something fishy

Exiting my Nissan Sentra, I walked on the crunchy snow in the parking lot. I like that squeaky, stiff, yet hard rubbery sound when the snow is packed and the temperatures are frigid. Reminds me of a dentist putting a filling into a cavity. Though it is after 10 p.m., the lot is brightly lit. Security cameras are strategically placed in a corner and on the sides. Wait. Stop. Rewind. Step back. Is that a fish? It is. A dead fish, mouth and one eye open on its side, scales silvery in the January moonlight. Bloodied in the middle as if shot. The nearest body of water, a lake, is a mile away. This Surprise Fish Presence (SFP) sparks a gazillion questions, some you are already formulating, others being fished from the open air of my imagination. Aside from the obvious how and why it got to this spot, there's the who placed it and was it by accident or on purpose. Was it a coded "sleep wit da fishes" warning? To whom? Not likely me. It wasn't snoozing near my car and its apparitional appearance preceded my parking in this spot anyway. I suppose someone could have gone to the regional market (we don't have a fish market as New York, Boston, Tokyo, San Francisco, and Omaha has have), bought a bass or perch or whatever my Piscean Poseur is, and dropped it, tossed it, placed it, planted it. Maybe it's performance art. I do not know the answer to any of these questions or to any of a myriad queries associated with this Neptunian Mystery. This terrestrial sighting, um, spawned a stinging array of additional questions upon finding the SFP gone two days later. Gone as if never having put in an unannounced, uncamouflaged cameo in the first place. This bothers me more. Did I dream or delusionally fantasize the Unidentified Fishy Observation (UFO)? I did not. It was there. I have no corroborating evidence, no cellphone photo. My observation is evidence-based reality, or reality-based evidence. It was there, staring at my two eyes with its dead-pan unmonocoled cyclops of a visage (other eye peering blindly into the icy snowpack). I was there, and so was one dead unfake fish. It was. Believe me. 

ghost in the machine

It is 2018. Election Day. The Feast of Choices. I voted, made my choices. I had uncharacteristically backed into the parking space outside the Hazard branch library. I won't hazard here a guess as to the 5Ws and an H of the hazard. Turn the ignition. No push button. The engine starts. Wait. Hold it. I'm not ready but I'm rolling forward, sliding as if on black ice. I'm pushing down, down, down, pumping on the brake. To no avail. Huh? Hold it. Can't stop the forward motion, the inertia. Panic. Sweat. Brake. Brake. Wait. The car is in park. What? Oh. What? Hunh? The car to my right, parallel to me, doing the sliding, the gliding, the creeping forward. Rapid heartbeat slows. Reorients. Back to normal. Things in their proper place and time. Back to normal, whatever that is.

It is 1956. I know it is 1956 because later in the journey, after Mom, Dad, Jack, and I, and the Kandas visited Washington Crossing State Park in New Jersey, a mysterious conversation ensued in the car. "Are you okay, Josephine?" The dialogue among the adults was confusing. I was 7 years old. The words "morning sickness" were uttered that summer day in the car, in New Jersey, where at the Kandas' for vacation I would enjoy buttered and salted corn on the cob that has yet to equaled in sweet and salty succulence, a trip so satisfying I saved sand in a Dixie cup from Ocean County Park in Lakewood after wading in its tea-colored lake water. After Bobby was born, in January 1957, did I hearken back to Mom's car-sickness obliquely discussed? Doubtful. It was more of a mosaic, a gestalt portrait painted in stages over the years since.

It is 1956. We are on a train in Stamford, Connecticut, bound for Trenton, New Jersey, for a family vacation. One could only hazard a wild guess as to the costly burden this put on our family. We lived in a city housing project, well kept, reasonably safe. We moved there in 1955, part of a seismic postwar transformation unknown to the scared and curious kid in the front passenger seat with cousin Joe Kanda driving. How did six of us fit in the car? No bucket seats, no seat belts. We are on the train ready to embark on our adventure. Some kid in school (for all I know, it was a teacher not a classmate) once told a story of someone being sucked under a train and dying. So, when steam burst forth from the arriving New York, New Haven and Hartford line (the New Haven line; oh, how I would long for a gorgeous serial comma inserted there, seifs or not) engine, what else could I ponder but swift death and extinction by locomotive vacuuming? A terrifying prospect.

Not sucked under but alive, oh, the excitement of sitting in a train chugging toward Manhattan, solid and rhythmic, stoic and hypermuscled, iron in its will and movement. Passengers on a train, human cargo -- living and breathing after not being mercilessly sucked into its abdomen!

We arrived at the terminus of Grand Central Terminal (not Grand Central Station, which is a post office). Presumably to change trains for the Pennsylvania Railroad, a coveted ownership property in Monopoly.

I am sitting near the window, the window is on the right. We start moving slowly, pulling out of the station. We are underground. Here we go. A gentle rolling sends us toward Trenton. Wait. Something is wrong here. What's the train on the other side of my window doing? Going backward? I don't get it. I stamp my feet on the floor, as if I could step on my own personal braking system to set things right.

"Mommy? Daddy? What's the train do -- ... ?"

Did they see it too?

Some kind of secular miracle. Movement not movement. We weren't moving, the other train was. What's going on here? Did you catch that? Was that for me to see or does everyone see it? As if my beloved Willie Mays wasn't tracking the ball over his shoulder in center field but instead the outfield and the stands and naturally the batted ball were conspiring to move while he was stationary.

And a seven-year-old boy doesn't know where to begin so he swallows his words and buckles up, so to speak, for the ride.

Who or what authored this vection vision of illusory movement? 

Tell me.

Don't tell me. 

Not yet.

hopeless romantic

You hear and see the term "hopeless romantic." Why hopeless and not hopeful? Does the former choice anticipate rejection, adding to the unrequited-love pose? Does the latter choice make it all sound too easy? Is being romantic a hopeless proposition, given the clash of romance and gauzy fantasy vs. the pebble-in-the-shoe or sand-in-your-tea challenges of so-called reality?

cui bono?

The movie "Birdman" did not soar for me. Although the acting performances were excellent across the board, and the filming techniques intriguing, the movie was drenched in the existential searching and posing I thought went out in the Seventies. I liked some of the takes on Manhattan, evoking the somewhat squalid Eighties, when I worked there, more than the current Disneyfied version of Times Square and its environs. Oh, I get the reality versus fiction versus fantasy stuff. And the back story about worth and authenticity and identity blah blah blah. Cui bono? To what good? The writers and directors took themselves über-seriously. Sorry. Pretentious claptrap. Not buying it. Save it for the Gauloises-smoking crowd.

handicapping perception

The Silverado pulls up into the handicapped parking spot to my right. The truck is big enough to eat my Rabbit in one gulp. The very truckness of my neighboring vehicle arouses an undercurrent of resentment. Its intimidating presence summons an echo of the grammar-school bullying I sometimes endured. (No, it doesn't. That's overstated, too overt. I only say that upon reflection afterward.) Instinctively I look for, and find, the handicapped parking tag hanging from the rearview mirror. Legit. (Isn't that grand of me, to approve?) The driver and the passenger in the back seat look whole and fit and able. They don't look handicapped to me. You're right. Maybe the driver or her passenger who loom above me are legless or eyeless or paralyzed or subject to seizures or handicapped mentally (does that qualify one for the parking privilege?) or dually addicted to drugs, alcohol, gluten, and trans fats. Maybe the vehicle transports someone in a wheelchair who is at home or at a rehab facility. Maybe. And what is it that really nettles me, anyway? The fat, gas-guzzling vehicle? The perception of entitlement? The appearance of injustice? Why should I care? Why should one who says he espouses the simple life, who asserts all manner of progressive values, bother to notice this harmless status, alleged or posed or sanctioned or otherwise? Questions worth pondering. Answers pending.

A few hours later, up at the University, I saw a Mini Cooper (or is it Cooper Mini? I always forget) drive by. I spotted a handicapped parking tag. A young driver, perhaps a student, zipping down the street, seemingly "whole and fit and able." Ah, what about her? What about that sporty car and its occupant?

And what about me?

Same self-imposed questions worth pondering. Answers still pending.

Kokonuts vs. Kokonuts

I have just read about Daniel Bejar and Daniel Bejar in The New Yorker. One is a musician, another an artist. The artist has made himself look like the musician and as an "art" project in real time in real life is playing on the same-name identity. His project is called Googleganger, with those two dots over the a.

All of which got me thinking.

Who, after all, is Pawlie Kokonuts?

And if I used my real name, would it really be me?

Who is me?

This is what employers and education officials don't seem to get. They warn people to be careful about their online identity and online representations, but who is who? And what is what? What is real? Why can't anything online be considered the mere fictional fabrications of a virtual persona?

This is nothing new in literature, going back to Truman Capote's non-fiction novel "In Cold Blood," and the same with many works by Norman Mailer. Frederick Exley wrote "fictional memoirs," featuring a character named Frederick Exley. But he wasn't Frederick Exley the author, was he?

So, who is who? And what's what?

Deep questions.

Realish the Moment

We breezily assume we know what is real.

But of course "reality" is a slippery eel, hard to grasp, hard to handle.

And Marcel Proust celebrated how subjective and deceptive our memory is.

David Sedaris says his latest "nonfiction" series of personal essays is "realish."

Great word. Realish.

"Memoir is the last place you'd expect to find the truth," he was quoted as saying in The New York Times.

Bloggers, take note:

All you say is true; all you say is false.


All you write is false; all you write is true.