I was the first person in line for the Beck show at Columbiahalle. Other German hipsters may boast, may have the lie tattooed across their biceps. But it was I, standing on the kerb, ticket in hand, who was uncool enough to show up two hours before the bouncers did. It had been years since I'd attended a concert where you actually had to buy tickets beforehand, so I'd grown accustomed to waltzing through the doors in an altered state midway through the third opener, sidling up with whomever I knew at the bar and slugging my way to the front after the lights had dimmed. But this was Beck and this was Berlin: I erred on the anal side and showed up three hours before the doors opened. I had to ask a wino whether I was at the right place. Then it started to rain, so I ducked into a nearby pub whose clientele reminded me of American war vets, though they were probably just retired Krautrock scenesters. I sat and ate a pickle and langenscheidted my way through Die Andere Seite and waited for the rain to stop.
When I returned to Columbiahalle, I was no longer the first person in line. There was a German girl with Beck pins covering both lapels of her frockcoat and a Spaniard wearing the Beck t-shirt that I had left at home.
"So, ehh, you guys like Beck much?" I asked.
As they talked about Him, their eyes glazed over in a way that mine did not. But like all music buffs, I nurtured the belief that they didn't appreciate Beck the way I did, and like the rest, I was probably right about that.
The bouncer let us in and we pressed as far forward as the guardrails allowed. We sent the Spaniard out for drinks and we sat injun-style on the floor and waited.
There may have been an opening act, but I have no memory of it. I remember Beck walking out on stage - already some Germans were chanting "Loser" - and I was surprised to see him sporting his Loser-era locks, his Mellow Gold shades, and the sneer to match.
It was an underwhelming show, or perhaps it was just me who was underwhelmed. I hadn't slept in a fortnight and after a month in Berlin, my body was turning to Nutella and currywurst. I remember little about the concert, just that Beck was surly and anhedonic, that I was dissecting the performance too much to enjoy it, and that the German girl in the frockcoat had fallen in love with me, but I dissected her to bits and so lost her to an autistic Swede. The whole night would have been a wash if a German graphic designer hadn't adopted me after the show and paid for me to dance at the rockabilly club until the sun came up over Kreuzberg.
A week later, Radiohead came to town. This was, for me, the mother of all shows; was, in fact, the reason I had allowed myself to linger in Berlin for so long. The night before the concert, I tried to get a good night's sleep, and so I stayed up 'til five. I tried to get geared up in the hours before kickoff, and so I found myself listless and lifeless as I slipped through the turnstile.
There was an opener, the much-hyped Modeselektor. I was able to cut through the crowd with unexpected ease, so I was close enough to the stage that Jonny Greenwood's hair was whipping me in the face. And yet I can't say I enjoyed the show. They played songs - i.e. all of them - that always put me in a visionary trance when I listen to them at home on my oversized headphones, but there, live and in the moment, I couldn't build an enthusiasm that wasn't false. In truth, I wanted to go home and see what Ben was up to.
Through incredibly dumb luck, I scored a free ticket to see R.E.M. the following week. I figured that expectations were at the root of my rock show impotence, that perhaps a band whose lyrics weren't already tattooed across my cortex might stir me out of my slumber. And R.E.M. did, but not as much as I'd led myself to expect. I'd never heard "Electrolite" before, which remains a staple on any mixes I make for girls. And Michael Stipe was lively and carefree on stage, as Michael Stipes are wont to be. But as the drunken hordes pushed through the black forest towards the nearest U-Bahn station, I was haunted by the suspicion that I had missed something.
I was crashing in Schöneberg at the time, which is where David Bowie lived while he was recording the Berlin Trilogy. Twice I set out to find his old digs, where one imagines the Thin White Duke lavishing himself with a spongebath in a porcelain tub overflowing with Nutella and cocaine. On my first expedition, I walked in the complete opposite direction and found myself merging onto the autobahn. The second time, I grew confused by the apartment numbers and gave up, settling instead for a döner kebab and a Franziskaner for the road.
And then my cash ran out and I was ejected from Germany like a bad organ. I wasn't disappointed, not exactly. I had expected Berlin - and at least two of those performances - to transform me. And in some way they had. Everything always transforms you. But the moment has a way of eluding me. The attempt to measure the moment renders the moment, like the electron, nonexistent: a smear in time and space. The moment only becomes a moment after the moment has passed, often years and years later.
If I am to be honest with myself, and to my readership (who will judge me), the only rock show I ever enjoyed the way a rock show should be enjoyed was the Counting Crows concert I saw when I was sixteen. It was my first show. For me, the electric guitar was a recent discovery. I remember standing in a garage with one of my cronies as he plugged his amp into the wall. There was a screech of feedback, then the unexpected power of the non-chord he strummed, the disproportionate relationship between the sheer volume generated and the 106-pound nerd who had so amateurishly generated it. The electric guitar, for me, was the first great equalizer between brawn and intellect, though I would discover others as I went along in life.
At that young age, live music thrilled me. It wasn't something to be dissected or inspected for quality. The sound of a savage beat on a thrift store trap set was enough to set my legs joggling against their caucasian will. And so the Counting Crows show was a spiritual experience for me, though I would cringe and probably vomit to see something like it now. Adam Duritz - I believe he was wearing pleather pants - tightroped along a stack of amplifiers with his arms outstretched and his head thrown back in an unabashed Christ imitation. The band broke into seemingly impromptu interludes in which Duritz sang what was glossolalia to me then, though I know now that they were just Byrds lyrics. And on the drive home, there was no debate as to whether what we had just seen was three hours of contrived bullshit: we knew the mind of God and were content to say "Wow" over and over again. We were also buzzing to be in a car - a 1992 Plymouth Acclaim - driving back on the interstate from a rock show in Iowa with no adult supervision. It is hard to tell whether the enthusiasm of youth is misguided, or whether it is more pure than anything we will ever experience again.
There were other good shows, of course. I saw The Fiery Furnaces four years ago and I appreciated the performance several months later, though I struggled to understand it in the moment. Devendra Banhart came to Omaha a while back with his band of sleepy-eyed beards, and he suspended us between sleep and waking for two wonderful hours. I saw Low once and the Sokol Underground was unusually sepulchral for the occasion: nobody spoke, and people shooshed you when you did. We were hyped up on something, laughing way too much, and Will was acting goofy, so we removed ourselves from the show before it got too sublime. I have seen Bright Eyes on three occasions. The first time, Conor was so hopped up on quaaludes that he smashed his guitar midway through the second song. The other two shows were in Council Bluffs, and though they were four years apart, I found myself in the same predicament: drinking with Will, about to leave my main squeeze for the weird, wild East. Strangely, perhaps cruelly, life functions like a broken elevator and, despite an infinity of other possibilities, will deliver you to the same floor several times in a row: step in, please - sixth floor - women's hats and coats, lingerie and perfume - step in, please ...
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
Armadillo
I struggled with the reality of China for the entire month of September. It was one thing to read about it, and to swim around in it amidst a school of foreign fish, but to confront China head-on every time I opened the front door was too much for my neurotic circuitry. That was September. On the first of October, I woke up and suddenly loved the place. Overnight, my brain had formed a protective callus that screened out all the noise and allowed only the loveliness to seep through.
These stages of loathing and loving were foretold by any number of Peace Corps manuals and cultural integration seminars, so I saw them coming. But again, it is one thing to know about them and another thing to experience them.
Last month's euphoria has faded and November is looking to be a blend of September and October. I have a more nuanced outlook now, a wiser one perhaps. I am ecstatic to be here but mindful of the challenges. Three days out of the week will be good days. Three will be absurd days. And one day (today) will be catastrophic: you will forget all the Mandarin you've learned; after days of invisibility, China will suddenly notice you and follow you about like the pied piper; so you'll lay low in a restaurant, ask the fuwuyuan for a menu, he'll point at the board on the wall, and in the heat of the moment you'll find yourself ordering the bitter melon and bacon combo for ten kuai; winter will arrive later that evening and you'll discover the hot water in your apartment has fizzled out. On those days, you ball yourself up like an armadillo and wait it out. What makes it bearable, even laughable, is the realization that other volunteers elsewhere in the world are reading this paragraph and thinking: bacon? hot water? apartment? and the locals love you? Why don't you write about Nietzsche some more, you goldbricking ninny?
This is easy for me to say, goldbricking Nietzschean ninny that I am, but I believe that the human ability to extract happiness or misery from his surroundings doesn't vary much from one set of circumstances to another. I imagine I would be precisely as happy as I am right now whether I were huddled over a heap of smoldering charcoal while a typhoon made scrap metal out of my Micronesian hovel, or supping on crawdads and Chablis in a dining room the size of the Fleet Center. And precisely as unhappy, too. What matters is having some sort of trajectory, a plot to usher you from one day into the next. That involves finding a cast of characters to support you, and keeping a long list of mostly unattainable goals. It also involves conflict and complications. And laughter. I'm not sure I could endure anything at all if I couldn't every so often collapse face-down on a table laughing so hard I lose track of time and finally, as if waking from a sleep, lift my head, mop my brow and say, "Whew, where did that come from?"
These stages of loathing and loving were foretold by any number of Peace Corps manuals and cultural integration seminars, so I saw them coming. But again, it is one thing to know about them and another thing to experience them.
Last month's euphoria has faded and November is looking to be a blend of September and October. I have a more nuanced outlook now, a wiser one perhaps. I am ecstatic to be here but mindful of the challenges. Three days out of the week will be good days. Three will be absurd days. And one day (today) will be catastrophic: you will forget all the Mandarin you've learned; after days of invisibility, China will suddenly notice you and follow you about like the pied piper; so you'll lay low in a restaurant, ask the fuwuyuan for a menu, he'll point at the board on the wall, and in the heat of the moment you'll find yourself ordering the bitter melon and bacon combo for ten kuai; winter will arrive later that evening and you'll discover the hot water in your apartment has fizzled out. On those days, you ball yourself up like an armadillo and wait it out. What makes it bearable, even laughable, is the realization that other volunteers elsewhere in the world are reading this paragraph and thinking: bacon? hot water? apartment? and the locals love you? Why don't you write about Nietzsche some more, you goldbricking ninny?
This is easy for me to say, goldbricking Nietzschean ninny that I am, but I believe that the human ability to extract happiness or misery from his surroundings doesn't vary much from one set of circumstances to another. I imagine I would be precisely as happy as I am right now whether I were huddled over a heap of smoldering charcoal while a typhoon made scrap metal out of my Micronesian hovel, or supping on crawdads and Chablis in a dining room the size of the Fleet Center. And precisely as unhappy, too. What matters is having some sort of trajectory, a plot to usher you from one day into the next. That involves finding a cast of characters to support you, and keeping a long list of mostly unattainable goals. It also involves conflict and complications. And laughter. I'm not sure I could endure anything at all if I couldn't every so often collapse face-down on a table laughing so hard I lose track of time and finally, as if waking from a sleep, lift my head, mop my brow and say, "Whew, where did that come from?"
Sunday, November 01, 2009
Xiao Pengyou
I flourished early in life. Back in first grade, I was a nordic blonde with steely blue eyes. I wore an aviator jacket and I was unbelievably popular with the ladies. I remember standing in line waiting for the bell to ring while four or five girls fought to give me a backrub when Mrs. Baldwin wasn't watching. And it was no mean-looking harem: all of these girls were future Prom Queens and eventually, waitresses at Applebee's.
At no point in my life have I found girls gross. In the first grade, I did not see cooties as a pressing public health concern. Though I was deathly afraid of getting in trouble, I enjoyed being the object of affection, so long as that affection was stealthy and went no further than a gentle massage.
I was then, as I am now, sensitive to a fault and a complete pushover. The girls I attracted were uniformly sadistic, the kind of girl who would glue your index fingers together, pluck your armhair out one strand at a time to see how far she could go before you begged her to stop, who would bite the webbing between your thumb and forefinger to show her affection, who would color your hands with permanent marker because she knew she could get away with it. I was so obviously defenseless that girls took advantage of me every chance they got and somehow left me feeling guilty when the torture had finally ceased.
Then came puberty. My hair darkened and curled, so I took to plastering it down with gallons of hairspray. I sprouted a pair of buck teeth. A team of dentists strapped a football facemask around my neck: the chastity belt of the modern age. Aviator jackets no longer did the trick. There were several years where, frightened and confused by teenage fashion, I wavered from gangster to preppie to hipster and everywhere in between. Michael Cera was not yet a sex symbol, so high school chicks didn't even enjoy torturing me. They held all the cards; it was too easy. I was forced to turn inward and become an interesting person in the meantime.
Which was a cumulative process and an ongoing one. Hence I came to China.
Although I wrote about writer's block sometime last week, it has not yet arrived, and I find myself filling up notebook after notebook with writing, most of which will never see the light of the internet. This afternoon, in the lingering afterglow of last night's Halloween debauch, I stopped at the juice bar en route to the internet cafe, to buy a couple of cups of joe to fuel this afternoon's writing session.
"Do you have black coffee?" I asked.
"Yes."
"Two cups of black coffee, please." And for good measure: "No cream or sugar, please."
"Coming right up!"
Sure enough, I wound up with two cups of creamy nectar that was already attracting bees. I thanked the barista and turned to leave.
"Lao-wai!" - a little girl, about six or seven, pointing at me with a pair of chopsticks.
"Chinese person!" I said.
"I know you."
I searched my Chinese Rolodex but nothing turned up.
"Where do I know you from?" I asked.
"You came to my shishkebab restaurant! Don't you remember, laowai?"
Ah, yes. This was the little kid I argued with until 3 AM while a Chinese couple - her parents? - looked on and applauded.
"Yes, I remember," I said.
She followed me down the road and pelted me with questions.
"Sorry, little friend," I chuckled. "But I don't understand. I've got to go now."
I took my usual refuge in the far back of the internet cafe, pounded my first coffee, and cracked open my soy sauce splattered writing notebook. I set to work. Then I heard a little voice at the front desk.
"Where is that laowai?" she asked.
The owner led her to my computer and she took the seat next to me.
"What are you doing?" she asked.
"Writing."
"Writing what?"
"Stories," I said, for lack of a better word.
"Stories about China?"
I nodded. She stared at the screen. Then she reached over and hit Control-Alt-Delete.
"Hey, don't do that," I said.
"I want to use the computer."
"But I've got work to do!"
"I want to play games."
I shrugged and, turning away from her, lit a cigarette for the kid-repelling effect I hoped it might produce. She stole my lighter and pulled a gum wrapper out of her pocket. She lit the gum wrapper on fire.
"Stop it!" I said. "You'll get in trouble."
I blew out the gum wrapper. She picked it up and lit it on fire again. I blew it out. She picked it up a third time, but the lighter was out of fluid. She asked me for another lighter. I lied and told her I didn't have one.
I got up to ask the teenager at the front desk to log me in again. But by the time I'd returned to my computer, the girl was playing Maple Story.
"Hey, little friend," I said. "I've got work to do!"
"Me too," she said, extinguishing a purple monster with a rainbow gun.
"Where are your parents?"
"They're at work."
"Don't you have other friends to play with?"
"Yes. But they're stupid."
"I need to use the computer," I said. "I've got work to do."
"Work is stupid."
I walked back out to the juice bar and found the owner.
"Excuse me," I said, blushing with absurdity, "but that little girl of yours is bullying me."
"We don't know that little girl."
"She's not yours?"
"No, she's not ours."
"Whose is she?"
"Who knows? Is she bugging you?"
"Yes. She stole my computer and is setting things on fire."
"Kids," said the owner. "What can you do?"
I returned to my computer and loomed over the girl's shoulder for a minute or two. She was in a trance. I no longer existed. I gathered my coffees and cigarettes and went to the bathroom. I stood there looking in the mirror, pacing around and rubbing my forehead. Then I snuck out through the side door and went somewhere else. For all I know, my little friend is still playing Maple Story on my dime.
But she wasn't there when I went back to the internet cafe this evening to write about her. I sank into a zone and found myself, uncharacteristically, listening to Nine Inch Nails. I was putting the finishing touches on this post and scraping my brain for a conclusion that wasn't coming naturally. And then I nearly choked on my heart because someone ripped off my headphones and screamed in my ear. I turned and there she was. She sat on the arm of my chair. Then she produced a bag of hot meat from her pocket and rested it on the back of my hand. I recoiled and shouted, "Gross!" And she is still here, eating shishkebabs, twirling her scarf around her neck, reading this blog post as I draw it to a premature close because she is holding down Control-Alt and reaching for Delete.
At no point in my life have I found girls gross. In the first grade, I did not see cooties as a pressing public health concern. Though I was deathly afraid of getting in trouble, I enjoyed being the object of affection, so long as that affection was stealthy and went no further than a gentle massage.
I was then, as I am now, sensitive to a fault and a complete pushover. The girls I attracted were uniformly sadistic, the kind of girl who would glue your index fingers together, pluck your armhair out one strand at a time to see how far she could go before you begged her to stop, who would bite the webbing between your thumb and forefinger to show her affection, who would color your hands with permanent marker because she knew she could get away with it. I was so obviously defenseless that girls took advantage of me every chance they got and somehow left me feeling guilty when the torture had finally ceased.
Then came puberty. My hair darkened and curled, so I took to plastering it down with gallons of hairspray. I sprouted a pair of buck teeth. A team of dentists strapped a football facemask around my neck: the chastity belt of the modern age. Aviator jackets no longer did the trick. There were several years where, frightened and confused by teenage fashion, I wavered from gangster to preppie to hipster and everywhere in between. Michael Cera was not yet a sex symbol, so high school chicks didn't even enjoy torturing me. They held all the cards; it was too easy. I was forced to turn inward and become an interesting person in the meantime.
Which was a cumulative process and an ongoing one. Hence I came to China.
Although I wrote about writer's block sometime last week, it has not yet arrived, and I find myself filling up notebook after notebook with writing, most of which will never see the light of the internet. This afternoon, in the lingering afterglow of last night's Halloween debauch, I stopped at the juice bar en route to the internet cafe, to buy a couple of cups of joe to fuel this afternoon's writing session.
"Do you have black coffee?" I asked.
"Yes."
"Two cups of black coffee, please." And for good measure: "No cream or sugar, please."
"Coming right up!"
Sure enough, I wound up with two cups of creamy nectar that was already attracting bees. I thanked the barista and turned to leave.
"Lao-wai!" - a little girl, about six or seven, pointing at me with a pair of chopsticks.
"Chinese person!" I said.
"I know you."
I searched my Chinese Rolodex but nothing turned up.
"Where do I know you from?" I asked.
"You came to my shishkebab restaurant! Don't you remember, laowai?"
Ah, yes. This was the little kid I argued with until 3 AM while a Chinese couple - her parents? - looked on and applauded.
"Yes, I remember," I said.
She followed me down the road and pelted me with questions.
"Sorry, little friend," I chuckled. "But I don't understand. I've got to go now."
I took my usual refuge in the far back of the internet cafe, pounded my first coffee, and cracked open my soy sauce splattered writing notebook. I set to work. Then I heard a little voice at the front desk.
"Where is that laowai?" she asked.
The owner led her to my computer and she took the seat next to me.
"What are you doing?" she asked.
"Writing."
"Writing what?"
"Stories," I said, for lack of a better word.
"Stories about China?"
I nodded. She stared at the screen. Then she reached over and hit Control-Alt-Delete.
"Hey, don't do that," I said.
"I want to use the computer."
"But I've got work to do!"
"I want to play games."
I shrugged and, turning away from her, lit a cigarette for the kid-repelling effect I hoped it might produce. She stole my lighter and pulled a gum wrapper out of her pocket. She lit the gum wrapper on fire.
"Stop it!" I said. "You'll get in trouble."
I blew out the gum wrapper. She picked it up and lit it on fire again. I blew it out. She picked it up a third time, but the lighter was out of fluid. She asked me for another lighter. I lied and told her I didn't have one.
I got up to ask the teenager at the front desk to log me in again. But by the time I'd returned to my computer, the girl was playing Maple Story.
"Hey, little friend," I said. "I've got work to do!"
"Me too," she said, extinguishing a purple monster with a rainbow gun.
"Where are your parents?"
"They're at work."
"Don't you have other friends to play with?"
"Yes. But they're stupid."
"I need to use the computer," I said. "I've got work to do."
"Work is stupid."
I walked back out to the juice bar and found the owner.
"Excuse me," I said, blushing with absurdity, "but that little girl of yours is bullying me."
"We don't know that little girl."
"She's not yours?"
"No, she's not ours."
"Whose is she?"
"Who knows? Is she bugging you?"
"Yes. She stole my computer and is setting things on fire."
"Kids," said the owner. "What can you do?"
I returned to my computer and loomed over the girl's shoulder for a minute or two. She was in a trance. I no longer existed. I gathered my coffees and cigarettes and went to the bathroom. I stood there looking in the mirror, pacing around and rubbing my forehead. Then I snuck out through the side door and went somewhere else. For all I know, my little friend is still playing Maple Story on my dime.
But she wasn't there when I went back to the internet cafe this evening to write about her. I sank into a zone and found myself, uncharacteristically, listening to Nine Inch Nails. I was putting the finishing touches on this post and scraping my brain for a conclusion that wasn't coming naturally. And then I nearly choked on my heart because someone ripped off my headphones and screamed in my ear. I turned and there she was. She sat on the arm of my chair. Then she produced a bag of hot meat from her pocket and rested it on the back of my hand. I recoiled and shouted, "Gross!" And she is still here, eating shishkebabs, twirling her scarf around her neck, reading this blog post as I draw it to a premature close because she is holding down Control-Alt and reaching for Delete.
Friday, October 30, 2009
The Naming of Things
One of the finer pleasures of your early days in Asia is the naming of things. When you first arrive in your foreigner ghetto, you are a child: you don't know your address, or the names of objects, or what to call manmade structures. Perhaps you know "here" and "there," but that will get you neither here nor there. And so you and your band of expats start naming things, at first for the practical reason that if you are to meet another expat somewhere, you must choose a discrete location in time and space at which to meet them, and then for the purpose of distinguishing important places from the sameness that surrounds them, a sameness that would astound even americanus suburbicus, and finally with the same giddy imperialism as kids naming lightning-splintered trees or NASA geeks naming rocks on Mars.
You can master the Korean alphabet in three months without even trying, and despite our best efforts, some of us did. We could read street signs, but the problem in Korea was that there were none: the Koreans stubbornly refuse to name their streets. So the expats of Chilgok District 3 devised an atlas of their own, a geography that was well-known even to the fringe members of the group. There was Cakehouse Road and Footbridge Boulevard, Garbage Heap Turnpike and Exploding Transformer Square. We often built bonfires along Cremated Cat Creek, so named, suffice to say, because the foreigners of Chilgok 3 once cremated a dead cat upon its fertile shores. We felt no need to rename the Gugu Tunnel, though nearby Mt. Unamji was known only as "Jumanji," and it was pretentious to call it otherwise. There was Rub 'n Tug Lane, a reference to the services rendered by its afterhours massage parlors. I lived on the corner of the Pig Intestine Intersection. You often took your best girl for a late night stroll along Sea Penis Promenade, named for its seafood restaurants and their specialty, an uncannily phallic bottom-dwelling organism that propels itself by ejaculating torrents of milky saltwater from its uncircumcised head, served raw. (Breaking News: Though for years I was unable to empirically prove the Sea Penis's existence, Wikipedia now tells me it is the urechis unicinctus, a species of marine spoon worm. That which we call a Sea Penis by any other name is just as hideous.)
There were other places which we did not rename, but endowed with a kind of mythical status that baffled any and all Koreans in our company. There was the GS 25 convenience store, where we sat outside in plastic chairs around a plastic table and insulted each other until four AM, and The Coffee Bean downtown, where we congregated the following afternoon to apologize, to read the New York Times, and to sneak off to the bathroom one by one to enjoy the sudden and violent regularity afforded by a hangover and too much coffee.
We rechristened the beers, mostly out of spite. Hite was Shite. Cass, obviously, became Ass. O.B., like the Gugu Tunnel, needed no alteration, was just fine the way God made it, though you were allowed to call it B.O. if that was your wont. And lest you think we were amused by ourselves, we always spoke these names with straight faces.
At Old School, Daegu's one and only hip-hop bar, Mark introduced the bartenders to the Irish Car Bomb, which later resurfaced on the menu as an Ai-ri-shi Ka Bom-buh and went for nine bucks a pop.
Children's Day became Youth in Asia Day. Daegu was known, affectionately (I think), as The 'Gu. Chilgok was The 'Gok. I was Kisu, Mark was Marker, and Arthur was R-Dor 3000. Hyunmin was Richard and Sangmin was John.
And now, in China, I am Pan Da. I have so far neglected to mention this fact, perhaps the key plot element of my Chinese existence. I did not choose the name, though I certainly would have if I had been creative enough to think of it myself.
Our official Chinese names were posted on the wall of the hotel conference room on our third or fourth day in-country. I'm not sure who picked them for us, whether it was a Chinese bureaucrat down at the immigration office, one of our Mandarin teachers, or a Peace Corps employee with his tongue planted firmly in cheek.
I remember glancing at the other names as I looked for myself on the list. Song Min-Tao, Gao Hai-Ning, Bai Li-Jie, Lin Rei: these were names that I could not pronounce or make fun of. Then I found mine: Pan Da. Pan ... Da. Panda. I stood there for an unusually long time. I ran my index finger across the page to make sure that the name was indeed mine. Keith Petit - Pan Da. I searched the other 74 names for a Kou A-La, a Wen Hung-Lo, a Long Dong, to no avail. I shrugged. It was a happy coincidence that the most ridiculous volunteer should have the most ridiculous name. From that day on, I was Panda. Many of my fellow Peace Corpses still do not know my Christian name.
Pan Da looks something like this: 潘达. The first symbol, Pan, is a surname. The second symbol, Da, means "dignity" or "to achieve." But to my students, Pan Da means "panda." And so, after asking them to call me Keith, Mr. Petit, or Pan Da, they insist upon calling me Mr. Panda.
It's good to be a panda in China. When my name comes up at the drinking table, I will smugly say, Dui-aaaa - wo shi guo bao: Yep - I'm a national treasure. It's hard to gauge whether my audience is amused, revolted, or amused despite their revulsion.
China has named me, but the naming of China is not yet complete. I have named and renamed some of my students. Monkey, I explain, is probably not such a good name for a human. How about Edwin? I am slowly mapping out Nanchong, planting flags and lifting my leg on street signs, but it remains largely uncharted. And Chengdu was far too vast for naming, aside from the bar where I met and came to know some of my favorite people, where we were once attacked by a hive of ill-tempered wasps, a bar we dubbed The Bee Bar and much later, The Bee Bar and Grille, after we discovered that they served peanuts upon request.
You can master the Korean alphabet in three months without even trying, and despite our best efforts, some of us did. We could read street signs, but the problem in Korea was that there were none: the Koreans stubbornly refuse to name their streets. So the expats of Chilgok District 3 devised an atlas of their own, a geography that was well-known even to the fringe members of the group. There was Cakehouse Road and Footbridge Boulevard, Garbage Heap Turnpike and Exploding Transformer Square. We often built bonfires along Cremated Cat Creek, so named, suffice to say, because the foreigners of Chilgok 3 once cremated a dead cat upon its fertile shores. We felt no need to rename the Gugu Tunnel, though nearby Mt. Unamji was known only as "Jumanji," and it was pretentious to call it otherwise. There was Rub 'n Tug Lane, a reference to the services rendered by its afterhours massage parlors. I lived on the corner of the Pig Intestine Intersection. You often took your best girl for a late night stroll along Sea Penis Promenade, named for its seafood restaurants and their specialty, an uncannily phallic bottom-dwelling organism that propels itself by ejaculating torrents of milky saltwater from its uncircumcised head, served raw. (Breaking News: Though for years I was unable to empirically prove the Sea Penis's existence, Wikipedia now tells me it is the urechis unicinctus, a species of marine spoon worm. That which we call a Sea Penis by any other name is just as hideous.)
There were other places which we did not rename, but endowed with a kind of mythical status that baffled any and all Koreans in our company. There was the GS 25 convenience store, where we sat outside in plastic chairs around a plastic table and insulted each other until four AM, and The Coffee Bean downtown, where we congregated the following afternoon to apologize, to read the New York Times, and to sneak off to the bathroom one by one to enjoy the sudden and violent regularity afforded by a hangover and too much coffee.
We rechristened the beers, mostly out of spite. Hite was Shite. Cass, obviously, became Ass. O.B., like the Gugu Tunnel, needed no alteration, was just fine the way God made it, though you were allowed to call it B.O. if that was your wont. And lest you think we were amused by ourselves, we always spoke these names with straight faces.
At Old School, Daegu's one and only hip-hop bar, Mark introduced the bartenders to the Irish Car Bomb, which later resurfaced on the menu as an Ai-ri-shi Ka Bom-buh and went for nine bucks a pop.
Children's Day became Youth in Asia Day. Daegu was known, affectionately (I think), as The 'Gu. Chilgok was The 'Gok. I was Kisu, Mark was Marker, and Arthur was R-Dor 3000. Hyunmin was Richard and Sangmin was John.
And now, in China, I am Pan Da. I have so far neglected to mention this fact, perhaps the key plot element of my Chinese existence. I did not choose the name, though I certainly would have if I had been creative enough to think of it myself.
Our official Chinese names were posted on the wall of the hotel conference room on our third or fourth day in-country. I'm not sure who picked them for us, whether it was a Chinese bureaucrat down at the immigration office, one of our Mandarin teachers, or a Peace Corps employee with his tongue planted firmly in cheek.
I remember glancing at the other names as I looked for myself on the list. Song Min-Tao, Gao Hai-Ning, Bai Li-Jie, Lin Rei: these were names that I could not pronounce or make fun of. Then I found mine: Pan Da. Pan ... Da. Panda. I stood there for an unusually long time. I ran my index finger across the page to make sure that the name was indeed mine. Keith Petit - Pan Da. I searched the other 74 names for a Kou A-La, a Wen Hung-Lo, a Long Dong, to no avail. I shrugged. It was a happy coincidence that the most ridiculous volunteer should have the most ridiculous name. From that day on, I was Panda. Many of my fellow Peace Corpses still do not know my Christian name.
Pan Da looks something like this: 潘达. The first symbol, Pan, is a surname. The second symbol, Da, means "dignity" or "to achieve." But to my students, Pan Da means "panda." And so, after asking them to call me Keith, Mr. Petit, or Pan Da, they insist upon calling me Mr. Panda.
It's good to be a panda in China. When my name comes up at the drinking table, I will smugly say, Dui-aaaa - wo shi guo bao: Yep - I'm a national treasure. It's hard to gauge whether my audience is amused, revolted, or amused despite their revulsion.
China has named me, but the naming of China is not yet complete. I have named and renamed some of my students. Monkey, I explain, is probably not such a good name for a human. How about Edwin? I am slowly mapping out Nanchong, planting flags and lifting my leg on street signs, but it remains largely uncharted. And Chengdu was far too vast for naming, aside from the bar where I met and came to know some of my favorite people, where we were once attacked by a hive of ill-tempered wasps, a bar we dubbed The Bee Bar and much later, The Bee Bar and Grille, after we discovered that they served peanuts upon request.
Milgram Experiment
Because I am chronically three minutes and 37 seconds behind the rest of the world, every morning I miss the bus and wind up riding shotgun in one of the Toyotavans that wait for me just off campus. The drivers charge me ten yuan, which is two kuai more than a taxi, and ten times more expensive than a bus. But it's well worth footing the bill for companionship and a complimentary lesson in Sichuanese, and the comfort that comes with knowing the Toyotavan cannot exceed thirty miles per hour, which gives me ample time to grab the "oh shit" handle prior to head-on collision.
This morning, I told the driver to wait while I hit up the ATM so I could pay him. It was raining, as it has been for the past month. Poised there with my fingers hovering over the keypad, some inner Pavlovian voice barked at me, some vague memory of a past trauma suffered at the hands of a rain-drenched Chinese cashbox, perhaps this very one - but I ignored it. "Please be entering your secret number," said the ATM. The instant my first digit met the first digit, the ATM dealt me an electric shock that made my Amish beard stand on end. A stream of religious personages and scatology flew out of my mouth. The security guards stared. I hobbled in a circle and slapped my thighs. The Toyotavan man tooted his horn. I returned to the machine and was shocked again. And again. Chinese pin numbers are six digits long. So, zap, I hit the "cancel" button and withdrew my card, which sent a current of not unpleasant energy coursing through my bones.
I jerked and jolted over to the machine across the street and waited in the queue for the girl ahead of me to finish. That she was not screaming and cursing throughout her transaction seemed to me to be a good sign. I inserted my card and zap, I flew away from the machine. I staggered back to it and zap. I snuck up on it from the side and zap. As a foreigner, apparently, I am a much better conductor than your average Asian coed. I needed something plastic to put between me and all that misdirected Chinese energy. But I had neither pen, nor lighter, nor tiddlywink. One of my students passed by, no doubt wondering why I looked like Gene Wilder on meth. I asked him for a pen. And thusly was the transaction completed and the taxi paid for. Now the problem was that I was five minutes late for class.
And oddly, trembling with static, my mind still lost somewhere in Tuesday night, I taught the best class of my life. It was my first run-through of a lesson I had dubbed "Poetry Slam." I began by reading the entirety of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot, and nearly succumbed to a crying jag when I came to the part about the coffee spoons. My students gave me a polite ovation. I asked how the poem made them feel.
"Depressed," offered a girl in the front row.
"Excellent! That's how it's supposed to make you feel. And why did it seem depressing to you?"
"Because it was too long."
Laughter. I laughed, too, though me and the ghost of Tough Shit Eliot were both wounded by the remark.
"Prufrock seems scared of some event in the future. I think it is coming soon," another girl said. "What is he scared of?"
"I don't know," I shrugged. "Probably death or something."
I had them read aloud and analyze poems by Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Carl Sandburg. One of the groups was reading The Negro Speaks of Rivers by Langston Hughes, and though the word "Negro" made them giggle, they loved the poem. One girl began to write her thoughts on the bottom of the page - "I am warm," she wrote - but I asked her to please write on another piece of paper, as these hand-written copies were the only ones I had.
When it came time for her group to slam Langston Hughes, her friend walked up to the podium and read him beautifully, with a sincerely oppressed tremolo in her voice.
"I've known rivers. Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers." She paused and her sad eyes searched the crowd. " ... I am warm."
I spent several minutes keeled over a desk until I'd laughed myself out.
After class, feeling awfully smug, I treated myself to a cigarette on the balcony. Across the way, I saw a girl leaning on the ledge with her head in her hands. She stayed that way for a long time. I wasn't about to abide any suicides on my watch, so I walked over and said, in Chinese, "Hey. What's wrong?"
She looked up. She wasn't crying.
"Are you an English teacher?"
"Yes," I said. "I am a laowai."
She looked me over.
"I know that," she said.
She wanted English lessons. She wanted to improve her oral English. She wanted a foreigner friend. And so on. Fairly certain that she wasn't a jumper, I wished her a good afternoon and ran off to my next class.
As I was walking out to the bus, I heard my name and saw her standing up on the balcony four stories above me.
"Can you catch?" she asked.
"Some things!"
She let a folded-up scrap of paper flutter down to me and I missed it. I plucked it up from the wet ground and hurried off to catch the bus. I was meeting an Italian for lunch.
One of my handlers from the university knew a girl who was married to an Italian. So she had arranged a foreigner playdate. It occurred to me that never in my travels had I ever met a Real Live Italian. Truth be told, I wasn't entirely convinced that they existed. But Fiero's story checked out. He was a chain smoker. He loved wine. He was old and fat and missing a few important teeth. He spoke little, probably because I was young and American. But when he did, his English, I thought, was better than my own: riddled with endearing errors and full of old world European depth and character.
There is always some conversational inertia when a European first meets an American. I'm not sure whether it's because the European has encountered unpleasant Americans in the past, or because the America we broadcast is so loud and schizophrenic and domineering that, as a European, you are no more inclined to talk to an American than you are to your television set. But over the years, I have developed an international charm that I didn't have before, and of course, it is easy for westerners to relate on matters pertaining to the experience that is China. So, by the time the fifth course had arrived, the Italian was waxing Chomsky on linguistic differences and Chinese etiquette.
"The Chinese have this way of making themselves disappear," he said, sucking a three-kuai cigarette through the gap in his front teeth. "When they are wanting to go, they stand up and say bye bye and they are gone!"
"This is not normal?" asked his wife.
"No! No. No!" Much gesticulating. "In Italy and in America, you must stay and shake hands and say, oh how I hate to leave, and make excuses and say goodbye to each person ten times."
Fiero and I agreed on the strangeness of Chinese teleportation. And we both agreed that we liked the Chinese way better.
I mentioned how, when I first visited China, I was curious as to how the Chinese typed. At the time, I said, I wasn't sure how it was even possible. Did they have 5,000-character keyboards that wrapped around you like a control panel? The Italian spit out a chunk of eggplant laughing and began spinning in his chair, pressing invisible buttons behind his back: "Dear ... mother ... I ... miss ... you ... so ... much!" The two Chinese girls tittered.
"But yes," the Italian said, composing himself. "This is problem with Chinese. You cannot have too many hieroglyphics because you cannot learn 300,000 hieroglyphics. So every symbol have fifteen or twenty meanings."
"Hence we have Chinglish," I said. "It's difficult to translate the openness of a Chinese sentence into the precision of English. So we have signs telling us, 'Please, gentlemen, how barbaric it is to shit on the floor!' And so on."
It is through conversations with Italians that you come across ideas you didn't know you had. While the Italian translated a verse of Dante's Inferno for me, I thought about Chinglish: I had always thought of it as bad English, plain and simple. It hadn't occurred to me before that there might be a deeper linguistic reason for Chinglish, but a fundamental difference in language seems to me, now, to be precisely the problem: each Chinese symbol has several possible interpretations, and as a reader of Chinese, you learn to choose the interpretations that make the most sense to you. But we have half a billion words in English, so the difference between a good writer and a literary hack is precision - putting the exact right words in the exact right places - and just about any English speaker, whether they can write or not, can separate good writing from bad writing. Chinglish is nowhere to be found on the quality spectrum, though it often reads like James Joyce at his best.
The four of us lingered for several hours. The Italian raged about the restaurant's interior design. "They construct this beautiful granite waterfall and then put it in the corner by the bathroom where it is invisible!" He asked whether I liked European beer and European coffee and I nodded emphatically on both counts. He invited me downtown to his European beer and coffee bar. And I trembled at the possibility of savoring a bottle or a cup of foul and bitter stuff without having to endure the formaldehyde hangover that comes ten minutes later.
I had to jet off to my Mandarin lesson, so I made my escape the Chinese way: "I'd love to stay and chew the fat, but bye-bye!" I caught the Number Five bus home and, on the way, passed a new restaurant whose logo was a black-and-white portrait of Saddam Hussein raising a finger in defiance. It reminded me of The Hitler Bar in Daejeon, South Korea - where the Third Reich comes alive! - with its balsa wood Messerschmitt BF109's rotating slowly on catgut cords dangling from the ceiling, the walls decked a la Applebee's with Afrikacorps caps, castrated Karabiner 98K's, framed photographs of The Fuhrer himself ... the smiling waiter clomping towards your table in his steel-toed jackboots, brown uniform decorated in Panzer Assault Badges and silver eagle patches ... the unabridged version of "Deutschland über Alles" warbling and crackling through the speakers in the bathroom. It is these warped glimpses of the West that remind you how far away from home you really are.
This morning, I told the driver to wait while I hit up the ATM so I could pay him. It was raining, as it has been for the past month. Poised there with my fingers hovering over the keypad, some inner Pavlovian voice barked at me, some vague memory of a past trauma suffered at the hands of a rain-drenched Chinese cashbox, perhaps this very one - but I ignored it. "Please be entering your secret number," said the ATM. The instant my first digit met the first digit, the ATM dealt me an electric shock that made my Amish beard stand on end. A stream of religious personages and scatology flew out of my mouth. The security guards stared. I hobbled in a circle and slapped my thighs. The Toyotavan man tooted his horn. I returned to the machine and was shocked again. And again. Chinese pin numbers are six digits long. So, zap, I hit the "cancel" button and withdrew my card, which sent a current of not unpleasant energy coursing through my bones.
I jerked and jolted over to the machine across the street and waited in the queue for the girl ahead of me to finish. That she was not screaming and cursing throughout her transaction seemed to me to be a good sign. I inserted my card and zap, I flew away from the machine. I staggered back to it and zap. I snuck up on it from the side and zap. As a foreigner, apparently, I am a much better conductor than your average Asian coed. I needed something plastic to put between me and all that misdirected Chinese energy. But I had neither pen, nor lighter, nor tiddlywink. One of my students passed by, no doubt wondering why I looked like Gene Wilder on meth. I asked him for a pen. And thusly was the transaction completed and the taxi paid for. Now the problem was that I was five minutes late for class.
And oddly, trembling with static, my mind still lost somewhere in Tuesday night, I taught the best class of my life. It was my first run-through of a lesson I had dubbed "Poetry Slam." I began by reading the entirety of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot, and nearly succumbed to a crying jag when I came to the part about the coffee spoons. My students gave me a polite ovation. I asked how the poem made them feel.
"Depressed," offered a girl in the front row.
"Excellent! That's how it's supposed to make you feel. And why did it seem depressing to you?"
"Because it was too long."
Laughter. I laughed, too, though me and the ghost of Tough Shit Eliot were both wounded by the remark.
"Prufrock seems scared of some event in the future. I think it is coming soon," another girl said. "What is he scared of?"
"I don't know," I shrugged. "Probably death or something."
I had them read aloud and analyze poems by Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Carl Sandburg. One of the groups was reading The Negro Speaks of Rivers by Langston Hughes, and though the word "Negro" made them giggle, they loved the poem. One girl began to write her thoughts on the bottom of the page - "I am warm," she wrote - but I asked her to please write on another piece of paper, as these hand-written copies were the only ones I had.
When it came time for her group to slam Langston Hughes, her friend walked up to the podium and read him beautifully, with a sincerely oppressed tremolo in her voice.
"I've known rivers. Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers." She paused and her sad eyes searched the crowd. " ... I am warm."
I spent several minutes keeled over a desk until I'd laughed myself out.
After class, feeling awfully smug, I treated myself to a cigarette on the balcony. Across the way, I saw a girl leaning on the ledge with her head in her hands. She stayed that way for a long time. I wasn't about to abide any suicides on my watch, so I walked over and said, in Chinese, "Hey. What's wrong?"
She looked up. She wasn't crying.
"Are you an English teacher?"
"Yes," I said. "I am a laowai."
She looked me over.
"I know that," she said.
She wanted English lessons. She wanted to improve her oral English. She wanted a foreigner friend. And so on. Fairly certain that she wasn't a jumper, I wished her a good afternoon and ran off to my next class.
As I was walking out to the bus, I heard my name and saw her standing up on the balcony four stories above me.
"Can you catch?" she asked.
"Some things!"
She let a folded-up scrap of paper flutter down to me and I missed it. I plucked it up from the wet ground and hurried off to catch the bus. I was meeting an Italian for lunch.
One of my handlers from the university knew a girl who was married to an Italian. So she had arranged a foreigner playdate. It occurred to me that never in my travels had I ever met a Real Live Italian. Truth be told, I wasn't entirely convinced that they existed. But Fiero's story checked out. He was a chain smoker. He loved wine. He was old and fat and missing a few important teeth. He spoke little, probably because I was young and American. But when he did, his English, I thought, was better than my own: riddled with endearing errors and full of old world European depth and character.
There is always some conversational inertia when a European first meets an American. I'm not sure whether it's because the European has encountered unpleasant Americans in the past, or because the America we broadcast is so loud and schizophrenic and domineering that, as a European, you are no more inclined to talk to an American than you are to your television set. But over the years, I have developed an international charm that I didn't have before, and of course, it is easy for westerners to relate on matters pertaining to the experience that is China. So, by the time the fifth course had arrived, the Italian was waxing Chomsky on linguistic differences and Chinese etiquette.
"The Chinese have this way of making themselves disappear," he said, sucking a three-kuai cigarette through the gap in his front teeth. "When they are wanting to go, they stand up and say bye bye and they are gone!"
"This is not normal?" asked his wife.
"No! No. No!" Much gesticulating. "In Italy and in America, you must stay and shake hands and say, oh how I hate to leave, and make excuses and say goodbye to each person ten times."
Fiero and I agreed on the strangeness of Chinese teleportation. And we both agreed that we liked the Chinese way better.
I mentioned how, when I first visited China, I was curious as to how the Chinese typed. At the time, I said, I wasn't sure how it was even possible. Did they have 5,000-character keyboards that wrapped around you like a control panel? The Italian spit out a chunk of eggplant laughing and began spinning in his chair, pressing invisible buttons behind his back: "Dear ... mother ... I ... miss ... you ... so ... much!" The two Chinese girls tittered.
"But yes," the Italian said, composing himself. "This is problem with Chinese. You cannot have too many hieroglyphics because you cannot learn 300,000 hieroglyphics. So every symbol have fifteen or twenty meanings."
"Hence we have Chinglish," I said. "It's difficult to translate the openness of a Chinese sentence into the precision of English. So we have signs telling us, 'Please, gentlemen, how barbaric it is to shit on the floor!' And so on."
It is through conversations with Italians that you come across ideas you didn't know you had. While the Italian translated a verse of Dante's Inferno for me, I thought about Chinglish: I had always thought of it as bad English, plain and simple. It hadn't occurred to me before that there might be a deeper linguistic reason for Chinglish, but a fundamental difference in language seems to me, now, to be precisely the problem: each Chinese symbol has several possible interpretations, and as a reader of Chinese, you learn to choose the interpretations that make the most sense to you. But we have half a billion words in English, so the difference between a good writer and a literary hack is precision - putting the exact right words in the exact right places - and just about any English speaker, whether they can write or not, can separate good writing from bad writing. Chinglish is nowhere to be found on the quality spectrum, though it often reads like James Joyce at his best.
The four of us lingered for several hours. The Italian raged about the restaurant's interior design. "They construct this beautiful granite waterfall and then put it in the corner by the bathroom where it is invisible!" He asked whether I liked European beer and European coffee and I nodded emphatically on both counts. He invited me downtown to his European beer and coffee bar. And I trembled at the possibility of savoring a bottle or a cup of foul and bitter stuff without having to endure the formaldehyde hangover that comes ten minutes later.
I had to jet off to my Mandarin lesson, so I made my escape the Chinese way: "I'd love to stay and chew the fat, but bye-bye!" I caught the Number Five bus home and, on the way, passed a new restaurant whose logo was a black-and-white portrait of Saddam Hussein raising a finger in defiance. It reminded me of The Hitler Bar in Daejeon, South Korea - where the Third Reich comes alive! - with its balsa wood Messerschmitt BF109's rotating slowly on catgut cords dangling from the ceiling, the walls decked a la Applebee's with Afrikacorps caps, castrated Karabiner 98K's, framed photographs of The Fuhrer himself ... the smiling waiter clomping towards your table in his steel-toed jackboots, brown uniform decorated in Panzer Assault Badges and silver eagle patches ... the unabridged version of "Deutschland über Alles" warbling and crackling through the speakers in the bathroom. It is these warped glimpses of the West that remind you how far away from home you really are.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Sabbatical
I've ridden this wave of creativity about as far as it will go for the moment. I have no idea how actual writers do it. I was on a roll, there, for a while. But past a certain point, in the midst of your delirious scribbling, you begin to fear the writer's block you know is lurking just around the corner, and the fear of writer's block turns into writer's block. In your efforts to stave it off, you develop the superstitious quirks of a Big League knuckleballer: leaving your shoes untied, opening doors with the pinkie finger of your left hand, wearing the same chalkstained suit coat for weeks on end, crossing your chopsticks in an X over the rice bowl, and so on. But the writer's block arrives right on time no matter how schizophrenic you become and the only thing to do at that point is shut the whole thing down for a while, read some new authors, get out of the house, stay out late and get yourself in trouble, and return to your desk after a week or two when you've stopped thinking so damned much.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Taxionomy: A Passenger's Guide to Cabbies of the World
I don't pretend to be an expert on taxi drivers. I admit to you, my fellow passenger, that I have no idea what makes the cabby tick. I can't imagine how he spends his off hours or whether he feels absurd when it's time for him to get out of his cab and into his car to drive home. Like most far-flung fields of human study - quantum mechanics and what have you - the taxi driver eludes the common man as well as the so-called experts, who demonstrate at best a well-articulated befuddlement when it comes to their pet subject.
There is nothing on the Newtonian scale so puzzling as the cabby. Like the electron, the cabby wheels about in an exhaust plume of probability: it is impossible to know his exact location and his future destination simultaneously. Perhaps the taxi driver remains a riddle even to himself. But because cabbies, unlike Higgs bosons and neutrinos and antimatter, are a real and active force in our day to day lives, and because I have a layman's understanding of taxi drivers from various unpleasant corners of the globe, I will offer this brief and elementary introduction to cabbies of the world: their customs, their caprices, and their cunning.
Let me begin by narrowing our scope. This essay will concern itself solely with taxi drivers outside the United States of America. First of all, the only American taxi I can remember taking was from New York's Kennedy Airport to a Holiday Inn in nearby Jamaica. My senses were not at their sharpest and my only recollection of the experience is of leaving the cab much lighter than when I'd entered it. Secondly - and I know this only from hearsay, literature, and my own a priori speculations - American cab drivers, because they can trace their roots to everywhere on earth and beyond, share almost nothing in common. These men may once have piloted Fiats, Volkswagens, alpacas, or rickshaws in their native lands, may once have driven under the umbrella of whatever Geneva Convention governs international cab driving, but they are Americans now: their morals have long since burned up in U.S. Customs like so much space dust.
It is something of a mystery, then, that cabbies elsewhere in the world, even in nations whose embassies have been closed to one another for decades, abide by the same unspoken code of conduct. For this reason - though I do not profess to understand it - cabbies of the world, to some degree, can be measured and understood. Taking an American cab, on the other hand, is a game of Russian or Jamaican or Armenian roulette. An analysis of the American cabby would be as fruitless as an analysis of The American, who, if we consider the human antipodes of Shaquille O'Neal and Woody Allen, cannot be said to exist in anything but the most rarified metaphysical sense.
In the American cab - or so I am given to understand - the driver is the agitator and the passenger is his agitatee. As a passenger, you can do nothing to improve your standing with the American cabby. Most of the time, he will talk and you, despite yourself, will listen. He will usually offend you in some indirect (but lowbrow) way, and you will be unable to defend yourself either verbally - good luck getting a word in - or physically, as the backseat ear-slap is among the weakest assaults known to man. The American cabby deals you the damnation card from the instant the fare meter lights up and you can only dig yourself into deeper and deeper layers of perdition by opening your mouth. No tip, however generous, can pull you out of the hole the American cabby, by default, has placed you in.
But in the non-American cab, the ball (to coin a sports metaphor) is in your court. You are the guest and so you are the agitator. The cabby, as host, is the agitatee. He is your friend to lose. In the non-American cab, you are granted a very finite number of friend points the moment you get in the car, and will add to or subtract from them according to your behavior.
The first thing you will notice about the non-American cabby is that he is silent. This is not from a lack of things to say. Bear in mind: this man has transported tens of thousands of people hither and thither, most of them drunk and many of them vagrant. He has stories, grievances, and wisdom to share, as any traveler does. But he is waiting for you to make the first move.
Speaking of first moves, it seems I have gotten ahead of myself, for the first question any conscientious passenger must ask himself is: front seat or back? Which seat best facilitates a healthy driver/passenger relationship?
The front seat, I feel, must make the non-American cabby uncomfortable. It is literally too forward. It gives the appearance that the two of you are going somewhere together - which, in a relativistic sense, you are - but understand that, after you've arrived wherever it is you're going, you will never see your cabby again. Let's try and not get too attached. To make the separation less painful, I always sit in the back.
Which is not to say you should keep yourself distant and aloof. Though he may not look directly at you, the cabby has at least three mirrors at his disposal. The cab is his domain and he sees all that goes on within it. Make eye contact with your cabby not by staring at the side of his head, but by looking directly into the rear view mirror. This sounds elementary, but I rode foreign cabs for two years before I was stunned one evening to notice a pair of sad, jaundiced eyes in the mirror, studying my every backseat fidget. From that day on, I have maintained eye contact with my cabbies and it has yielded positive results in terms of rapport and chivalry. Eye contact lets the cabby know: here sits no greenhorn, here is a man who has ridden in a taxi before.
Do not buckle your safety belt. Non-American cab drivers view this as an ominous portent and an insult to boot. You don't begin a romp on the high seas by stuffing your ears full of wax and strapping yourself to the mast, or at least I don't. Buckling up doesn't bode well for the trip and it implies a lack of faith in the cabby, that you think him fallible when - aged 75 and a 63-year veteran of the Chinese road - he clearly is not. The clicking of the safety belt is as the ticking of the deathwatch to the cabby's ear. If he hears you buckling up, which he will, he is infinitely more likely to drive the vehicle into a gorge, killing you but not him.
Cabbies are a finicky lot when it comes to seatbelts, but there is much that doesn't faze them. Language, for one. Tell the cabby where you're headed in English, Tagalog, or 12th Century Plattdeutsch. It doesn't matter. He understands you just the same. Of course, this is not to say that all languages are equal. German - links! rechts! geradeaus! - will get you there minutes before you departed, whereas if you use Spanish - mañana, mañana, mañana - you will not reach your destination until the next Big Bang.
Cabbies sometimes make mistakes: they are not yet automatons. If you tell the cabby "Tesco," he will 99.999999% of the time get you to Tesco. But if you take a million cab rides, your cabby will one day drop you off in the middle of an alkali flat. Do not tell the cabby he has made a mistake. Perhaps he has not made a mistake at all; perhaps he knows something you do not. Slowly get out of the cab and walk out into whatever strange landscape you are confronted with. If there is a shack, a toolshed, a porta-potty, or some sort of closed structure within view, enter it and shut the door behind you. Remain there until you are sure the cabby has pulled away. If there are no manmade structures nearby, continue to walk off into the distance until you are a mere speck on the horizon - from the cabby's vantage point, not yours. Do whatever it takes to convince the cabby that he has successfully and punctually brought to where you were supposed to go. Otherwise, you will probably hurt his feelings.
If you become violently ill in transit, indicate to the cabby that you would like to blow chunks out the window. Again, language is not an issue. When you have received his blessing and he has toggled the child safety lock feature, commence blowing chunks out the window. But it is crucial that you first receive his blessing. While the cabby is no prude and certainly will not blanch at the sight of bodily fluids or the scattering to the four winds thereof, he is deeply bothered by unpermitted violations of the boundaries of his vehicle. He does not appreciate it when people touch his cab or when other vehicles collide with it. Nor is he comfortable with you throwing things (the contents of your stomach) out of the cab without his prior consent.
He is similarly irked when you play with the windows or smoke in the backseat without his permission. I prefer not to imagine what he might do if you fiddled with the mirrors, changed the radio station, or opened the glovebox. Though he does not technically own it, remember that the cab is a direct extension of the cabby's nervous system. He senses all that you do and all that you are about to do. He can read all of your thoughts. In a very real sense, you are a parasite upon his body and, if agitated, he can expel you from his cab as quickly and as violently as your stomach just expelled that last shot of Jager.
Sometimes your cabby will be wearing medals. These were awarded him either by the taxi corporation or by the Alfred Nobel Foundation. You should commend him for his decorations, because he probably received them for meritorious behavior in the line of duty and not for, I don't know, killing scores of pedestrians or something.
A non sequitur: many years ago, I rode in the back of a Chinese trishaw whose pilot - a man with black hair, a neck, and rather indistinct features because he was facing the other way - had mounted between the handlebars of his bicycle a small wooden box. On that box, in a whimsical old-timey font, were the words "MYSTERY BOX," underscored by not one but four italicized question marks. When I asked, in English, about the contents of the Mystery Box, the cabby pretended not to understand, though he had been carrying on just fine a moment before. My translator asked him once in Mandarin and again in whatever the local dialect was, but it seemed the cabby had forgotten how to communicate altogether. Meanwhile, I couldn't be sure, but the longer we rode, the more the Mystery Box seemed to take on a dull red glow. I felt fine that evening, but the next day I all of a sudden succumbed to brain fever, an ailment I would recover from only gradually and painfully, though there remains a sharp, high-pitched ringing in my ears whenever I encounter an excessively punctuated sentence.
Anyway, cabbies: how 'bout em????
There is nothing on the Newtonian scale so puzzling as the cabby. Like the electron, the cabby wheels about in an exhaust plume of probability: it is impossible to know his exact location and his future destination simultaneously. Perhaps the taxi driver remains a riddle even to himself. But because cabbies, unlike Higgs bosons and neutrinos and antimatter, are a real and active force in our day to day lives, and because I have a layman's understanding of taxi drivers from various unpleasant corners of the globe, I will offer this brief and elementary introduction to cabbies of the world: their customs, their caprices, and their cunning.
Let me begin by narrowing our scope. This essay will concern itself solely with taxi drivers outside the United States of America. First of all, the only American taxi I can remember taking was from New York's Kennedy Airport to a Holiday Inn in nearby Jamaica. My senses were not at their sharpest and my only recollection of the experience is of leaving the cab much lighter than when I'd entered it. Secondly - and I know this only from hearsay, literature, and my own a priori speculations - American cab drivers, because they can trace their roots to everywhere on earth and beyond, share almost nothing in common. These men may once have piloted Fiats, Volkswagens, alpacas, or rickshaws in their native lands, may once have driven under the umbrella of whatever Geneva Convention governs international cab driving, but they are Americans now: their morals have long since burned up in U.S. Customs like so much space dust.
It is something of a mystery, then, that cabbies elsewhere in the world, even in nations whose embassies have been closed to one another for decades, abide by the same unspoken code of conduct. For this reason - though I do not profess to understand it - cabbies of the world, to some degree, can be measured and understood. Taking an American cab, on the other hand, is a game of Russian or Jamaican or Armenian roulette. An analysis of the American cabby would be as fruitless as an analysis of The American, who, if we consider the human antipodes of Shaquille O'Neal and Woody Allen, cannot be said to exist in anything but the most rarified metaphysical sense.
In the American cab - or so I am given to understand - the driver is the agitator and the passenger is his agitatee. As a passenger, you can do nothing to improve your standing with the American cabby. Most of the time, he will talk and you, despite yourself, will listen. He will usually offend you in some indirect (but lowbrow) way, and you will be unable to defend yourself either verbally - good luck getting a word in - or physically, as the backseat ear-slap is among the weakest assaults known to man. The American cabby deals you the damnation card from the instant the fare meter lights up and you can only dig yourself into deeper and deeper layers of perdition by opening your mouth. No tip, however generous, can pull you out of the hole the American cabby, by default, has placed you in.
But in the non-American cab, the ball (to coin a sports metaphor) is in your court. You are the guest and so you are the agitator. The cabby, as host, is the agitatee. He is your friend to lose. In the non-American cab, you are granted a very finite number of friend points the moment you get in the car, and will add to or subtract from them according to your behavior.
The first thing you will notice about the non-American cabby is that he is silent. This is not from a lack of things to say. Bear in mind: this man has transported tens of thousands of people hither and thither, most of them drunk and many of them vagrant. He has stories, grievances, and wisdom to share, as any traveler does. But he is waiting for you to make the first move.
Speaking of first moves, it seems I have gotten ahead of myself, for the first question any conscientious passenger must ask himself is: front seat or back? Which seat best facilitates a healthy driver/passenger relationship?
The front seat, I feel, must make the non-American cabby uncomfortable. It is literally too forward. It gives the appearance that the two of you are going somewhere together - which, in a relativistic sense, you are - but understand that, after you've arrived wherever it is you're going, you will never see your cabby again. Let's try and not get too attached. To make the separation less painful, I always sit in the back.
Which is not to say you should keep yourself distant and aloof. Though he may not look directly at you, the cabby has at least three mirrors at his disposal. The cab is his domain and he sees all that goes on within it. Make eye contact with your cabby not by staring at the side of his head, but by looking directly into the rear view mirror. This sounds elementary, but I rode foreign cabs for two years before I was stunned one evening to notice a pair of sad, jaundiced eyes in the mirror, studying my every backseat fidget. From that day on, I have maintained eye contact with my cabbies and it has yielded positive results in terms of rapport and chivalry. Eye contact lets the cabby know: here sits no greenhorn, here is a man who has ridden in a taxi before.
Do not buckle your safety belt. Non-American cab drivers view this as an ominous portent and an insult to boot. You don't begin a romp on the high seas by stuffing your ears full of wax and strapping yourself to the mast, or at least I don't. Buckling up doesn't bode well for the trip and it implies a lack of faith in the cabby, that you think him fallible when - aged 75 and a 63-year veteran of the Chinese road - he clearly is not. The clicking of the safety belt is as the ticking of the deathwatch to the cabby's ear. If he hears you buckling up, which he will, he is infinitely more likely to drive the vehicle into a gorge, killing you but not him.
Cabbies are a finicky lot when it comes to seatbelts, but there is much that doesn't faze them. Language, for one. Tell the cabby where you're headed in English, Tagalog, or 12th Century Plattdeutsch. It doesn't matter. He understands you just the same. Of course, this is not to say that all languages are equal. German - links! rechts! geradeaus! - will get you there minutes before you departed, whereas if you use Spanish - mañana, mañana, mañana - you will not reach your destination until the next Big Bang.
Cabbies sometimes make mistakes: they are not yet automatons. If you tell the cabby "Tesco," he will 99.999999% of the time get you to Tesco. But if you take a million cab rides, your cabby will one day drop you off in the middle of an alkali flat. Do not tell the cabby he has made a mistake. Perhaps he has not made a mistake at all; perhaps he knows something you do not. Slowly get out of the cab and walk out into whatever strange landscape you are confronted with. If there is a shack, a toolshed, a porta-potty, or some sort of closed structure within view, enter it and shut the door behind you. Remain there until you are sure the cabby has pulled away. If there are no manmade structures nearby, continue to walk off into the distance until you are a mere speck on the horizon - from the cabby's vantage point, not yours. Do whatever it takes to convince the cabby that he has successfully and punctually brought to where you were supposed to go. Otherwise, you will probably hurt his feelings.
If you become violently ill in transit, indicate to the cabby that you would like to blow chunks out the window. Again, language is not an issue. When you have received his blessing and he has toggled the child safety lock feature, commence blowing chunks out the window. But it is crucial that you first receive his blessing. While the cabby is no prude and certainly will not blanch at the sight of bodily fluids or the scattering to the four winds thereof, he is deeply bothered by unpermitted violations of the boundaries of his vehicle. He does not appreciate it when people touch his cab or when other vehicles collide with it. Nor is he comfortable with you throwing things (the contents of your stomach) out of the cab without his prior consent.
He is similarly irked when you play with the windows or smoke in the backseat without his permission. I prefer not to imagine what he might do if you fiddled with the mirrors, changed the radio station, or opened the glovebox. Though he does not technically own it, remember that the cab is a direct extension of the cabby's nervous system. He senses all that you do and all that you are about to do. He can read all of your thoughts. In a very real sense, you are a parasite upon his body and, if agitated, he can expel you from his cab as quickly and as violently as your stomach just expelled that last shot of Jager.
Sometimes your cabby will be wearing medals. These were awarded him either by the taxi corporation or by the Alfred Nobel Foundation. You should commend him for his decorations, because he probably received them for meritorious behavior in the line of duty and not for, I don't know, killing scores of pedestrians or something.
A non sequitur: many years ago, I rode in the back of a Chinese trishaw whose pilot - a man with black hair, a neck, and rather indistinct features because he was facing the other way - had mounted between the handlebars of his bicycle a small wooden box. On that box, in a whimsical old-timey font, were the words "MYSTERY BOX," underscored by not one but four italicized question marks. When I asked, in English, about the contents of the Mystery Box, the cabby pretended not to understand, though he had been carrying on just fine a moment before. My translator asked him once in Mandarin and again in whatever the local dialect was, but it seemed the cabby had forgotten how to communicate altogether. Meanwhile, I couldn't be sure, but the longer we rode, the more the Mystery Box seemed to take on a dull red glow. I felt fine that evening, but the next day I all of a sudden succumbed to brain fever, an ailment I would recover from only gradually and painfully, though there remains a sharp, high-pitched ringing in my ears whenever I encounter an excessively punctuated sentence.
Anyway, cabbies: how 'bout em????
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Rain Check
A funny thing happened this afternoon. I met Wendy in our new classroom, a bricked-off cubicle down by the lake. I sat across from her and recounted the weekend's adventures: Friday night, arguing with the riffraff at the shishkebab place and someone's eight-year-old daughter until four AM; Saturday, trying and failing to buy a computer and all of the misunderstandings that involved.
It started to rain, so we moved to a gazebo. After five minutes there, the bench we were sitting on was claimed by a young couple with amorous ends, so we moved to another gazebo. Before long, it began to fill up with gawkers.
"Okay," said Wendy, clearly agitated. "Just pretend it is you and me and no one else is here."
I've gotten good at that, so I did. But they kept coming. Strangers were seated on both sides of us, leaning over the banisters to get a good look at me, a parade of bikes and bao-bao men and babies and dogs that was as loud as it was endless. It got to where we were being muscled out of the gazebo by the very people coming in to watch us. Every half-sentence I produced was telephoned down to the end of the line and either applauded for its cuteness or dissected for its incorrectness. Wendy was on the verge of a panic attack.
"Maybe we will only have one hour of class today," she said, "since it is raining and there are too many people watching us."
When the street vendors showed up to hawk their wares, it was clear that things had escalated to an unacceptable level of ridiculousness.
"Maybe we can just cancel class today and meet tomorrow," Wendy said. I nodded.
We packed up our things and pushed our way to the street. The crowd lingered, unsure whether they should follow me back to my apartment or remain there in the gazebo to discuss what they had just seen.
I felt bad for Wendy, the poor girl. As comforting as it is, perhaps, to briefly share my claustrophobic existence with another person, it is an insane world that I don't want to subject anyone to, not anyone who doesn't deserve it. We haven't had a single class, indoors or out, that hasn't been disrupted by a curiosity seeker, usually several of them. After my stalker blew up at us last week, Wendy gave me a class on refusing invitations.
I tend not to complain to my tutor about life in China per se - I like it here - but when the crowd gets so tight around us that I have to throw elbows just to finish my vocab quiz, I send a feeble smile across the table, by way of saying, "This is what it's like. The only thing to do is move quickly."
It started to rain, so we moved to a gazebo. After five minutes there, the bench we were sitting on was claimed by a young couple with amorous ends, so we moved to another gazebo. Before long, it began to fill up with gawkers.
"Okay," said Wendy, clearly agitated. "Just pretend it is you and me and no one else is here."
I've gotten good at that, so I did. But they kept coming. Strangers were seated on both sides of us, leaning over the banisters to get a good look at me, a parade of bikes and bao-bao men and babies and dogs that was as loud as it was endless. It got to where we were being muscled out of the gazebo by the very people coming in to watch us. Every half-sentence I produced was telephoned down to the end of the line and either applauded for its cuteness or dissected for its incorrectness. Wendy was on the verge of a panic attack.
"Maybe we will only have one hour of class today," she said, "since it is raining and there are too many people watching us."
When the street vendors showed up to hawk their wares, it was clear that things had escalated to an unacceptable level of ridiculousness.
"Maybe we can just cancel class today and meet tomorrow," Wendy said. I nodded.
We packed up our things and pushed our way to the street. The crowd lingered, unsure whether they should follow me back to my apartment or remain there in the gazebo to discuss what they had just seen.
I felt bad for Wendy, the poor girl. As comforting as it is, perhaps, to briefly share my claustrophobic existence with another person, it is an insane world that I don't want to subject anyone to, not anyone who doesn't deserve it. We haven't had a single class, indoors or out, that hasn't been disrupted by a curiosity seeker, usually several of them. After my stalker blew up at us last week, Wendy gave me a class on refusing invitations.
I tend not to complain to my tutor about life in China per se - I like it here - but when the crowd gets so tight around us that I have to throw elbows just to finish my vocab quiz, I send a feeble smile across the table, by way of saying, "This is what it's like. The only thing to do is move quickly."
Dislikes
(in order of appearance in consciousness)
1. styrofoam
2. chalk
3. chalkboards
4. insects
5. airplanes
6. shopping
7. the word "milk"
8. sugar in my coffee
9. too-much-coffee puke sensations
10. driving purposefully
11. unlocking doors
12. balloons
13. dragonflies mating in midair
14. clowns
15. casinos
16. poetry slams
17. cellular phones
18. fighting with road maps and newspapers
19. reading something I wrote several months ago
20. comedians
21. birds
22. fish
23. reptiles
24. street gravel in early spring
25. the way a basketball feels in my hands
26. thoughts of infinity
27. babies
28. the sound of typing
29. Nebraskan winters and everything associated with them
30. the sound of running water
31. climbing ladders
32. choking on fish bones
33. the soprano saxophone when played by anyone other than John Coltrane
34. televisions
35. lime green
36. amusement parks
37. the eyes of goats
38. the part of the neck where the voicebox is located
39. being impersonated
40. 90% of all movies I've seen
41. happy endings
42. passing semi trucks on the interstate
43. mathematics
44. not giving money to hobos
45. giving money to hobos
46. the smell of alcohol
47. liquor
48. when girls get together and scream
49. malls
50. meatballs
51. Council Bluffs, Iowa
52. ending an otherwise amusing anecdote with a sigh and the words "Good times"
53. mops
54. Nicholas Cage
55. being stared at by the faceless masses
56. any phrase that begins with "If looks could kill ..."
57. narratives written in the present tense
58. when someone says "just kidding" because they assume you haven't gotten the joke
59. anything that requires manual dexterity
60. the last hundred pages of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle
61. tying my shoes
62. billboards
63. overdubbed films
64. those thick glass tiles endemic to apartment buildings built in the 1970's
65. "What kind of music do you like?" "Oh, I like everything."
66. having to pee all the time
67. the smell of products ordered from the OTC Catalog
68. babysitters who tickle
69. mannequins
70. nightmares about teeth
71. the question "What do you want to do?"
72. the question "Where do you want to eat?"
73. North Platte, Nebraska
74. whoopie cushions
75. the buying and selling of Indulgences
76. objective truth
77. wind
78. finding myself on either end of the service industry
79. comic books
80. receiving a Matchbox Car when I have asked for a Transformer
81. the last three notes of "I Just Called to Say I Love You" by Stevie Wonder
82. perfection
83. having to rewrite something I have accidentally erased
84. offensive bumper stickers
85. cleaning my room
86. cooking
87. tourism
88. formal wear
89. elevators
90. escalators
91. grain elevators
92. shaving
93. Interstate 29
94. martinis
95. misspellings in marquee displays
96. gratuitous use and misuse of French by novelists
97. meatloaf
98. organized religion
99. pornography
100. pictures of lampreys
101. tattoos
102. "An Inconvenient Truth"
103. people who take a lot of pictures at social occasions
104. wearing a watch
105. swimming pools
106. long corridors
107. aliens
108. venetian blinds
109. the word "fag"
110. Bluetooths/Blueteeth
111. video games
112. discotheques
113. cracking one's knuckles
114. professional wrestling
115. men who spit
116. and the women who love them
1. styrofoam
2. chalk
3. chalkboards
4. insects
5. airplanes
6. shopping
7. the word "milk"
8. sugar in my coffee
9. too-much-coffee puke sensations
10. driving purposefully
11. unlocking doors
12. balloons
13. dragonflies mating in midair
14. clowns
15. casinos
16. poetry slams
17. cellular phones
18. fighting with road maps and newspapers
19. reading something I wrote several months ago
20. comedians
21. birds
22. fish
23. reptiles
24. street gravel in early spring
25. the way a basketball feels in my hands
26. thoughts of infinity
27. babies
28. the sound of typing
29. Nebraskan winters and everything associated with them
30. the sound of running water
31. climbing ladders
32. choking on fish bones
33. the soprano saxophone when played by anyone other than John Coltrane
34. televisions
35. lime green
36. amusement parks
37. the eyes of goats
38. the part of the neck where the voicebox is located
39. being impersonated
40. 90% of all movies I've seen
41. happy endings
42. passing semi trucks on the interstate
43. mathematics
44. not giving money to hobos
45. giving money to hobos
46. the smell of alcohol
47. liquor
48. when girls get together and scream
49. malls
50. meatballs
51. Council Bluffs, Iowa
52. ending an otherwise amusing anecdote with a sigh and the words "Good times"
53. mops
54. Nicholas Cage
55. being stared at by the faceless masses
56. any phrase that begins with "If looks could kill ..."
57. narratives written in the present tense
58. when someone says "just kidding" because they assume you haven't gotten the joke
59. anything that requires manual dexterity
60. the last hundred pages of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle
61. tying my shoes
62. billboards
63. overdubbed films
64. those thick glass tiles endemic to apartment buildings built in the 1970's
65. "What kind of music do you like?" "Oh, I like everything."
66. having to pee all the time
67. the smell of products ordered from the OTC Catalog
68. babysitters who tickle
69. mannequins
70. nightmares about teeth
71. the question "What do you want to do?"
72. the question "Where do you want to eat?"
73. North Platte, Nebraska
74. whoopie cushions
75. the buying and selling of Indulgences
76. objective truth
77. wind
78. finding myself on either end of the service industry
79. comic books
80. receiving a Matchbox Car when I have asked for a Transformer
81. the last three notes of "I Just Called to Say I Love You" by Stevie Wonder
82. perfection
83. having to rewrite something I have accidentally erased
84. offensive bumper stickers
85. cleaning my room
86. cooking
87. tourism
88. formal wear
89. elevators
90. escalators
91. grain elevators
92. shaving
93. Interstate 29
94. martinis
95. misspellings in marquee displays
96. gratuitous use and misuse of French by novelists
97. meatloaf
98. organized religion
99. pornography
100. pictures of lampreys
101. tattoos
102. "An Inconvenient Truth"
103. people who take a lot of pictures at social occasions
104. wearing a watch
105. swimming pools
106. long corridors
107. aliens
108. venetian blinds
109. the word "fag"
110. Bluetooths/Blueteeth
111. video games
112. discotheques
113. cracking one's knuckles
114. professional wrestling
115. men who spit
116. and the women who love them
Likes
(in order of appearance in consciousness)
1. the smell of coffee
2. coffee
3. rain
4. late night turboprop flights to Omaha
5. mid-1980's Chrysler products
6. the sound of far-off marching bands
7. the smell of far-off burning leaves
8. the smell of gasoline
9. the smell of secondhand smoke
10. Franziskaner and Weihenstephaner weissbiers
11. Rhodes pianos
12. the sound of a trap set played sans-instrumentation
13. women
14. women with glasses
15. several
16. things
17. pertaining
18. to
19. women
20. (omitted
21. for
22. propriety)
23. ...
24. ...
25. ...
26. ...
27. ...
28. ...
29. old Chinese men
30. old shoes
31. driving aimlessly
32. airports
33. cats
34. burritos drowned in green sauce
35. ownerless dogs who look like they've got places to go
36. emerging from the movie theater surprised to find it is still midday
37. the hum of a room full of vending machines
38. the smell of low-budget hotel hallways
39. the smell of churches
40. Christmas lights
41. Korean red bean stew
42. college campuses
43. darkrooms
44. positive remarks from doctors re: my pulse
45. the smell of books
46. waking up on Saturday thinking it's Friday before remembering it is Saturday
47. The Brothers Lounge on 38th and Farnam
48. choosing a point in the distance and walking there
49. the way cornfields swirl when you're passing them on the highway
50. the month of September
51. Old Spice deodorant
52. deserts
53. fog
54. cranberry juice
55. suit coats
56. boxer briefs
57. the lo-fi voices of bank tellers
58. pneumatic tube systems
59. dumbwaiters
60. the smell of sawdust
61. payphones
62. getting on the wrong bus
63. taking the stairs two at a time
64. the sweet, fetid smell of zoos
65. taking so long to finish a book you feel like you're living in it
66. being told off by Bob Dylan
67. thrusting my hands in my pockets
68. hooded sweatshirts
69. dissonance
70. harmony
71. dreaming
72. taking a crap
73. arriving in a small town where the high schoolers still sit on the hoods of their cars parked on Main Street on a Friday night
74. garlic
75. listening to pathological liars
76. trees lit up by streetlights
77. maps
78. my facial hair
79. the Berlin U-Bahn system
80. mustard
81. the sound of a band tuning in the moments before the lights come up
82. trains
83. garages
84. absurdly long showers
85. mammals
86. pet names
87. the delirium that comes after running six miles
88. photographs of microorganisms
89. the names of places on the arrivals/departures board
90. those upside-down-J-shaped metal pipes that stick up from the ground and every so often emit a mysterious steam
91. the diner at 3 AM
92. plucking leaves from low-hanging tree limbs
93. baseball diamonds
94. the fold-down seats in the back of a pickup truck
95. tollbooths
96. paintings of feudal scenes
97. mailboxes with their red flags up
98. miniature golf courses
99. losing track of time in a writing frenzy
100. talking to myself
101. kimchi
102. the shrieking of espresso machines
103. learning animal noises in foreign languages
104. tree sloths
105. new car smell
106. kicking rocks
107. organizing my bookshelf
108. microscopes
109. telescopes
110. root beer
111. picking my nose
112. Air Force bases
113. extremity numbness caused by an electric razor running up the back of your neck
114. the dobro
115. sandwiches
116. cicadas in the evening
117. and crickets at night
1. the smell of coffee
2. coffee
3. rain
4. late night turboprop flights to Omaha
5. mid-1980's Chrysler products
6. the sound of far-off marching bands
7. the smell of far-off burning leaves
8. the smell of gasoline
9. the smell of secondhand smoke
10. Franziskaner and Weihenstephaner weissbiers
11. Rhodes pianos
12. the sound of a trap set played sans-instrumentation
13. women
14. women with glasses
15. several
16. things
17. pertaining
18. to
19. women
20. (omitted
21. for
22. propriety)
23. ...
24. ...
25. ...
26. ...
27. ...
28. ...
29. old Chinese men
30. old shoes
31. driving aimlessly
32. airports
33. cats
34. burritos drowned in green sauce
35. ownerless dogs who look like they've got places to go
36. emerging from the movie theater surprised to find it is still midday
37. the hum of a room full of vending machines
38. the smell of low-budget hotel hallways
39. the smell of churches
40. Christmas lights
41. Korean red bean stew
42. college campuses
43. darkrooms
44. positive remarks from doctors re: my pulse
45. the smell of books
46. waking up on Saturday thinking it's Friday before remembering it is Saturday
47. The Brothers Lounge on 38th and Farnam
48. choosing a point in the distance and walking there
49. the way cornfields swirl when you're passing them on the highway
50. the month of September
51. Old Spice deodorant
52. deserts
53. fog
54. cranberry juice
55. suit coats
56. boxer briefs
57. the lo-fi voices of bank tellers
58. pneumatic tube systems
59. dumbwaiters
60. the smell of sawdust
61. payphones
62. getting on the wrong bus
63. taking the stairs two at a time
64. the sweet, fetid smell of zoos
65. taking so long to finish a book you feel like you're living in it
66. being told off by Bob Dylan
67. thrusting my hands in my pockets
68. hooded sweatshirts
69. dissonance
70. harmony
71. dreaming
72. taking a crap
73. arriving in a small town where the high schoolers still sit on the hoods of their cars parked on Main Street on a Friday night
74. garlic
75. listening to pathological liars
76. trees lit up by streetlights
77. maps
78. my facial hair
79. the Berlin U-Bahn system
80. mustard
81. the sound of a band tuning in the moments before the lights come up
82. trains
83. garages
84. absurdly long showers
85. mammals
86. pet names
87. the delirium that comes after running six miles
88. photographs of microorganisms
89. the names of places on the arrivals/departures board
90. those upside-down-J-shaped metal pipes that stick up from the ground and every so often emit a mysterious steam
91. the diner at 3 AM
92. plucking leaves from low-hanging tree limbs
93. baseball diamonds
94. the fold-down seats in the back of a pickup truck
95. tollbooths
96. paintings of feudal scenes
97. mailboxes with their red flags up
98. miniature golf courses
99. losing track of time in a writing frenzy
100. talking to myself
101. kimchi
102. the shrieking of espresso machines
103. learning animal noises in foreign languages
104. tree sloths
105. new car smell
106. kicking rocks
107. organizing my bookshelf
108. microscopes
109. telescopes
110. root beer
111. picking my nose
112. Air Force bases
113. extremity numbness caused by an electric razor running up the back of your neck
114. the dobro
115. sandwiches
116. cicadas in the evening
117. and crickets at night
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