| The guy to the left of me does philately in his ECKO Other Ground print shirt. The guy to the right blasts death metal into his headphones while he draws careful line drawings on sheet-after-sheet of copy paper. The guy to my immediate right is quiet and square-looking; he reads and writes and occasionally types. The guy down at the end of the row has recently rolled out of a boxcar and wears acid-washed denim blackened with grime and a Karl Marx style beard. I believe mice live in it. There's a lady who is here often. She sits perched on the edge of a chair and does not read. She just watches everyone and appears perturbed by the hard rock music. Her ears lay back like an irritated cat's. Soon she leaves. I spent much of the morning with my son at pre-school. Now I won't see him until the evening. I'm on vacation, so I just come here to kill time. I find the environs and the people watching to be pleasant. Later on I will have some Thai iced tea and a chicken-and-rice bowl at the nearby Quickly snack bar and watch the Simpsons on their TV. Tomorrow is the last day of my vacation and I will return to my normal schedule. The goat in me is happy (Capricorn)-- I frolic in my goals and ambitions. I love tasks and plans and passion and motivation. This is my native element, and only in the soil of realism and daily duties does my imagination take root-- not in the airy vagaries of vacation time. Yay, work! |
Thursday, August 19, 2010
César Chavez Library: Thursday the 19th of August
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Walking My Neighborhood: Friday the 13th of August
The kamikaze dog who bit my pants legs repeatedly the other evening scratches desperately against the screen door and chews on the bottom corner with her lip pressed desperately against the metal, exposing her horrific 1/4 inch fangs.
The girls one house up are dousing each other randomly with the hose. They don't even bother to spray. I think their game is more like Marco Polo, but with a hose. Since they keep spraying the sidewalk I didn't stay long enough to figure it out.
As I reach the corner, the two snack vendors approach from opposing sides. God forbid they ever face each other in open battle; fruit skewers to the midriff, hot sauce in the eyes, smearing oil and mayonnaise on their arms to slip the enemy's grip. It would be a mess.
They honk their horns insistently and glare at each other across the main thoroughfare.
I speed up to avoid the conflagration.
In someone's back yard they are doing terrible things to a tuba. The cymbals and snare get their abuse, too. The combined effect is drunken, carnival-like madness. Next door the Templo Monte Sinai stands in severe silence.
I catch a lyric from a passing Escalade, blasting a bolero-- to my Spanglish ears it sounds like "comiendo hongos con las sirenas." I'm pretty sure I missed the mark, but it would be fun.
To my Spanglish ears every single bolero sounds like it has the same rhythm and the same tune. The same tuba baseline. Its like a game where you make up different words to the Yellow Rose of Texas, like Emily Dickinson did, and sing them really loudly, pretending they're brand new songs.
A woman walks slowly down a full story staircase talking urgently in K'iche'.
A few houses down a woman smiles at me. She wears a blanket knotted at the shoulder, tying a bundle to her back. I am likewise carrying things-- a booster seat in a messenger bag and a jogging stroller under my arm.
We are bonded by the kinship of carrying things, divided by the particularities of custom.
Later, as I return with my son, the street is flooded with bicycles. They are fitted with carts with amps and speakers and the riders are fitted with hipster clothes and sculpted hair.
Hundreds of them mass in the square. It's a "bike party," as they loudly exclaim, but only for those to whom bicycles are a lifestyle accessory-- excluding all who use them out of necessity.
On the way back, the tall women in stilettos prances around her coupe, emblazoned in Morrissey, The Cure and other decals. She is waiting for her boy toy to finish up with his slow rearrangements of items from seat to seat. He has streaks of glittery Christmas tree foil and green-apple green in his hair, and a funky hat.
They both seem to have recently run off from the circus. Or possible they're carny folk. I think she's slumming it with him, but he doesn't know.
We pass the El Centenario taco truck and the tortilleria (La Finca) and head up the hill. On the other side the far hills seem emblazoned with Christmas lights and the perfect half-circle of the moon lazes above, lighting our journey.
The girls one house up are dousing each other randomly with the hose. They don't even bother to spray. I think their game is more like Marco Polo, but with a hose. Since they keep spraying the sidewalk I didn't stay long enough to figure it out.
As I reach the corner, the two snack vendors approach from opposing sides. God forbid they ever face each other in open battle; fruit skewers to the midriff, hot sauce in the eyes, smearing oil and mayonnaise on their arms to slip the enemy's grip. It would be a mess.
They honk their horns insistently and glare at each other across the main thoroughfare.
I speed up to avoid the conflagration.
In someone's back yard they are doing terrible things to a tuba. The cymbals and snare get their abuse, too. The combined effect is drunken, carnival-like madness. Next door the Templo Monte Sinai stands in severe silence.
I catch a lyric from a passing Escalade, blasting a bolero-- to my Spanglish ears it sounds like "comiendo hongos con las sirenas." I'm pretty sure I missed the mark, but it would be fun.
To my Spanglish ears every single bolero sounds like it has the same rhythm and the same tune. The same tuba baseline. Its like a game where you make up different words to the Yellow Rose of Texas, like Emily Dickinson did, and sing them really loudly, pretending they're brand new songs.
A woman walks slowly down a full story staircase talking urgently in K'iche'.
A few houses down a woman smiles at me. She wears a blanket knotted at the shoulder, tying a bundle to her back. I am likewise carrying things-- a booster seat in a messenger bag and a jogging stroller under my arm.
We are bonded by the kinship of carrying things, divided by the particularities of custom.
Later, as I return with my son, the street is flooded with bicycles. They are fitted with carts with amps and speakers and the riders are fitted with hipster clothes and sculpted hair.
Hundreds of them mass in the square. It's a "bike party," as they loudly exclaim, but only for those to whom bicycles are a lifestyle accessory-- excluding all who use them out of necessity.
On the way back, the tall women in stilettos prances around her coupe, emblazoned in Morrissey, The Cure and other decals. She is waiting for her boy toy to finish up with his slow rearrangements of items from seat to seat. He has streaks of glittery Christmas tree foil and green-apple green in his hair, and a funky hat.
They both seem to have recently run off from the circus. Or possible they're carny folk. I think she's slumming it with him, but he doesn't know.
We pass the El Centenario taco truck and the tortilleria (La Finca) and head up the hill. On the other side the far hills seem emblazoned with Christmas lights and the perfect half-circle of the moon lazes above, lighting our journey.
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