Reaction in 3 Parts: Reaction I
On Thought & Action
There is a static temporality of affect tied to all events. These situations, however fleeting, transpose the fluidity or rather, choppy disjunctive integration: the life narrative. It is in hindsight that we assign strength or saliency to particular instances in the life narrative that set them apart from the non-adventure happenstance; ordinary life. Upon further examination of typical mundanities we find ourselves wading through, is a microcosmic metalogue of emotionality. That is, our interactions with others and with ourselves. Internal dialogue materializes as a continuous frame story presented as white noise behind our actions- surface regressions in the most empirical terms. Intentions, fears, expectations are abstract paradigms of the life narrative filled in, so to speak, by the physicality of communication.
Catholic School
The plaid jumper and a shiny Lincoln face.
I remember clearly watching my sister fall on the stage of the pulpit platform while getting her wafer in front of the entire congregation. This image played itself involuntarily every time I went to "receive Jesus' body" and I would stand in line waiting for my turn, with my jaw firmly set, and I’d bite my tongue to hold it in. One time I laughed in the priest's face as he leaned over to place the host in my properly set hands (left above right, perpendicular). His face grew red like a newborn baby and he scolded me, "Jesus wouldn't appreciate it if you laughed at his crucifixion."
My sister and I hid under a church pew and giggled in hushed girlish decrescendos at our grandmother's funeral. We no longer had to see or hear her catatonia; like a weeping waxed Virgin statue fixed awkwardly atop a sterile hospital bed suffocating under a thick musk of piss and old person cough.
I finally made my first confession at the same time as my first holy communion, after training myself during time-out at catechism (time-out for not listening) to hold in the laughter. I told the priest with a huge grin under a mask of shadows that I'd thought badly against my sister and I lied to my mother.
Sit. Kneel. Stand. Kneel. Sit.
We had a priest at my church who was in his 90s and during the service would look up gloriously. Sanctimoniously. He would cry sometimes and really stir my emotions. I would resolve to stop cheating on school work, stop gossiping behind people's backs; to write everyday in my diary even if nothing happened. When Father Jasper cried; normal life was realer to live.
Reaction in 3 Parts: Reaction II
"A crowd of small metamorphoses accumulates in me without my noticing it...then one fine day, a veritable revolution takes place." -Sartre (La Nausea)
The middle of the night
The middle of the night is not ordinary. Billy Joel sang a song about the middle of the night and sleepwalking. MC Dad played one of his albums, maybe Pianoman, on Saturday nights. He kept it pretty fresh with Loverboy or Michael Jackson and a box of Franzia in the fridge. My mom claims I did a lot of sleepwalking when I was growing up and scared the "tipsy" out of them on more than one Saturday night occasion. Dad remembers when he found me at the top of the stairs looking down and pointing at nothing in the dark.
The middle of the day
4 o'clock humidity. The washeteria is silent save jingly nervous change. A deaf homeless woman claps her hands violently as she watches breakdancing on the tiny embedded screen adjacent to a row of the 2 load washing machines. As she gestures from her seat and joins me in examining my own clothes spiraling in place, I can smell her unwashed body, clothes, hair. She smacks her gum loudly and motions to a burly Filipino guy wearing an I-Pod that she wishes to borrow his cell phone. Then slaps her knee and points to her ears grinning big. She shakes her head no.
Later the proprietor comes around and mutters while trailing away, "she always calls the cops when she's here."
The middle of the night (Christmas Eve)
Dad doesn't see that I'm pretending to be asleep in my big stocking sleeping bag; with one eye barely an open slit. I can see the bathroom light on and I'm getting up to inspect. My mind is droning with awake activity but I rub my eyes in mock-sleep. I see him pull out a box from the attic that says karaoke machine on the side. He jumps back because I've startled him, standing there silently, and searches frantically for a cover to hide the package. He fumbles with something that looks like a child's sweater and places it on the top of the box. The corners jut out obscenely, and my gift stands there naked. I am led by my dad back to my big stocking sleeping bag. He pats my head and whispers soft dream talk. And all the while I'm crying goodbye to my santa.
_____________________________________________________________________________________Reaction in 3 Parts: Final Reaction
Work. As in working class. gristle and grime and all things grey and that start with the letter "g". And a time clock with an egg tooth, hatching another monotonous cycle. Work clothes that you must separate from regular living clothes. As if work is an altered state of being in which you are no longer actually living for yourself, but maintaining the motions of a human with the essence of a machine.
But we are machines, or at least gears in a system, or better yet, cogs on the gear itself in so far as our altruism is evidenced by the structure of our recombined nucleic acids constantly striving for our "common good".
It's easy to be radical and idealistic when you are a single person without dependents. It's easy to scrape by or not really when you don't have someone to whom you justify your hunger or lack of medical attention. You tend to look over most things you remember your mom fretting over when you were younger like whether you have milk for the breakfast cereal or film for the camera. Life becomes smooth like a spackled wall and kind of cheap looking. Sometimes you reach points of surrender/soul searching when you have to say "fuck it" and put your work aside, if you have any work, and think or cry or do something that will make you feel more monkey and less robot.
My dad raised my sister and I under the Protestant work ethic "If you're not working, you're sinning." And in my mind I always imagined the Puritan ladies hoeing turnips or parsnips or whatever they ate with heavy sweat-lined brows. This association has developed into a full love of gardening because it's the only real "work"-like satisfaction that I get. I tell folks it feels like I'm working with the Earth. We get along pretty well.
