Tin Star (9.5)

It had been a mediocre franchise restaurant, a long, low sandstone structured sprawled out along a broad street in Preston Center, where the residential charm of the Park Cities began to give way to urban Dallas. The interior packed all the Tex-Mex flavor of a gift hastily bought at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport. Near the back, a salsa bar with two types of mild salsa and great warming trays of tasteless, flaky chips waited ominously. Yet every Friday during my senior year I arrived with the same friends (Maddy, Mary and Jenn), ordered the same thing (the Grilled Chicken Quesadillas and a fountain drink) and ate it in the same booth (the one snuggled between the salsa bar and soda fountain). A few weeks ago I returned with my three old companions and found it had closed. There are at least a few times in a person’s life when they are smacked with the realization that things are overused and become trite for a reason. That I was in the middle of a scene cheesy enough to be featured in the finale of a major network sitcom did not lessen its impact on me. Our old conversations had settled deep into the creases of the pleated red booths like crumbs. The western decorations had been tacky voyeurs to the glory days of my senior year. That towering gooey mess of cheese, chicken, bacon, pico, and beans slapped between two white tortillas, that thing they called a quesadilla had been a staple food of my high school diet. And now the building was an empty space with a for rent sign in the window. Driving home, listening to desperate Bruce Springsteen ballads, I feel as ragged and sad as I ever have.

Proverbs (9.4)

The future is an anchor you drag around to keep from floating away.

Calling fire friendly doesn't make it so.

The world is not the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants; the same jeans do not fit everyone.

A good artist is embarrassed by his old paintings.

Words are like uncomfortable shoes: constraining.

A liar sees only liars.

99 Cent II Diptychon (9.3)

It is fitting that, at 3.34 million dollars, Andreas Gursky’s 99 Cent II Diptychon is the most expensive photograph ever sold. The 6.79 by 11.06 foot work features seemingly unending rows of supermarket shelves, digitally altered to diminish perspective. As a result, the most distant products have collapsed back into the foreground, converting depth into dizzying height. The result is a grotesque carnival of color and detail, of overstocked super market aisles stacked into infinity. The 99 cent store has been violently compressed into a frenzy; each of the million of items screams out, brandishing its sharp, crisp figure and belligerent colors. In between the aisles, pressed between the insistent shelves like flowers between the pages of a hard-backed book, are lonely, flattened consumers, visually overwhelmed by the unrelenting amount of stuff.  Without the comforting haze of perspective the products shelved in the final rows are not smudged daubs of soft, radiant color but neon shrieks rendered with cruel precision. The viewer cannot ignore their presence, cannot escape the boundless, meaningless enumerations.The layers of aggressive products pile upwards in a capitalist race towards the ceiling where they are met, by yet another photograph of grocery store aisles robbed of depth. Together the two images present a towering accusation of excess, a visual ladder with rungs of glinting bottles, neon packages, crowded boxes, bright cans, and labeled cartons. The final impression, which is an aggressive and lonely tribute to the power of American consumerism, is well suited to its exorbitant price tag.

Cell (9.2)

I am made of cells. This kind of thought always has a hallucinogenic effect on her. Her hands pulsate with the knowledge.  In the hidden world of her palms there are a thousand Dali landscapes. In each of them, satin ribbons of endoplasmic reticulum swirl gracefully along the membrane. A rainbow of bulbous, misshapen water balloons float through space. Kidney-bean-red: mitochondria, scrubbed-sky-blue: vacuole, Dijon-mustard-yellow: lyosome, fresh-cut-green: vesicle. Centrioles race through the thick custard plasma like shattering stars. In the far corner, the mysterious golgi apparatus folds in on itself apprehensively. And in the center, spattered with ribosomes, rises the nucleus, a triumphant, pink egg, with DNA twisting in its purple yolk. She wishes she could disappear into this kaleidoscopic world of whimsy that exists in her fingertips. This cell, the one two cells down from her right thumb nail would be her room, her sanctuary. She would sleep on the soft, swollen body of a mitochondria, and use a vacuole for her watery pillow. After waking, she would run her fingers up and down the membrane and feel it tremble like jello. She would swim laps around that Dr. Seuss miracle of science. And in the evenings she would sit on the rough edges of the endoplasmic reticulum and contemplate the secrets kinked and curled inside that quiet pink egg.

FREE DAY #4

Selections from My Writer's Notebook (8)

Last Fragments of Yale

“I feel like if I’d listened to more Tupac instead of Simple Plan, I’d be like… a better person” –Eunju

“I feel good about it. I know I didn’t get any right. But I put down answers that were true to who I was. It was awesome. I’ve never take a test that way before.” –Jordano, on a Biology test taken earlier in the day

The Failure of the American Education System

The girl (tight jeans, blonde pony-tail, manicured nails) asks the man (button down shirt, khakis, thick accent) where he is from. The man replies, “Peru”. The girl asks if Peru is in Brazil.

Reading Sky Mall

“Litter Kwitter” promises to “Potty train your cat faster than most people can potty train their kids”. A quick flip through the next few pages reveals overpriced beds, ramps, and drinking bowls for spoiled pets. Somewhere in the world a child is dying of hunger.

“The Gift of Love” is available at the low, low price of $49.99.

“The Impervious Wristwatch”. I must remember to buy the Sky Mall editor a copy of The Elements of Style.

“Bigfoot, the Garden Yeti Statue: Sky Mall Classic”. I was unaware there existed such a category as Sky Mall Classic, am depressed.

“Baby Quasar Photo Rejuvenation Light Therapy Device, $399.00”: A sign of the post modern apocalypse? The “device” is a small flashlight. It appears that both words and money have lost all meaning.

3/11/2011

The air is thick with the sickly-sweet smell of fresh-cut grass baking under the blinding Texas sun. The birds scream their broken melodies from the trees. A few surviving dew drops twinkle violently, throwing off white spears of light. It is an aggressively beautiful day.

The Boyfriend

            Alexandria’s eyes focused on the deck floor, ran along the grooves in wood, circled the table legs and stopped at her aunt’s feet. She couldn’t call him again. The feet were cracked and yellow with purple-blue veins streaking down the center. She had already called four times: at 4:14, at 5:27, at 5:39, and at 6:03. They were almost grotesque, reminded her of the peeling weatherproof lacquer on the old wooden swing set in their backyard. She remembered peeling great rubbery flecks off the rotting wood. Alexandria could almost feel the dry plasticene flakes as she sat paralyzed. But then again he had not answered the last two times and perhaps he was lost, trapped in a labyrinth of Texas highways somewhere near the city limit. It was possible; he was coming all the way from Wichita Falls and didn’t have the—

            “So, Alexandria what’s his name again?”

            “Jim”

            “What’s he do?”

            “He’s training to be a sniper…for the police, like a special task force out in Wichita Falls… He’s practically guaranteed a job there. I’ll probably end up there too—

            Her mother cut in, “Well and Alexandria’s guaranteed, I mean guaranteed a job there. She practically runs the law enforcement club and is interning there this summer, so…y’know it’s a slam dunk.”

            “Yeah and we go out all the time…” Alexandria heard the conversation slowly drift away but couldn’t concentrate on the words buzzing in the flat stale air. They had dated for a while but she didn’t want to push him, people didn’t like being pushed. She could text him, but if he was driving then he wouldn’t be able to answer. She flipped her phone up; it was 7:08. She reached for a beer sweating on the table cloth, then changed her mind and pulled back. Alexandria froze. She wondered if anyone had seen her and remained suspended for half a moment, poised between the table and her chair, before rushing forward to grab the beer. She really couldn’t call him; he got annoyed when she called a lot. The beer was disgusting; it churned slowly in her mouth, warm from the sun. For a moment she felt like she was drinking barley syrup. But dinner was supposed to have started at 7:00 and now it was 7:10 and everyone looked hot and sweaty and possibly upset at having to wait. But they were talking so they couldn’t be too upset.

            “…no really they’re everywhere and Judy”

            “Judy Doyle?”

            “No, Judy from down the street. She said they got into her coffee maker and like ate right through the wires and short circuited it.

            “And these are fire ants?”

            “No, the sugar ants, those tiny black ones. I mean really you should see the house, they’re everywhere and I don’t know what we’ll do if they get into the kitchen.”

            Every summer Alexandria was secretly happy when the ants returned. They were adorable in their own weird insect-y way. They had those cute little antennas that spun around and they were so small and they didn’t bite. Soon it would be 7:15 and then 7:20 and she knew her mom; she would make everyone wait and it would be embarrassing. But she really couldn’t—

The machine purr of a Ford F150 filled the damp air, stalled and then sunk into silence. He was here; it was 7:13. She ran to the gate and saw him standing there in the driveway. Jim was 6’7, 250 pounds, slightly on the heavy side but cute, handsome even, with tousled brown hair and big brown eyes.

“So, Jim are you two going to go out again?”

“Oh, we’ve never been like boyfriend-girlfriend just real good friends mam.”

On Hugh Heffner’s Bed Room

            Slumped across the couch with a bag of chips, I have somehow fallen into watching MTV Cribs’ Priciest Pads Countdown. Worth an obscene 50 million dollars, the Playboy Mansion comes in at number two. Sweeping helicopter shots pan across the grotto, the tennis courts, up the football field of a lawn and stop at the rambling Tudor structure itself. The host, Kimora Lee Simmons, announces that there is a zoo with spider monkeys. A decrepit Heffner drags himself, flanked by blondes and tailed by the cameras, through the game room, private theater, wine cellar, and dining room, all the way to his cavernous bedroom. There is no furniture save the bed, a pair of side tables and a long, low dresser beneath the TV. Haphazard stacks of videotapes line the walls and push into the center of the room, as if the man had run out of money just as he was about to purchase bookshelves. A mountain of mangy and worn stuffed-animals engulfs the upper half of the king sized bed. A collection of panties dangle from the chandelier. Two dozen half-naked girls have crowded into the room for the shot. And in the center sits Hugh Hefner, all slack flesh and thinning hair, wrapped in his trademark robe, surrounded by his innumerable things, his strange collections.

The Food Preparation Diet

            I have been volunteered by my mother to coordinate and prepare lunch for the 100 students attending the three-day H. Grady Spruce High School TAKS Spring Break Camp. After  de-casing and grinding ten pounds of sausage for the baked ziti I feel nauseous. The spoons are not long enough to reach the bottom of the vats; we must mix it by hand. On Turkey and Cheese Sandwich Day I see what a gallon of mayonnaise looks like and am unable to eat anything. If I were forced to cook like this every day I am sure I would never eat again. Preparing industrial quantities of food is sure to be the next big diet fad.

Jersey Shore Season 2, Episode 25

            After a brief one episode courtship, a seven episode honeymoon, and a twenty four episode clusterfuck of affairs, breakups, reunions, more breakups, tears, and accusations Ronnie and Sam are once again together. They both look broken, defeated.