all places, would any right minded English speaker place those ads in the Boston arear? The last thing the World needs, besides transplanted ‘2004 World Champs’ Red Sox caps spread liberally across the globe, is a legion of Japanese people students and business men speaking with a Southie accent. The Southie Pacific accent. Ha! Give us a break.

A word we shouldn’t teach the clients? Appetizer. Ban that word. Stricken it from the English language. Because it’s a paradox. An appetizer cannot feature over 2000 calories. That, in common parlance, is called a meal, in American English, also known as a days worth of sustenance in the FDA’s words. That is an appetite. Someone pulled a fast one on us, dropped the –e for an –izer. Appetizers should be like tapas. You want an appetizer? Go for a run. Refrain from food consumption for six hours or longer, give or take one purging. Your body will create a natural appetizer. It’s called ‘hunger’.

T.G.I.F. Fridays cannot sell appetizers any more, because it’s a contradiction in terms. Food has to be palatable, appetite inducing, for you to consider it an appetizer in these times, and we all know the food at the Teeg is none of the sort. Appetizer. It’s kind of misleading. Let’s just call it ‘meal’ and be done with it. (T.G.I.F.; This, guaranteed, is foul (parenthetic expression; another grammar tip, gratis). And I really don’t recommend teaching people abroad about appetizers. The irony of teaching a Chinese person about the delight of ‘Potstickers’ or ‘Lettuce Wraps’, when their grandparents lived through the Cultural Revolution, might be a lost and pointless cause.

Getting paid for talking English. That’s like your Grandparents giving you money for getting A’s in elementary school. No work. Easy. Who needs a job? You really did learn all you needed to know in life in kindergarten. English. I learned that shit by the time I was six. Teaching English is one rung up the ladder from giving your consent for paid medical studies and selling your sperm. I can’t help but wonder if the English teaching thing is really one big experiment also, subsidized by the Federal Government and T.G.I.F. Fridays to provide wages to otherwise unemployable liberal arts majors and spread to the developing world the gospel of appetizers and appletinis. Or maybe the is government is paying the Chinese Communist Party fees to displace Bostonians in a foreign land to see the long term effects of being removed from the center of the Universe for an extended period of time. Or to see if they would develop a Napoleonic Complex for a Sino-version of New York. In any case, there are even odds that someone would end up stabbed when a compliment of teaching prowess in broken, Southie inflected English is tragically and unintentionally interpreted to imply ‘better than you’ status.

You Figure It Out

I overheard someone reminiscing about friends. They said...
"My friends and I..."
Whoa. Stop right there. Friends? And you? Hanging out? Major. So what do you and these friends do? Listen to the latest Top 40 Billboard hits? Dance to these hits? Maybe a little basketball, sports, and when you dribble by them you yank their pants down, because it's funny! And then you'll all go for a dip, a little swim in the local pool, and you'll do the sickest water jumps. The cannonball. The jackknife. The gainer. The incontinent lush. The promiscuous older sister. Ha! I made those last two up! That's how reckless we were as kids, the friends and I. We didn't let stodgy old farts tell us how to do our water jumps. We came up with our own shit, man. We improvised. Sign o' the times. The "geriatric transsexual substitute teacher". Total classic. The "inconvenient truth". You did this one when you had to pee real badly and hadn't been in the pool for a bit. The "precocious onset of puberty". That one was the most popular and got the most attention, although it also stood the best chance of getting you pregnant.

Ah, friends, they were great. Sit around during the summer with your pals, maybe listen to a little Garrison Keillor, then rep it like you hailed from Lake Wobegon. But everyone knew you didn’t. They called us posers. Posers? Please! They were just jealous of that Mini ‘Sota flavor you rocked. And you talked like them, too. Affected a nice accent. And your mom would get all pissed and tight in the pants. Say Garrison was no good and that he objectified women and called them ho’s and how she didn’t trust people from Minnesota, and how they smelled funny. But when she saw one of them she’d be so polite. “Oh, I love lakes! And all the gophers! You must feel so lucky, growing up with all the gophers! And your cheese is splendid!”

Minnesota. Always made me think of baking soda. That was a lie! Baking soda. It was more like baking detergent. Clean my Girbauds in that shit. They probably called it baking pop in Minnesota. What the hell was it for? You would always be making some treat, a delicious batch of muffins or something, and you’d get down towards the end of the ingredients list and see B.S. sitting there, like an unwanted guest. Baking soda? Who invited you! You taste like shit! And it was always so pointless, when you were only allowed to put in like 2/8ths of a teaspoon. What good would that do? But you know that there’s someone out there in the world eating muffins, and they’re like, “ Ah, ack! Where…you can’t even taste the baking soda in this!” Must be diet baking soda; Baking Soda Zero. But at least it didn’t give you diabetes, at least you got to keep your toes. Baking soda had that going for it.

But baking soda was an uninvited guest, like that awkward kid in elementary school who overhead you say in class that you were having a party at Chucky Cheese and then showed up there himself and tried to play it off as a coincidence You didn’t just stop by Chucky Cheese on a lark! It was not the Olive Garden! This was an event. You’re never just “in the neighborhood”, unless you lived under the highway underpass, which, in retrospect, that kid might’ve. Like anybody says “in the neighborhood”, anyway. You were not! You’re a party crasher! You’re worse than baking soda!

Chuck Cheese. In my town it was called Showbiz Pizza. That’s fun. You got to be in The ‘Biz. Funny thing though: I expected more hookers and blow in The ‘Biz. But I know Michael Bay likes a slice of ‘za, and they did that right. And then sometime Chuck moved in on Showbiz’s turf. Kicked the joint to the curb. The show was over. Chuck rolled up in the spot, all loose like he was your chum. But let’s be honest – he was a giant rat. Could you really trust your kid’s birthday party and pizza to this character? And he totally rode the employees. “ Hey, bud, it’s Mr. Cheese to you. Charles Montgomery Cheese. Catch you slippin’ again and I’ll have one of my animatronic, hillbilly bears lodge a skee-ball up your ass.” Chuck was a real ball buster. But he didn’t get to the top of the birthday pizza party game by letting things slide. He was a ruthless businessman; you fucked with the pizza king, bitch, you’d get sliced! That was an industry specific joke. Sliced like a pizza, you know. It’s a joke, and not true. The reality was, if you crossed Chuck, he’d just come after you with a baseball bat with a nail in it, wrapped in barbed wire and dipped in mutagen.

Beth

Beth, short for Bethlehem, the little town of the song where Jesus was born. Beth, she of tendrils of thousands of hairs drawn together in unity on her lovely head. Why did her parents name her such? The casual mistakes that would come like the mailman (rain, sun, snow) with her name; and why wasn’t it short for Elizabeth, and could her parents have been mistaken? How was this her name, or could they have gotten it wrong? Where do names come from? Maybe she should have been Lucy, Jill, Claire or Connie. It could be that she could change her name, but she started out as a Beth, short for Bethlehem. A long name for a short child.

How could I ever forget the day I met Beth? I saw her out at a Saturday’s market, the sort of recidivistic place where Intel chip farmers hawk their sincere produce to those of us who can afford to spend a little extra on Kale. I was perusing the spread of turnips one particularly odiferous vendor had brought for sale, when I had the prescient impulse to look over, possibly to avert my nose, possibly from fate. Who was that? Somehow all 4 feet 11 inches of this girl seemed to rise above all the distractions of the scene. She was considering the virtues of arugala grown in a grimy valley east of the bay ( I had tried it; it was unremarkable) versus the charm of the stalky red lettuce that filled its strained packing box fat (hm, I was intrigued). Hello, can I help you pick vegetables? Could any act be more intimate? Take the testicular qualities of kohlrabi, hard like a kidney stone, the bulbous carrots like a fat man’s prick, mix them and… well, perhaps intimate isn’t quite the right word. But you see how close we could become in these quarters, amongst the lust of organic food? I approached her willingly, and she did not refuse my attention for long. In short order we walked side by side through the stalls and halls of the outdoor market surveying the entire scale of offerings like a king and queen newly joined and eager to view their lands.

We made love that very night. Can we say making love is synomous with sex? Or do we oblige each other that pass? Her apartment was a shrine. The tapestries she had brought home, to the states, from Nepal and various other countries on the periphery of China that I had heard of before but could not reveal much about, were laid about in fell across the living room which also served as the bedroom. The walls were white, except where they were blue. She had painted them herself, she mentioned. When I reported to the toilet after, I noticed she had a transparent shower curtain. The tiles on the floor were chipped in a corner, and her laundry burrow was overflowing with a wealth of clothing and magazines. Was that a Vogue peering out at god and whomever else might stumble across it? The porcelain basin featured black hairs in the familiar crevices a casual cleaning doesn’t disturb. I examined my face in the mirror; still there.

Outside she was frying something over the stove. She wielded a heavy iron skillet like a wand, like a heavy broadsword employed in the holy missions of Jesus. Joan of Arc, this Beth. The contents crackled and popped and spit back at her from the cruel heat, never consigned to their fate. She wore only a lavender skirt (how did it feel across her body?). Her back displayed a map of freckles that hinted at some distant treasure, the kind men agonize over obsessively until they drive themselves mad. When she smiled the darkness showed between the gaps of her teeth, not quite white. She focused all of her attention on the lucky, doomed denizens of the pan, leaving me alone to make tea. She liked hers with honey instead of sugar.

We sat over the small coffee table, the lone one of its kind in the apartment, on the wooden floor. She had fried the eggs, and the spices seemed as foreign as the woven art on the wall. Never cumin, never rosemary, of course. The fork sat in her hand like a little girl’s, the top poking out bare from the knot of her fingers. Beads of sweat down her breasts, a summer’s kiss. We talked but didn’t say much. Godard spoke to her. We’d never had much to say to each other. When I finished my eggs she scrapped hers onto my plate. They had gone cold, rubbery: I had finished my eggs, but here they were, more eggs on my plate. I would never hold that against her, or her lavender skirt.

The futon pulled down into a bed. A changeling couch, or was it ever even a couch? It had long since dried, and now it smelled of benign fabric. It was our spaceship. The open window was our air conditioner. There was no clock. What time was it? It was dark, though that only let on part of the picture. Did she fear losing me? She shuddered as she fell asleep, as though her body shivered from cold, or some Penecostal spirit moved her. The street, hidden from my eyes (but not my ears, always the more resourceful), droaned on, cars and maniacs rambling across the concrete. They had no idea what was inside. They couldn’t see through the walls.

When I woke, I realized I hadn’t realized I was asleep. I could recount the shade of the ceiling without the lights on, and that was it. It hadn’t changed, and didn’t tell me how long I’d been out. Cad. The mat was still warm from her body, her spot was still there, but she was not. Oh, did you also have the nightlys? There was a thin promise of light around the edge of the bathroom door. Some things are sacred. Have your peace and I will have my sleep.

When I woke a second time the light was in the window. Morning. What does it take to keep the interloper out? Relentless and always uninvited. My clothes reminded me of the day before, their smell testified to it. The plate was still there on the table, flakes of overcooked egg settled on the lip. Had we really eating breakfast for dinner? Or were we free of such conventions? They had tasted good, especially with the sweetness of salt. She had tasted good; could I salvage some from my lips, my fingers? Had I been to greedy? Gluttony of the flesh, the most delightful excess. The light was still on in the bathroom, the outline outshined by the its newfound rival, diminished against the door in the grey room. Some things are sacred. But there is a time for everything, and so I went for the knob. I had the faint inclination to knock, but it came too late. A lesson to procrastinate. I probably would have ignored it just the same.

The light inside was absolute, with no windows to invite competition. Poor, prideful light. We had spent most of the night together. Had the light been there all the time? She wasn’t inside, and it was a very small room, with no nooks and crannies. But, was she kind enough to leave a note? A box sat in front of the bowl, on the tile that was chipping in the corner. Wood in front of porcelain.

When I opened it, it was empty. It smelled like lavender.