Category: Uncategorized

Humans bond in tragedy. Or near tragedy. Or in the tragedy they create for themselves.

To many, the Greyhound is a tragedy. A disaster. A punishment or prison sentence. To some it is a sore-assed haven of travel. For most it is the only means they can afford. But when the Greyhound breaks down twenty miles from Pittsburgh, PA, no matter what the Greyhound means to the traveller, it is discouraging. The amount of discouragement caused, however, does differ from passenger to passenger based on how they deem the bus itself. Those who view it as a tragedy on wheels are far more discouraged by a four hour delay than one that considers the bus a privilege.

Everyone fears for their lives when the bus driver is raving. It is no better when the already irritable passengers accept conclusions that the bus driver has fallen asleep while driving, created by the mother being summoned to a court out of state. Then there is the woman who complained to her husband while standing in line at Penn Station, grumbled to her husband when she smelled the toilet, whined to her husband when the person was talking to loud on the phone, and screamed out loud to her husband that she valued her life when the bus broke down. She was obviously having a more difficult time than I was, as I chuckled and emailed the first contact I saw so that someone knew how I died. So that someone could rate this tragedy.

Humans bond in tragedy and my journey has been characterized by the disagreeable itch of tragedy. Missing university students, feared buried in a construction site or dismembered in the river. Driving through towns stripped completely by high speed tornado winds as if they were humans that had decayed to only skeleton. Greyhounds breaking down with passengers crying and calling the police and their families, locked in the bus because of a faulty computer and a incompetent and inhuman driver. Each tragedy has its own weight which depends on the one being traumatized.

But through the tragedy, I have bonded. With one friend and his friends, then two friends and their other friends, and one more friend and his friends. Because just like natural disaster movies or killer animal movies or horror movies, humans bond in tragedy, no matter what kind of human or what level of tragedy.

You make your best friends by living in the disasters you have in common.

I’m coming to terms that I’m not concerned With planting my feet but looking onward I’m growing older but I cant get over The need of colder skin when I know that home is warmer It’s just that I have this problem Where I want to be everywhere I’m not I’m thankful for what I’ve got A room in a house where my bed may stay But the feel of another’s sheets help keep my demons away It’s become clear that what keeps me here Is the sense of failure and other nightmares I’ve become jaded and I can’t escape it The thought of settling when I know it’s what I’ve hated It’s just I have this problem Where I want to be everywhere I’m not It’s just I know myself and I’ll sacrifice everything I’ve got Though I can’t afford to eat as much as I should be And my bills won’t pay themselves so I’ll come up with another scheme This place looks better from a passenger window Or stared at from above But when you’re chasing brightness You lose concern with the damage done It’s not my fault I’ll try to call No ties no roots I’m fine.

– Touche Amore, Home Away from Here, Parting the Sea

I have a rash. It looks like my skin is melting in certain spots and that the high temperature melted skin is dripping melting spots on my feet. It is found nowhere above the knee, and no I am not referencing the timeless childhood joke about having three knees (left knee, right knee, weenie). Rash talk is usually only done on WebMD or in the dark cold lighting of a doctor’s office. Open rash conversation isn’t usually acceptable because rashes often indicate sexual promiscuity. However, my leg was not sexually promiscuous, although a dog might have had his way with it it last weekend.

My mother called me a hypochondriac once. I was hurt. Not physically, because I was undoubtedly making it up, but emotionally. I was ten. I was complaining about a stomach ache and she asked me if I had eaten anything that might’ve caused it. I meekly said no, concealing the fact that I had just eaten maybe ten ‘Eat the Middle First’s, President’s Choice’s answer to the Oreo. Now in ‘adulthood’ I still ask my mom about ailments and she still likely thinks I am making them up. Since my mom made fun of me about my eggplant finger for expecting a diagnosis without proper photographic analysis, I took some macro rash shots of my right calf and sent them in an email. Dad thinks that it is ‘Stinging Nettle’, a plant that incites equally as much fear in childhood as poison ivy and venomous spiders. I think it is flesh eating disease. Or possibly scabies. Scabies, my brothers told me as a child, are contracted by putting your hands on the hand rail of an escalator. Or maybe that was a made up disease called sucrumb. Most likely entered my body through my finger and eating my legs off while I travel. According to the BallsofRiceMD.com, scabies, sucrumb and flesh eating disease are caused by long periods of sitting around. Like bedsores. Stagnancy. My skin melts and my brain is eaten alive. And when things get stagnant, my body and mind start to eat themselves.

It has been too long since you last traveled when you can’t find your passport number on the one identification page of your passport. If you travel enough, this number should be an involuntary reaction to Customs forms and Visa information. Ask Mel. After an hour on the train, just before border patrol and after my first granola bar, that specific and overwhelming feeling hit me in the gut. The same feeling that followed me for months in India and the one that accompanied me a year and a half ago when I left home. When you breath in and feel your stomach flop and wheeze, as it is the first part of your body to realize yourself as completely vulnerable. Heavy fear. The fear of opportunity and the unknown. The feeling of not knowing what to say to the Border Patrol Officer when he asks how long you plan on staying in ‘his’ country. The feeling of fear. I thrive in this setting.

But goddamn is it itchy.

The only cure to my leg rash, hopefully, is not changing my clothes and walking around sweaty in new places. Because that is all I plan on doing for the next three months. If this is indeed not the cure, then I can at least travel in comfort knowing that in body and spirt, I am not alone. I’ve got scabies with me.

It was as if he knew that my finger turned blue and swollen like I had shut it in the car door, or hit it with an errant swing of a hammer. Maybe when I was waiting in line, he noticed me staring at it, trying to push back the cuticle and wincing. Maybe he could see the subtle glaring blue from his padded teller chair. Or maybe he could smell the gangrene. Either way, he asked me if I wanted travel insurance. For the low price of $200 I can insure that I lose $200 and nothing else. Double dismemberment, and so on. When he heard the word ‘Mexico’ he salivated kindly, knowing that any wise traveller to Mexico buys travel insurance, because it is a 50/50 chance that you will survive while visiting Mexico. I said I was interested, but declined all the same. RBC can suck the ‘hard earned’ dollars from someone else’s bank account. I’d rather be doubly dismembered.

But if I lose a finger while traveling, because it was falling off before I started traveling, maybe they’ll give me that $50,000 lottery that he was waving in my face. This could be a worthy investment. I’d cut my finger off for $50,000. I’m sure there is a market for that in Mexico.

He used Superman analogies in Quebecois English and I imagined my finger swelling to the point that it looked like a small, soft eggplant, pulsing with electric charge. They’ve got cheap medicare in Mexico, I tell myself. And likely black market medicare in Bloomington, Indiana. His greedy sense of worry and my mother’s concerned messages seem to foreshadow a point where I look back in regret that I didn’t buy overpriced insurance for suckers while I mourn a missing limb or digit. Jean-Francois just wants what is best for me, and my mother just wants a son with full use of his extremities. Fair enough, but no thanks.

That is a super-peachy-keen post. Thanks for really blathering on like that! Seriously, I don’t think I could have spent more effort wishing for something heavy to fall on me to erase that nonsense from my mind.
-Blithering Idiot

I am a blithering idiot.

The sooner we can say this to ourselves, the better. But in order for it to make the impact that it should, we must call ourselves idiots before someone else does. The repetition of the phrase merely because someone else realized it first, means much less. I knew I was a blithering idiot far before this person, presumably a man, commented on my blog. Whenever a person indirectly calls you an idiot, and names himself an idiot, that means you are doubly idiotic. Just makes sense.

One of my greatest worries is that this entity that is Balls of Rice is simply a forum for stupidity. Spouting opinion and acting pompous. Opinion is never wrong, nor is it ever right. But nevertheless, I don’t want to be filling your digital ears with my digital voice of digital opinion. Social networks fill anyone’s quota for opinion, and I strive for this URL to be as far away from daily updates and profile photos as possible. #blitheringidiot

Opinion is never truth. In a search for truth, opinion is an unnecessary distraction. In a post by post search for truth, it is difficult for the five-hundred-and-sixty-second post not to be dripping in personal belief, as if actual decent topics had dried up and Balls of Rice had no choice but to immerse the sponge in a bucket of opinion.

So while watching hockey that has no soul, I sit in dead heat with phrases bouncing in my head like the digital time on a computer screensaver, such as ‘The washing machine is loud.’ ‘Your roommate showers for too long.’ ‘I smell like old ravioli.’ ‘I’m tired.’ ‘It’s hot out.’ ‘I hate Burrows.’ The only thing keeping me a blithering idiot and not a goddamn idiot is the fact that at times I don’t say these things I think. And that I know well what I am.

We are all idiots. Blithering ones. And all for our own reasons. We are smarter if we find it out ourselves, instead of letting another blithering idiot tell us.

One shoe on, one shoe off.

I have been in the process of shoe repair for the past few weeks. New shoes in April, $50 for a pair of The People’s Shoes. The week after receiving them in the mail, I walked my soul into them. A month afterwards, holes have begun to form, so I have been patching them up with pieces of peanut butter jars, sections of old longjohn material, and hot glue. I want to become a cobbler. Good as new, but made modest.

A month or so of feeling good about myself, not just self-esteem, maybe pride or a sort of egoism. I knew it was going to come crashing down. I deserved to come crashing down. A contentedness of being can only last so long, and one must expect that they will be down-pegged hard in a short period of time. A long talk, one shoe on, one shoe off, and I was reminded of some personal aspects I needed to work on, but was comfortable in my own self-righteous glory. And it just takes one day, a few beer, and a clouded sky to remind myself that pride isn’t worth keeping around, and that yes, I am still indeed among those that I hail the worst.

As completely inflatable human beings, deflation keeps our egos in check. Brand new shoes need to get dirtied and hole-filled so that we can cobble them back to a more humble shoe.

The cobbler’s work is never finished.

The lights are out and I have no intention of turning them back on.

It is difficult teaching high school students about electricity. It is like trying to turn on a lightbulb when you know it is burnt out. Resistance is measured in ohms (Ω) and in how many days late their lessons are (Ls/DL). Potential Difference (voltage) is measured in Volts (V) and Time Spent Thinking About Failing Exams (t/FE).

Between the compliment that I’d make a good teacher and that I should go into an Education program, and a veteran teacher, Mr. Leclair, picking gum off the bottom of tables saying in clear sarcasm that he ‘loves students’, I walked without a hat in the pissing rain continuing the education debate that will never end until I die. More importantly I was instantly inventing phrases that would eventually compliment these ideas about electricity. But then, with the distraction of teaching, I forgot them all.

At one in the morning, I entered my room to a crack and a flash. When it happens, you always wonder if you flip the lightswitch too hard or with too much conviction, or how a the filament of an old incandescent bulb could really just blow like that. (Power = Energy/time) So, each day for the next two weeks, when natural light ceases to exist after 9pm, I plan to sit in the dark of my room with only the light of the street spilling past my curtain. And I will avoid going to the effort of buying a compact fluorescent bulb and straining my body on my tippy toes to screw it back in its socket simply to bring light back in the room. Often, the pop of a lightbulb is faster than the process of turning it back on. It is not always simply the flip of a switch.

I sat down to attempt at recollecting my brilliant metaphoric hypotheses that just an hour earlier shone like beams of light in my darkly shadowed mind. So without internet, with the laptop luminescence dimmed to none, I sat in the dark to allow the thoughts to resurface. Nothing lit up. I needed milk(soy), bread(discount), beer(favourite), and red pepper(staple) so I left my cave towards the market to allow the streets, doubly bright from the reflection off of the rain soaked streets, to inspire. They succeeded in coaxing out the ideas. The electrons flow, the circuit is closed. The pop of a bulb can bring about inspiration just as quickly as a constant and steady techno beat from your roommates room can suffocate creation.

So I have something new to write on the Exam Study sheet for the graduating science class that I tutor: Just as Current is inversely proportional to Resistance, Ideas are inversely proportional to Distractions. And just as quickly as comprehension flashes on, it can be lost with the pop and the flash of it dying out.  If I teach them that, then I don’t care if they fail and don’t graduate high school.
Because I love students too.

Where the grass is green and the girls are pretty.

Dog shit. One of the four most easily distinguishable scents. The others are: cat piss, apple pie, and McDonalds. (The fifth optional scent is McDonalds apple pies dripping in cat piss.) I moved from a town where my high school often smelled of the methane gases from nearby grazing cattle, to the city that smells of the most toxic of animal faeces, that of the dog. The scent followed for blocks, spanning neighbourhoods and lasting several hours. After more than three minutes of the scent, any astute human being investigates the underside of their own footwear, and like a astute human being, I did this. I even checked my pants. It couldn’t be my own body, I just bought my first pair of new underwear in the past two years (with tennis player print, straight from Bangladesh. Best shopping find of the decade). The city is saturated with spring’s cologne of dog shit.

New levels of personal poverty have been attained. New heights of ingenuity have reached. They go hand in hand, poverty and ingenuity (pinvenguity). It started with a coat hanger turned soap-holder for the shower, a rice bag sock drawer in the closet, a shoebox desk on the floor, bricks and 2×4’s for shelves, a flag for a curtain, an orange crate for a night stand, a milk crate for a book stand, and a dish drying mat for a shoe rug.

But on a recent ‘Take-Out in the Park’ date, one where chopsticks were forgotten to be provided, ingenuity, laziness and poverty struck again. Creation: Twig Chopsticks.
Step One: Look on the ground for a twig like a fork.
Step Two: Realize that Asian food is eaten with chopsticks and that straight twigs are easier to find than fork-shaped twigs.
Step Three: Smell to make sure there is no dog shit on the stick.
Step Four: Eat.

Needless to say, I was extremely proud of my innovation. And although I am not ashamed of my poverty, I am comfortable in it, thanks to my countless innovations. And although my bedroom smelled like one of the four most easily distinguishable scents when I moved in (cat piss), and when I open the window it smells like another one of the four, and although I can’t afford apple pie, and although McDonald’s paper bags decorate my street corner like fallen leaves, I have spent a year in the dream world, going to hockey games and getting paid to learn a language. Once reality strikes, I’m in for a real ass-kicking. Money in the bank.

Oh won’t you please take me home.