(Saturday)
It's currently 8:37pm and I’m outside on an abandoned building. Just like I like it.
In my bag, there is a semi-stolen granola bar and a fruit roll up, which I didn’t even realize were still manufactured.
Today has been both weird and warm. Also just like I like it.
There are pockets of this city that people don’t know about. Even those who claim to have seen every part of this city. It simply has to do with one’s willingness towards the pure feeling of doing something you are not supposed to be doing. It’s something so much dirtier and exhilarating than planned events and mountain ranges. It’s something more slanted and sideways- the kind of adventure that makes your asshole tingle not because you’ve just taken a shot of alcohol but, rather, because you’re entirely sober and recognize the potential danger of what it is that you are involved in.
Every weekend this month I have accidentally ended up in a city that is hosting Pride. This weekend, while Pride is happening in the city where I reside, I am the farthest away from leg wear and streaked make up as I can be. Texts coming in about where to be are being ignored. This is an all together different operation. Yes, I am queer. Sometimes the best celebration of that entails ending up around wild rabbits and cans of spray paint along with (or being) the filthiest of gays (think: bike chain grease on fingers when there is no bike around for miles.)
There is an odd mechanical breeze that is associated with the whisk of cars flying by on the nearby highway. So loud in its metal, pavement and velocity that it becomes almost melodic. Then you remember what the sound consists of.
(pause. Early AM Sunday.)
I've been listening to, watching, and being involved with interviews with writers and thinkers I respect. It is feeding me as of late. There is a lot on my mind. Continuing to make connections to something larger than my everyday life is one of them. It is important for so many reasons.
One item I am investing in is a text written by the late Anthony Bourdain. It is read by him as well. He reads fast but his words are beautiful. He was, indeed, a genius sensualist. I look forward to hearing more of him, although I would be lying if I were to say that hearing his voice read particular phrases is not haunting. It is. Something between hearing his voice speak of his own premonitions and attractions and my own discomfort with the levels of connection I feel to it.
(pause)
I unexpectedly related very closely to a passage he wrote about a famous Ultimate Terror of a chef that would go off for at least ten minutes on each and every student. Some people would drop the class just to avoid the tirade in which nothing was sacred. The chef would throw handfuls of their food on the ground and demand if they considered it cuisine. Each student knew that, in this one particular part of the class, everyone was guaranteed to "...in some way fail to meet our leader’s exacting standards". Bourdain's description of how he handled the tirade is something I relate to so humorously and deeply as it relates to lovable tyrants I have had in my own life. People who have had this type of exacting standards that no one can actually meet. These standards make me laugh-in a loving way because I know where they come from - but I also know that laughing will ultimately have me being yelled at even more.
I cheered when I heard this part of the book. This "convict thing" he describes is as familiar as the blood in my veins. It is the exact method I have used most of my life when needed. I don't have to use it too often these days, although I have used it a handful of times this year, for certain:
I was ready. I could see Chef Bernard looking deep into my eyes as he began his standard tirade, could see him recognize a glimmer of something familiar somewhere in there. I did the convict thing. The louder and more confrontational the authority figure got, the more dreamy and relaxed I became. Bernard saw it happening . I may have been standing at rigid attention, and saying all the right things, ‘Oui, Chef! Non, Chef!’at all the right moments, and showing the right respect, but he could see, perhaps in my dead fish-eye gaze, that he wasn’t getting anywhere with me.
He knew, I think, that I had already been humiliated. He looked into my eyes and saw, perhaps that (…) had done his work for him. I liked Chef Bernard and respected him. I enjoyed working under him. But the fat bastard didn’t scare me. And he knew it. He could have smacked me upside the head with a skillet and I would have smiled at him through broken teeth. He saw that, I think- and it ruined all the fun.
be well, be loved,
k
(title: translation of L'amour est un oiseau rebelle, the aria from the 1875 opera, Carmen. It has been on my mind since it was mentioned, in passing, in a book I am re-reading, currently, that was written by this neurosurgeon who does research on the connections between the brain and the heart, James Doty, entitled Into the Magic Shop. )
(photo: Angela Grubich via blackshivers tumblr)
(all italicized words written by Anthony Bourdain)
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