workshop

For those interested, this is an expansion of a piece that I posted here earlier.

Get it here.

another one for class

It was like a forced, sadistic, weeklong hide-and-seek game. My luck would come and go. Occasionally my older brother or dad found one before me. Some days none were found, but those days were like foggy days, when you can’t really see far, the air is sticky, and gets trapped in your throat, and you just wonder, when will this fog lift?

My three siblings (older brother, younger brother, younger sister), my dad and I got in my mom’s purple Chrysler minivan to take it down the street, to the auto shop. It needed an oil change. I was looking for a forbidden piece of gum. My mom usually had some, but my dad said gum made people disgusting, more like cows chewing their cud, rather than like people. I never was allowed to sit in the front passenger seat (I was nearly 7!), but I reached across my brother (and got hit) to get in the glove box.

“Come on! Get off me,” my brother Kevin yelled. We didn’t get along very well as kids. He turned his head toward the window, furrowing his brow.

“I just want gum; move”. I still am easily pleased and amused.

Instead of gum I found the object of our lose-lose hide-and-seek game.

It was about the length of my hand. It was clear and had numbers and little dash marks going up the side. There was a part to press in, and a rounded chamber in the middle, and then the needle. At least there was a lid on it. My dad tried to tell me that this needle wasn’t a good thing.

My dad’s face looked as if he had aged ten years in the last ten days. But in those new lines and around the newly sunken eyes, there was no emotion, no expression. Instead there was just a dead wonder: how could someone overdose while in rehab? Why did my wife leave needles hidden in her car, in the couch under cushions, in the kitchen?

All I thought about was the doctor’s office. Back then, I liked getting shots – the nurses would always give me a piece of grape Bubble Yum. I never made bubbles, though. I don’t know what happened to the needles I found, because I don’t think that we had one of those red boxes with the yellow sticker on it, like at the doctor’s office.

Whenever somebody found one of those hidden needles, it wasn’t quite as foggy. We didn’t have to sit around watching TV, or trying to find gum, wondering if we would find a needle somewhere. Those days were more like tumultuous lightning storms with possibly, some funnel clouds. We didn’t wonder, it just happened, it was there and now and immediate.

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this is for class

Three Objects

一

I have a blue mini-umbrella. Thankfully, considering it's been raining on and off all morning. I've had it since 2004 or 2005, or maybe 2003. That's a long time ago, for me at least. In 2003 I was a high school freshman living in Japan. That's a long way off from being a college senior leaving for grad school in thirty days.

For a while it was sitting the coat closet in my family's house entryway. It's not a small closet behind a door, but a nice big closet with two, maybe 4 feet long each, wooden sliding doors. There are all sorts of things in there, like Titleist Pro VI golf balls with my name on them in blue in. Dozens of them. There's the vacuum cleaner and it's hose, that connects to some central vacuum bag, I guess. There are also beach towels and beach bags.

Then there are tens of mini-umbrellas. My four siblings and step-mother, whom I call my mother, are irresponsible, always losing them. My dad, whom is actually my dad, buys them in bulk when they are on sale. There are a few coats.

二

I have an empty water bottle. It had Nestle PureLife water in it last night, when I got it from church. I wonder what the ad people at Nestle mean by PureLife. I wonder if the people at church get this water to help us lead pure lives (subliminally...?). This bottle isn't even mine, though. My friend took mine and dumped the water out and crushed it. She did that because I kept acting as a human fountain, beautifully arcing water onto her. She didn't find it as beautiful as I did.

I did tell her that she had to give me her bottle. I use one bottle all week and just refill it. By the end of the week I've usually ripped the English/Spanish bilingual label off. Also by the end of the week, I will throw it away. I figure mold or nasty germs will grow in there. I see them, all different pinks and greens and blues, flourishing on the inside of the bottle, creeping toward the top, into the lid, or congregating in the pools of water that I didn't drink up.

三

I have a HuanHuan key chain. HuanHuan is one of the five Beijing Olympic mascots, and he represents fire, ball sports, and the Olympic flame. HuanHuan is apparently an enthusiastic extrovert, quite unlike me in that “extrovert” aspect. His represented ideal is “passion”. I can do passion; I like to think of my self as a passionate person full of passion.

I'm not sure that I showed much compassion when I got HuanHuan and all his key chain mascot friends. I was vacationing in Beijing, and purchased them all in a fairly nice box for 20 RMB, which is a bit less than 3 USD. The seller's initial price was about 100 RMB ($14.6), but I bargained down. But the people in China are very poor. I wonder if that seller got much business, and I wonder if their family had enough to eat. Of course, they were in a nice part of Beijing where tourists come. I saw non-Chinese-speaking tourists drop $50 on something they could have gotten for $5, or less. Perhaps the vendor is driving BMW and sitting on 15 apartments (their investments), waiting to sell them.

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(in this section i have to connect the above three objects)

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What do you think? Does this come off as sarcastic or bitter at all, or what tone do you read in it? DO you see any connections between the three objects?