Finger Exercise #2 - "Key Foods"

 

By the time I had arrived, the scene had progressed from mild frustration, to regular frustration. The aisles in NY grocery stores only yield so many passing lanes and due to the produce man’s cart of assorted lettuces, the way had become blocked and the only hope of going towards the refrigerated dairy was a large circumnavigation of the onion display. The time for which, none of us had. With the AC on blast, I get in line behind two people. One, an overweight near sighted mother of two horrible children, and a young bespectacled hipster art student.

The mother gets up each morning when her horrible children ask for their horrible sugary cereals. She has a 45 minute commute to her job, consisting of two trains and several stairs, which are becoming harder each day. She has a cup of Folgers in the morning, an iced Dunkin Donuts black with 4 sugars during the commute, a 5 Hour Energy at 2:30, and sometimes a diet Coca-Cola with dinner. Throughout the day there is a static tiredness, an all encompassing and omnipresent weariness. She thinks of herself as a dog person because she wears “sporty” outfits, but the frizziness of her hair, the pedestrian wear in her sneakers and sweat pants, and the far off look in her eye leads me to believe she is a cat lady with no cats. In school she was proud to be an efficient reader, but her interest in fine literature was dispelled because appearing too interested in class was grounds for humiliation at the hands of her young and stupid friends at Richmondtown Prep on Staten Island. She has passed on her passable study habits to her children who are draped at either side of the cart, wearing lobotomized stares in front of the salad dressing, a deep stupidity in their eyes, apathetic and slow as molasses.

The art student wakes up around the 10:30 - 2:30 window and has borrowed this strategy from cable repair men. Most things happening in his life in large bay windows of time. To get to his catering job he would prefer to ride his bike, but having only one gear can be a strain on his little chicken stick legs, so he prefers to take the N to 42nd and transfer to the 1 train to 18th St. He’s been trying to watch his caffeine intake, but if the night before was especially raucous he has little choice but to keep a steady waterfall of coffee, bought at a myriad of establishments, rushing into his mustachioed face. Unlike his grad student friends, he will drink Starbucks and has on occasion enjoyed an iced grande carmael macchiato, because the caramel sauce settles in the bottom corners of his cup and turns into a soft, taffy like sugar snack that jazzes his mouth. He is a cat person, but does not know it yet. His schooling has been top notch and his family came from wealth, so they created a padded playroom for his life. He was always encouraged to work on big problems and not worry about keeping up with standards, as things could be moved to accommodate him, and not the other way around. He learned creativity not from scarcity or resourcefulness, but by the endless streams of support and encouragement from private schools and the terrarium of privilege which now he feels is his job to thwart and refute, rebuke and rebel. He is wearing a stupid hat.

Press Play and then read the story

Theatre of the Mind

The day after the funeral, the child was awake before everyone, and had begun to establish contact with his recently deceased grandmother. Outside, the birds acknowledged the grey dawn. In front of him lay the gutted remains of a 40 channel mobile CB radio, a soldering iron, green, red, and black wires, a clamp-on ammeter, coiled up coax, and an off-white saucer sprinkled with crumbs and 2 remaining sugar cookies. The child was sitting on his knees in a gardeners position, earnestly turning the RF gain in conjunction with the squelch control. In static colored visions, he heard himself travel outside of his parent's home, up into the sky and further into the ionosphere where electricity traveled unencumbered and reached all the way around the Earth. He whizzed by planets and brushed by comets and gravely nodded to event horizons surrounding sightless black holes, which he knew emptied themselves out into white holes in alternate universes. His grandmother had always loved his imagination, and now he was using it to reach out to her, to make contact with her, to establish a link and a connection, to ensure that there really was a destination at the end of our travels through life. In the end however, he only heard static.

Finger Exercise - "TradeWinds"    

Each morning, depending on where I train my eyes, I can see in the distance at least 17 17 year olds, walking to St. John's Preparatory Academy in uniforms. The uniforms start from the bottom. Black shoes; these are usually a simple affair, handled with a flare for the boring and a tendency to look somewhat “orthotic” in their general appearance. Below-knee stockings for girls; a sometime fantasy for sock lovers, topped by a feltish gray short skirt. Same shade of gray slacks for the boys, industriously pleated to gain maximum seriousness. The tops are navy blue sweaters which snuggle white dress shirts. The girls general appearance is an iconic fashionable encryption of a carnal set of datum, accented in some anime-specific way to exaggerate a sexual dawn already underway. Some of these girls are turning into what will later be beautiful women. But for now, most of them are beautiful in the potential way a chrysalis reminds us of a future butterfly. Or moth. Some of these girls are definitely moths. The boys also have insectual traits, praying mantis arms, chameleon fashion sense in regards to their chosen cadre, and some have small beady eyes like social spiders, cocksure of the strength of their webs. Most of the boys are too long for their faces and have a smug awareness of themselves as they ungracefully slice through the sidewalk traffic. A selfish time for them containing the first cracking of the crab shell of their egos, unwittingly anxious to be dipped into the clarified butter of manhood and devoured by the eventual and thankless life of the common 1st world adult. Of all of the things these high schoolers are, it’s really what they leave in their trails that stays with me, the olfactory traces of their emergent, proud and self-centered worlds floating on the clear morning air in Queens.

This is a time of flag planting. This is a time of cologne spritzing. This is a Cosmolopolitan time of ripping and rubbing sample pages of perfume on your wrists and neck. This is Axe body spray. This is what dad smelled like, this is what smell The Body Works girl sold you, this is smelling exactly like a candy store, this is freshly washed and conditioned hair hanging in tight, heavy, clean tentacles, this is heavily applied deodorant spray, gel, powder, roll-on, this is Aqua Velva, this is Brut, this is second-hand cigarette smoke, this is unwashed hair smelling like skin and dry grass, this is fruit spray, this is Tommy Girl, this is pineapple shisha, this is mango splash, this is the smell of a lintscreen. All of this is what trails behind these budding adults and collects on the motes of the humid morning air in my neighborhood in western Queens County.

Newness from co-pilot C. Vince. Tasty!

Local Rapper Battles Baby Panda, Wins.

Originally featured on elevendytwelven.blogspot.com

VS.

Ronald Shortblock reporting

RIFLE, CO––MC Chillability showed his self-quoted “Freeziness” to a wowed-out crowd as he crushed a baby panda with rhyme lasers last night.
It was due to be a massive battle, a struggle of wit and cleverosity, but ended in panda-shaped shame. Venom like this came from Chillability:

You'll high five me then I slap your face
You can't pull a peace treaty, Asian panty waste
I'll flood your homeland like the 3 fu%#in' Gorges
Take your mom panda some flowers that are gorgeous
I'll destroy ya'

Such lyrical face-melting like this was usually followed with an obscene gesture, Chillability’s secret intimidation technique, and at one point he spit in the face of the stupid, stupid panda. The small animal’s only reply to such debasement, if one could call it a reply, was:

hrghnhghr... Slurgh.

In all fairness, yes, it rhymes, but is nowhere close to witty or coherent, two things that the judges look for in such verbal bullet-based blitzkriegs. A fact Chillability knows all too well. Please note other licks of the organic box-cutter that is his tongue:

Your a long way from China b*tches
Like my dishes
I'll choke your Yin if you touch my Yang
I'll cover you in curry and feed you to orangutans
I’ve reached 3rd base with like 20 sluts
While you were busy comin’ out ya’ momma's butt

Has a heavier truth ever been told? The crowd last night--some of which were Chillability’s own “The ChillBillies” entourage--thought not, while the panda just sat and had the look in its cowed eyes like it had just been molested in the mouth a little bit.