Archive for June, 2009
Spiderbite
A few days ago, I engaged in a debate about race with a sociology professor up at UNT. He was a dark-skinned man, and claimed a tri-racial heritage, but identified himself as black. We argued back and forth about the future of race relations; he seemed to think that America would eventually be divided into blacks and non-blacks, and I thought that the concept of race would become meaningless and ethnicity (and ethnic equality) would take its place.
During his lecture he was saying something that he felt he should jokingly admonish himself for, and he slapped the back of his left hand, hard. Unusually hard. It was jarring in its violence, and it sounded like it hurt. It seemed an extremely odd behavior at the time.
That night, I dreamed I was bitten on the back of my left hand by a brown recluse. The symbolism was clear. The bite was in the same spot that he struck himself, and a brown recluse spiderbite turns your skin black. I was clearly experiencing some tension over the racial argument.
The following day, I rode my motorcycle to school. We watched the terribly depressing film Osama, and in discussions with one of my mentors (who is Egyptian), I encountered my own ugly ethnocentrism. I stumbled through our conversation, clumsily expressing my ignorance of the Middle East and its cultural variety. On my ride home I started feeling sick. I obsessively replayed and analyzed the exchange. I feared that I came across as racist, and my thoughts turned to the brown recluse that had bitten me in my dreams.
I pulled my bike under the carport and dismounted. As I was reaching around the wheel to put the chain on, I felt a sharp sting as the hot pipe burned the back of my left hand.
It wasn’t until later that night that I realized it was in the same spot that the professor had slapped his own hand, and the same spot I was bitten by the spider in my dream. I iced the burn right away, so it stopped hurting, but the skin reddened and then browned, and finally scabbed over.
Today, the scab came off. This is what was underneath it.
The Bad Tide
It’s time to climb.
I stared at the rock wall for an hour
and watched the Others rise and fall.
I stood in the room and drank myself to stupor
and feared that black synthetic rope:
that cord like a noose in the shape of a U
for a kung fu hero to choke himself out,
lose consciousness and move ever closer to climax and doom.
I idolized wildly a man who intended to stand and gasp for oxygen
at the summit of a mountain on a distant continent.
We talked on and on about this faraway land
and everything rhymed and it was easy to understand
and I laughed and they laughed at the Rainbow and the Klan
We Laughed At The Thought Of It All.
But then I dreamed of a brown recluse
and he sank his fangs into my left hand, blackening the skin with a pallor like death.
That bitter bite infected the best of us, we got distracted from the master plan
And suddenly, there’s leper colonies
And FEMA concentration camps
And this afternoon I touched a hot pipe on my bike and burned myself
GOD DAMN
IT
STILL
STINGS.
A sore appeared on my face.
Then a scab.
But now I see the web that connects all things.
This is just the bad tide.
This too shall pass.
There are these landmines
hidden in the fields where children play, over in the Middle East.
They’ve got candy-coated bullets, we’ve got pop rocks and soda.
They’re all the same color, and we’re all xenophobic,
they’ve got the Taliban, Al Qaeda
we’ve got McDonald’s, American Idol
and a DEEP WHITE SHAME.
The war never ends.
We’re forever on display.
Even with these friends,
I still drive them away enough to define them.
My own kind,
my very own kin,
I will study them within this personal space, from this specific distance,
and make a note about proxemics.
One teacher gives us a map.
Two teachers chastise us for napping during the collapse of conversations we’ve already had.
Everybody’s quiet because they’ve said everything they wanted to.
But I understand.
Reinforcement aids in learning.
Which is why I keep having these dreams where I see the future
and keep yearning to interpret them perfectly before they come true.
I’ll watch the people store up food,
and medicine,
and ammunition.
I’ll tell the truth.
Time-Out
This is a very brief break from my regularly scheduled broadcasting.
Just so you know, I’ve been immersed in this intensive, difficult, and extremely fast-paced research program. It’s the one I’ve been talking about non-stop for the past two months. You know, the one that launches my scientific career by paying me to do fieldwork and generate my first publication? The highly competitive program I worked very hard to get into? That one.
Well, it turns out that it’s demanding on my time. Shocking, I know! But I guess people think I’m exaggerating when I tell them that it’s eight hours in the classroom and at least three hours of reading and assignments EVERY DAY. Five, six, or even seven days a week.
My point is this, for those that still don’t understand: my availability outside of this program is very limited. I do not have the resources to go out on weeknights, or more than once on the weekends. Sometimes not at all. I am being very selective about the activities I choose to do beyond the scope of my schoolwork. Most times, they will be things I have already paid for, or things I can do with my wife, or things that only take up an hour or two of my time at the most.
Hopefully you can appreciate where I’m coming from, and maybe even be happy for me, because this is a professional-level venture and I am flourishing. You would know that if you asked, instead of giving me shit for not going to a bar on a Wednesday night.
Anyway, back to work. Look at me still talking when there’s science to do.
Becoming a Mountain
I am suddenly sad. This morning, I awoke in the undertow that busybodies get caught up in, where the To-Do List gets a flurry of checks next to pending items and productive hours pass into memory. I felt that surge of “Get Things Done” and supplemented it with caffeine.
I shredded some papers (Stop sending me your fake-ass, con-job checks, Orchard Bank). I called my grandparents (Thanks for the school money and newspaper clippings). I printed out Brit’s short story (the one about the pervert at Barnes and Noble). Josie and I watched an episode of LOST (Shannon annoys me). I disassembled my glow cups, because apparently putting them in the dishwasher shorts them so you can’t turn them off (There’s been a non-stop rave inside my kitchen cabinet for a week).
A pattern crystallized in my thoughts. I’m usually conscious of this energy when it hits: it precedes a period of activity, generally organizational or intellectual in nature. I make lists and put things in categories. When I’m riding a small wave of this energy, I’ll clean or do assignments. The big waves, though — the big waves reshape my conceptual framework.
It was a big wave. I saw something obvious today, something I’d seen before, but hadn’t ever experienced so deeply. I perceived with clarity the overarching patterns in my behavior, and recognized five thematic drives — distinct states of being — that I associated with each. These categories emerged organically, from the subjective meat of the behaviors themselves. More important than what the drives are is the recognition that they come in surges. Waves. Bursts.
This is problematic because it’s unsustainable. Perhaps it’s just the flow of my being: I’ve long been a volcano, rarely a mountain. But what of discipline? What of routine and habit and daily attentiveness? Can these drives be maintained so they surge with greater frequency?
Maybe that would rob them of their intensity, but maybe that would be preferable.