The Night is Less than a Day

Ashgabat was the only place where we didn’t need to be accompanied by our tour guide every time we left the hotel. In the capital of Turkmenistan, we were allowed to amble along the parade ground avenues and faux Timurid domed government buildings. We hadn’t been able to do this before, although we had tried. A few days earlier, when the freighter carrying us across the Caspian had docked at Turkmanbashi, we hadn’t expected to be able to enter the country until our tour guide arrived to vouch for our future activities and whereabouts while in Turkmenistan. When everyone else got in the customs line, we sulked on a curb outside, smoking cigarettes and watching our freighter unload the remainder of its cargo from Azerbaijan. We took out our passports and again looked at our Turkmenistan visas, still incredible in their blue-yellow sheen. We reminisced about the afternoon we had returned to the consulate in Yerevan thinking we’d get mummified in red tape and then booted out the door. We were left sitting in the reception area, looking at a copy of the Ruhnama, trying to decide if it would be OK if we picked it up. I had been just about to open up the touted Turkmen Book of the Soul, when the consular services attendant returned with our passports; he held them open to the page where he’d just affixed our visas. It turned out that we weren’t allowed to wait before entering customs and when we were found lounging around, smoking cigarettes in the back we were told sharply in Russian to get inside and go through customs. The whole time we had waited nervously to see if we’d actually be allowed to leave customs unattended. The stamp on our visas was as surprising as the visas themselves had been. Elliot and I walked out the door into the glare of new sidewalks and the oily Caspian and ran toward the town of Turkmenbashi, about 2 KM down the road, convinced that someone would soon discover their mistake and come after us. After having a gun pulled on us by walking into a bank and getting a slap on the wrist from the tourist agency we were in Ashgabat and finally able to look around one of the most cloistered and xenophobic countries in the world. Everywhere I went it was soldiers and monuments. There were no stores, just wide streets with a few government Ladas cruising around. The only civilians to be seen were completely wrapped in scarfs that covered their heads and faces while they cleaned the aforementioned monuments. It was hard to tell if the cleaners wore these scarfs to protect their faces from the sun and the sand blowing in from the Karakum or if they wore them to protect their anonymity in an autocratic country. They must have realized that there was some safety in looking like everyone else on the streets. Everyone was a worker and every worker had the scarfs on, man or woman. It seemed all one needed to do here to pass as a local was to put on fatigues or an day glo orange safety vest and wrap a scarf around your head. I never heard anyone talking so you could expect that no one would question you. I walked around downtown all day. I saw all the golden monuments and an odd unbroken line of brand new hotels, there must have been at least fifteen in a row, where it looked like no one was staying. I couldn’t help but to pity the volunteers and aid workers living out in Turkmenistan. In the former Soviet Union the capital was supposed to be a place where you could find an over-priced jar of peanut butter and speak English with someone while having a ridiculously overpriced beer in a mock-up Irish pub. Ashgabat seemed to be the only capital that was devoid of these things. What would it be like to live in a Turkmen village and come here once a month? It wasn’t a village, but it wasn’t exactly a city either; it was an amalgamation, part Baghdad, part Xanadu, part Gulag Archipelago. It was also boring. I had been wanting to see this place for years, but there wasn’t anyone to talk to and all the buildings were ministries behind armed guards. If I had tried to wander into one of these even the ignorant tourist card would probably not get me off the hook. Nowhere in the world have I felt the same kind of fear that I felt in Ashgabat. I wouldn’t say I was afraid but I was conscious of a fear. It may have not even been my own, but everyone else’s creating a palpable tension. Everywhere else, you fear a dark alley, a riot, a roving gang of armed teenagers, dogs and maybe even explosions. You fear the overt. In Turkmenistan, you didn’t fear so much as you felt the invert. It’s like there was something underground or between the walls that had no rationale that just struck occasionally because that’s all it knew and, of course, what it did when it struck was a complete mystery. Initially, you enjoy being a protagonist in a Kafka novel, but after a while you get hungry and the conspicuous lack of pirozhki stands is probably the most disconcerting thing. It’s almost like Ashgabat is entirely beyond the purview of either communism or democracy. In a way, it looks like an example of what the world would’ve looked like if fascism had won. The only other place in the world I have seen that looks like it is the EUR, a neighborhood that Mussolini designed as a world fascism exposition piece that still exists south of Rome. I don’t remember there being any place to eat there either. All the right angles and the chalk-white marble seem to inform you that you no longer get to decide when or what you’re going to eat. After finding the only place I saw anyone, in a market on the edge of the downtown area, I ate a little then went back to the hotel. I was exhausted. I found Elliot by the pool with a book and a beer. He looked unfazed by Ashgabat’s epiphytic quality. He had seen most of the monuments I had seen, but hadn’t bothered to walk to the outskirts of town, where the place abruptly ended in the desert, giving one the impression that Turkmen nomadic tendencies were still alive and well. Even the capital, at its fringes, gave the impression of a tent city. We went back to our room, showered and laughed some more at the incredible obvious place where the microphone wires had been run through the wall, but unlike the night we had gotten in, we no longer made a joke of sounding like spies. All those blank guarded buildings were too close to the fore of our minds. There was one place open to buy beer. I had never paid so much for beers in the former Soviet Union. I hadn’t been ripped off too badly because the price of the beers had been marked. Everywhere else, beer had practically been free, Efes in Azerbaijan, Kazbegi in Georgia and Kilikia in Armenia, all well under a dollar a bottle. It was the same in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan too. Either everyone drank araq (homemade) in Turkmenistan or no one drank, which in this part of the world would be quite a feat. After we drank our beers in the room we decided to go down to the hotel’s disco. There were two bars there, one upstairs and one downstairs. We went to the downstairs one first, but there was hardly anyone there. In the upstairs one we found a few more people, even a guy wearing a yes hay em (I’m Armenian) shirt. Thinking maybe we’d talk to this guy, we decided to stick around. We still had too many notes to compare about our experiences in Ashgabat that day to invite ourselves over to the Armenian guy’s table. The more beers we had, the more ponderous our conversation became. By the time we paid the check, we had agreed that the place had something cold and inalienable about it, but, to be fair, I had gotten the same feeling reading from reading Crime and Punishment and drinking too much back in the states. Elliot laughed at this. True, he said. We paid our exorbitant bill and went downstairs to the disco. Earlier there hadn’t been anyone down here, now it was almost at capacity. I’d already had too much, so I promptly went over to the bar to order another round of beers. Elliot stood on the edge of the dance floor like an uncertain kid standing on the edge of the ice skating rink. When I got the beers and turned back around he was gone. I looked around and found him sitting with some American-looking guys, military by the shape of their hair. There were two girls at the table too, one of them darker, like she could’ve been Turkmen and the other clearly Russian. I put the beers on the table and Elliot introduced me. I could feel the tension from the greetings. One guy was friendly, the other indifferent, but those two girls, those two girls wanted us dead. Either Elliot didn’t notice or, more likely, didn’t care. He was too busy talking to the friendly guy, leaving me to try to coax something out of the indifferent one. Since they were military they were practically hard-wired to regard any question with suspicion. I’ve seldom had such an unamiable conversation partner. Over the noise and russki pop I could hardly hear his monosyllabic answers. After a while I gave up, besides the more I talked to him, the more those two girls glowered at me. One of them kept saying things into the friendly guy’s ear. While she talked her eye brows fluttered up and down with irritation. I was about to wander away from the table when the friendly guy order a round for all of us. The place was so expensive that it felt rude to take my beer and go, so I stayed with the sullen crew, sipping my free beer and looking out at the dance floor like there was actually something interesting out there rather than the spandex-clad and bored-looking prostitutes. On their heels, in the flashing lights they looked spiderish somehow. Both the girls were getting up, they had been angry ever since we had sat down. I guess Elliot and I were bad for business. We had showered earlier, but after traveling for a few weeks, we probably still had that transient look, especially for these girls that were used to the biznezmany who came down here. They’d probably never seen anybody so irresponsibly groomed as Elliot and I. The girls stormed away and although I thought their behavior was vapid and amusing for its naivety, I hadn’t angered anyone so much with my appearance since I was in jr. high. After the army guys left, I finished my beer and realized I was at a threshold. I could either go up to bed now or get another beer and, quite possibly, do something stupid. I was about to go upstairs when I saw the angry girls that we had been sitting with out on the dance floor. They had the same bored looks on their faces and danced in the same uninterested way as everyone else on the floor. I felt choler burning the back of my throat, but I’d had too much to drink to be able to tell if I was actually upset or just felt maudlin. Elliot had wandered off somewhere. I stood there for a moment, tired, drunk and thinking about how quiet it must be out in the city. I am dancing, not just swaying around a little, but dancing like I’m at a punk show, dancing like a complete jerk, bringing my knees up, pistoning my elbows back and forth and shaking my hands like they’re holding maracas and I’m not alone. I’ve managed to wedge myself between the two sneering girls. At first they’re so shocked they don’t know how to react, but gradually their faces take on the same sneers they had on before and their eyes roll. Right in the middle of the song they stop dancing and walk to the other side of the floor where they begin dancing again and I follow them, not making it obvious at first, but soon, I’m right between them again, flailing around, acting completely oblivious. I’m trying not to laugh as they cross the floor yet again and I find myself dancing their way. These girls are so icy and I’m such a ragged bum, I can’t believe that I’m the only one that sees the humor in this, but then I think of the humorless city outside. I think of all those empty hotels and that revolving golden statue of Turkmenbashi. I think about the fascist architecture and the lack of any place to eat. I leave the sneering prostitutes alone. I don’t see Elliot anywhere so I go back up to the room. There’s no one there either. I get a glass of water and walk over to the window. I open it and there is nothing, no sound, just a gust of desert wind, it is bathwater warm. I finish my water in a gulp and lie down on the bed. I am lying there listening to the silence outside when I notice the microphone wire in the wall again. “You can hear me, right?” “It’s not funny, you know,” I say against the warm silence coming in the window. “It’s not funny at all.” The last word almost seems to echo. I roll over on my side and feel myself falling asleep. “Yeah.”

Goop

I’m so mad I can’t even finish any of my expletives. “Mother—,God—,Sonofa—” Then it trails into a cacophonic scrape, up from the top of my lungs, pushing against throat the whole way up.”Uuuuggghhhhh!” An inhuman noise, a sound from the Neanderthals stretched over millions of years. It’s the sound of a five gallon bucket of hummus falling over in the back of my truck. I’m always in a hurry; I can’t help it, the deliveries all have deadlines, even when I have all the time I need, I’m in a hurry. I want to get past all the other damn cars. I don’t want to wait while this guy takes a left up here. This old guy is taking way too long; I want to rear-end him for breaking when there’s no one there. That lady went right through that four-way stop. I want to hold back the impulse to break and let her run into me so that everyone will say that I had the right-of-way. I want to get around all of this, despite the fact that I know I will never get out of it. It’s like having a huge meal in front of you and trying to eat faster so you won’t get full. Racing through traffic doesn’t help anything. In the city, there is going to be traffic and even when you get around some of it, there’s going to be more. Nonetheless, I try to drive past it hoping that at least it will thin out a little. I don’t drive like a lunatic, in fact, by the city’s standards, I drive in a fairly mild way. I don’t cut people off, very often and I don’t floor the pedal when I get mad. I don’t even honk the horn, not that it would do any good. I only go a little fast sometimes and usually this doesn’t upset anything, but you’ve got to remember that my job is to transport food and I’ve got boxes of 100 dollar platters stacked up in the back of the truck. With every sudden depression of the gas they go sliding toward the back. If I break on a hill they come bearing down on me. All day long the food in the back of my truck is sloshing back and forth, usually with no ill effect. If the food sloshes with consistency it’s fine. If suddenly there should be a quick gravitational pull on it from one direction or the other, the food may be salvageable. If someone slams on their breaks in front of me, the food is probably not going to be in a condition to fetch its high price tag. When you are driving fast it’s difficult to keep gravity from infringing too harshly on the food in the back of the truck. The force can be somewhat subdued by boxes and with anything that could be used as padding. Sometimes, it seems to work just as well to leave things up to chance. What you may have carefully packed could tip over while the order you tossed on the bed of the truck had a center of gravity low enough to stay put. I try to consider how I’m packing everything, but there’s usually way too much on my mind. I’m lucky if everything makes it into the truck regardless of where it is. Sometimes, I forget to pack things. Sometimes, I forget to feed the meter, or the wheels might not be curbed. The only time I ever owned a car was for about three months in high school. I have no idea what I’m doing with this job. I enjoy the work though. After my last job working as a traveling actor, it’s nice to work alone. I always wanted to be a delivery boy, ever since the first Ninja Turtles movie wherein the turtles befriend a pizza delivery boy. I don’t expect to meet the Ninja Turtles delivering Mediterranean food, but maybe I’ll meet their Middle Eastern equivalent, the Morphed Marrakech Monkeys or something. Driving around, listening to music, however, doesn’t have the same appeal it did when I was 14. I cannot seem to listen to any CD more than 20 times and when I began to notice what radio stations play what song at what time, I started listening to NPR. So, in addition to driving too fast I’m also arguing with the radio all the time. I guess the arguing would be OK, but I tend to gesture a lot when I argue so my hands are very often leaping off the steering wheel, flapping around the radio and generally not anywhere near ten and two. It’s Saturday, I had to turn around before doing my delivery and drive across town because I forgot to drop off a five gallon bucket of hummus. I’m arguing with Lach Mi Sing (I’m spelling that phonetically) on the radio, going down a hill and I’m in a hurry. It’s Saturday so everyone else is out kind of putting around and getting mad at anyone who isn’t putting around, especially in the neighborhood where the restaurant is where no one ever seems to work anyway. The street is narrow and there’s unbridled parking on either side. Cars stop in the middle of the street when they hear a car freeing up a parking space three blocks away. If the parking spot that’s opening up is anywhere nearby five cars will suddenly redirect from wherever they are on the street and charge to this spot. It’s interesting to watch their faces, while they gun for the spot they look like they have the whiney faces of petulant children, but as soon as they move into a position from which they are assured the spot their faces resume the placid look of Saturday and they gently ease the car into the spot. A guy seems about to leave his spot down the hill, since he’s not moving I assume that he’s waiting for me to go by so he can reposition his car. I slow down, but not enough. Just as I’m about to pass the inattentive slob, he pulls right out in front of me. I slam on the breaks and while my reaction prevents the cars crashing it causes another crash as the five-gallon bucket of hummus flops the hell over in the back. While you might think that hummus is delicious when you’re eating it, when five gallons of it are draining out of a bucket all over your car it’s nothing but stinky goop. That’s right. It’s a damn smelly goop. From my standpoint, it wouldn’t have been much worse if a bag of medical waste exploded back there. “God—,mother—,UUUUUGGGHHHHH!” The guy pulling out of the spot smiles at me in such an idiotic way I have no idea what message he could be trying to convey. He looks at me like he’s just farted and I’m the only other one that noticed. Before he’s done driving away, I’m pulled over, with my hazard lights on, trying desperately to upright the bucket in the back of the truck. Oh, god, it’s all over the seats, it’s all over my order, it’s oozed down under the console, the damn smelly goop is everywhere! I’m able to keep about 1/3 or it from globbing out of the bucket. I feel like hurdling the accursed bucket into the street, but I keep my cool long enough to call my boss and make an ass out of myself by explaining what just happened to the hummus that he could’ve sold for hundreds of dollars. He tells me just to bring over what’s left. As I’m driving to deliver the remains of the hummus, I’m so angry that I keep unconsciously pushing down on the accelerator and grinding my teeth. The back of the truck is awash in hummus. I’m afraid to look back there, but I can smell it. That starchy garlicky smell reminds me of something that’s gone bad sitting in the back of the refrigerator, some abysmal Tupperware horror. As I drive faster, the hummus becomes more redolent, choking out the fresh air with its mephitic swells. When I stop to deliver the dumped hummus bucket, it doesn’t seem so bad. Yeah, it’s all over the car, but it looks like the bucket’s still about half-full. At least I managed to deliver something. I was worried that in addition to the mess I was going to have to drive across town to deliver an empty bucket. My disappointment resurges when I try to wipe some of the hummus off the bucket, not even that much, and end up with the stuff smeared all over my hand. It’s like glue and cottage cheese mixed together. It adheres to my pores, it crawls up under my nails and I’ve barely touched the stuff. There’s a huge pool of the stuff in the back of the truck. Its seeping under the front seat where the seat connects to the floor in these depressions. The hummus has pooled in these depressions and I know that I’m not going to be able to get it out of there without taking the damn seats out. The only way I can think to clean this stuff out is to take a fire hose to the interior of the car. I can’t think about this much though; I’ve got to get back to the delivery I started before all this hummus nonsense came up. When I get there, I’ve got to spend about another fifteen minutes scraping the hummus off the bags the order is tied up in. Luckily, everything is in bags, if not, I probably would’ve had to throw out the whole order. I scrape off enough of the hummus so that it won’t drip everywhere and when I do the delivery, I take the bags off as soon as possible and crumble them up before the customers can see that everything is covered is a maize-yellow garlicky funk. When the delivery is finished, I drive back to the restaurant with my head out the window. The sun has hit the hummus now and the smell is almost a tangible thing, like gravy floating through the air in tiny particles. I get a bowl, some water and a bunch of rags from the kitchen. None of it is any good. The water rolls right off the stuff without thinning it out, one swipe with the rags and somehow I’ve got hummus behind my ears; you so much as look at the stuff and it gets everywhere. Because it’s a goop, it has a very low rate of absorption. It’s not like a liquid that the rags would absorb, but neither is it like a solid that could just be picked up. It spreads out like pancake batter on a hot pan, instantly coating and sticking to everything. Using the rad to clean it is like using a scrap of wallpaper to clean wet paint. Because I am in front of the restaurant, and the truck has the restaurant’s logos all over it, everyone who goes by knows what happened; again, it’s Saturday and there’s lots of people out walking around. Almost everyone that passes me makes some kind of comment like “whoa, hummus spill,” or “wish I had some falafel for that.” Actually no one made that last comment. I may have laughed at that. The comments were all so mundane, that I couldn’t tell if they were supposed to be sympathetic or if everyone was making fun of me. The people making these comments didn’t seem to know either. They just said meaningless things as they walked by and I smeared the goop around in my car. I cleaned it up as best as I could, and luckily no one mentioned the incident again. I still haven’t forgotten it though. I couldn’t possibly. Every morning I punch in and get the car, hoping that the smell of rotting hummus somewhere under the seats hasn’t gotten any worse. Unfortunately, it always has.

Flowers all Year

Tata Simonyan is playing in the restaurant. It’s the first time I’ve heard it playing anywhere since Armenia. There is an abrupt feeling of disinterest, probably caused by the lack of sleep and too much coffee. I feel irritable. I would like to walk out of here, have a cigarette and come back all over again. The deliveries have to go out; there’s no time. I package all the orders together and bring around the van. The music in the restaurant keeps changing: Tata, Devochka, Beirut, Parisian rap. When I come back in from getting the van Tata is on again. It makes me slightly happier to hear than it did when I first came in. This is the music that I recommended. Hearing it makes me feel like I’m being listened to. I take a cup of coffee with me for the orders. Outside, San Francisco is lapped by waves. I can see them from Broadway; I can hear them making that indolent *chok, chok, chok* sound when I do my second delivery on the Embarcadero. The sun is out. People don’t pay much attention to me during the morning route. Someone else has already arraigned, they presume. It’s easiest when I’ve been a place before. I can walk in and set everything up without exchanging a word with anyone. That’s what people seem to prefer. When you’ve got to ask questions you’re bothering people. Park the car, sign-in at the door, take the elevator up twenty flights, set up the food in the break room. When the food is set up, I always take a second to step back and glance at it, to make sure everything is right. It looks good like this: untouched. This, rather than feeding people, seems to be the most important aspect of my job. I make my way back out of the office building, moving quickly with a few empty bags dragging from me. I thank the receptionist. She thanks me. From the moment I enter an office, it take about 4 minutes to set up a medium-sized order. Back down on the street, I toss the empty bags in the car. The deliveries are done, but the smell of food is still strong. The restaurant supply store is on the south end of town, in an industrial area where the streets are gravelly and worn away. At the door, I select one of the massive carts. It seems almost all of them have a defect of some kind. It’s not until the cart is weighed done with hundreds of pounds of wholesale items that the defect is noticed: an uneven wheel that makes the cart bounce, a slight bend in the frame that puts all the weight on the back while the front wheels hang two useless inches from the ground, making it almost impossible to steer. Today, I’ve got one of the bouncing carts. The non-refrigerated parts of the store are fine. Cardboard has a soothing smell to it and there’s a cathedral silence to the place—must be the high ceilings. No matter how well I’m dressed for it, the refrigerated part is always cold. It seems like an aberration that a place inside should be so cold. It looks just like the rest of the store, only it’s cold and gruesome. There’s a big box that reads: “Special! Half-goat.” Inside the box are about seven vaguely anthromorphic forms wrapped completely in gauze. It looks like a box of child-sized mummies. A whole isle is devoted to beef. Each piece is evenly cut and wrapped in cling wrap. It looks like a wall is being built of blood and muscle. I look at the list. “5 leg meat, 1 breast halal.” The chicken is shelved in waxed cardboard boxes. Despite the cold, some of them are very damp. The water and blood beads on top of the boxes. The beads roll off when the boxes are moved. After moving five boxes over my hands are damp. I look for the halal breast. I don’t see it. I cross the section: “thigh, leg, drumstick, wing, necks and parts,” no breasts. I find them. They’re all above me, on a shelf right over my head. I’m getting cold; I want to get them and leave this freezer. I reach up. The handle cut into the box is a little soggy. It’s hard to really get purchase with it. I pull the box over the little lip at the end of the shelf. To do this I bounce it up, ready to catch it when it comes back down on the other side of the lip. The box comes down, half on the shelf, half off, part of it angling down to me. There is a sound like large maraca being shaken and the box begins to disgorge its contents. My arm shoots up to steady the box balancing on the edge of the shelf and moves right into the sluice of fat, ice and blood that is pouring out of the box. I try to shake the box off the shelf so it will no longer be angled down at me, but it’s stuck on the lip. There must be about five pounds of slushy blood in there. The icy part is burning my palm, my wrist. The liquid part is running down my shirt. It goes down my arm, into my armpit and drains down my side, into the waist of my pants. When I get the box down, my hand is slippery with ice and fat and the cold blood had spread across my chest like an external circulatory system, soaking all of my undergarments. There is blood on my shoes and on my hands. I can feel it chafing my shirt against me. My arm is so soaked in blood that I have to roll up the sodden sleeve. Within seconds, my blood-wet and exposed arm is bitingly cold in the freezer room. I pick another box of chicken quickly and walk out. I through the checkout and pay for everything still soaked with blood. There is a wash station in the parking lot and after I’ve loaded everything up I scrub from both my elbows down like a surgeon. I don’t expect that it’ll do much good because I’ve got so much blood soaked into my clothes. In the San Francisco wind, my wet clothes are already feeling cold. I drive back across town to the restaurant. All I have to do is unload the truck, find a place to park and then I can go home and shower. On the drive, I keep my wet right arm out in the window in hopes that it will dry off a little. The restaurant is busy as it usually is for lunch. Luckily, the lighting is dim and my clothes are dark. The blood cannot be seen. When everything from the restaurant supply store is unloaded, I check the delivery sheet. There are about six more for the day. I’ll have to be back here for the next one at three. It’s already two. I’m not going to have time to go home and take a shower. I can feel the blood beginning to dry stickily underneath my shirt. I go and wash my hands again. There’s a park near the restaurant. I go there every day for lunch. I eat and watch the people walk by with their dogs. I know some of the dog’s names. One of them is named ‘nacho.’ I can’t hear that dog’s name without laughing. When the dogs are gone, I watch the buildings and the sun behind them. I look at the houses across from the park and wonder what they would be like to come home to. It’s uncomfortable to be outside in the wind, but the blood seems to be drying little by little. When my lunch is finished, I’m thankful to be able to get back in the car and do some deliveries to warm myself up. After a couple more cups of coffee and a few deliveries downtown, I’ve almost forgotten about the blood. The last delivery of the night brings me back downtown. It’s late, so there’s not too many people still out. I find a parking place right in front of the building, which is nice because the order is large. I’ve got to set everything on a cart. The porter downstairs is a larger guy, very jovial. He talks to me, not like the 304th delivery driver he’s seen that day, but like someone he’s actually interested in. He reads the name of the restaurant off my shirt. “What is that? Italian?” I tell him what kind of restaurant it is. “Ahhh. I see. Now what’s your name?” He’s writing all this down on his sign-in sheet. I tell him my name, spelling my last name. He reads it aloud, pronouncing the double ‘L’ as though it were Spanish, the way they did sometimes in Argentina. I correct him and tell him to pronounce the ‘L’s. “What kind of name is that, Catalan?” I tell him what kind of name it is. Almost wishing it was Catalan just because his guess was so specific and narrow. Upstairs, the workers of the tech. firm are forming a line while I’m setting everything up. They are all watching me, one man, set up all their food. They talk among themselves, but really they are watching, waiting for me to finish, cursing me for taking so long. When I am done, they move immediately on the food. No one thanks me. I have come and gone almost unnoticed. Back downstairs, the porter breaks off his conversation with someone to say goodnight to me. He even uses my name, glancing down to read it off of his sheet. I park the car off the meter and take out my bags, a few of them have accumulated over the day’s work. I have to stuff the smaller bags into the larger to get them to fit. It takes me a while to get everything together. The night is quiet and I walk back to the restaurant slowly. I can tell it’s crowded in there before I go in. The windows are slightly foggy and the yellow light inside is dimmed by the multitude of shadows darting around. A couple walks by me and I hear them quickly decide on a restaurant. “It’s Italian and they’ve got wine,” the young man says. “And you’ve eaten at this place before and like it?” The woman asks. “Yeah, it’s pretty good.” And on that unenthusiastic note, they turn back up the block, most likely heading back to the restaurant they had been discussing. Back in the restaurant, Tata Simonyan is playing again. I walk in with all my bags and a few people look up at me, then they look down again. I brought them this dinner music from the other side of the world, but they don’t know it. It’s a song about California, in the singer’s language he sings: Bright sun, love and happiness Buds and flowers all year Ocean: you do a bad thing You save us, but you won't set us free. (Paytsar arev, sern u barin Tsil u tsaghik amboghj tarin Ovkyanos lav ban ches anum Mez pahel es bats ches toghnum)

Ecology's Ecology

“I don’t know if I can afford this,” I think to myself looking up at the night sky out here in Fremont California. Lately, the night has been clear and cold, the sort of weather that looks beautiful but lends itself to the kind of thinking that is accompanied with lots of sighs. Either, you’re bundled up but still feeling the cold creep in and thinking of someone who could be with you, someone who’s absence is all the more profoundly felt in the presence of the cold, or you’re bundled up looking out over the horizon, thinking of a place less dark than this one where it never seemed to get this cold. Either way, you’re thinking about what you don’t have. Because I’m back where I want to be and with someone I love, my thoughts about what I don’t have drift to the most ordinary and boring topic. It almost makes me wish that I were alone on the other side of the world again, sighing much more profoundly. I try to chase the thoughts away, but nothing will come in their place. “1,400 dollars, how was it that I thought we’d be able to afford that?” I think to myself. The night is so clear, I can practically hear myself muttering it. I thought we could afford that because it was the going price for apartments around here. In San Francisco, nothing is under 1,000 dollars and if it’s not a couple of hundred dollars over a thousand it’s not going to be any good—the thousand dollar studio I went to see in someone’s garage in Daly City can attest to that. The reason the problem is so disconcerting to me is that it’s not one I’ve ever anticipated having. Since the day I moved out of my parents’ and rented out a place in Chicago my all-consuming thought has always been “I don’t need all of this,” and the next time I’d move I’d try to find something starker, cheaper. Depending on who I lived with the level of amenities went up and down slightly. Living with my friend Mikey in the Tenderloin, we went through unhealthy periods of almost conspicuously lacking soap. When I came back from the Peace Corps and lived in a flop-house type of place in Eureka I didn’t have anything, and the few things I did own I had to take with me when I left for fear that someone would steal them. And living in a hostel in the Once

district of Buenos Aires, I kept two plastic bags, one with my toiletries and the other had my food and cooking supplies. The change from the mendicant’s life was very subtle and came from two very reasonable desires. The first came after living away from my friends and family for so long. Having no one familiar to share an apartment with, I often had to find people, college students, meth addicts, willing to pay a share of the rent. After meeting Gina and moving in with her, I realized how much I’d missed sharing my room and my house with someone I genuinely wanted to be there, not just someone I had to put up with. The other change came after the second time I’d lived in an apartment from which the sole view was a brick wall. Anyone who’s ever had to live with such an unsightly obstruction more than once will understand. Considering these two factors, when I began my apartment search, I found that I didn’t want to share the apartment with anyone and that I wanted to have at least a little natural light in there so on Sunday morning I could stay in and have my coffee and not feel like shooting myself. These two specifications, as you can imagine, drove the cost of living up significantly. Even with the price being what it is, I was still unable to find anything that I’d really call habitable. A lot of the cheaper studios are usually in-law units, almost all of which are in direct violation of my rule about sharing the apartment with someone, not to mention certain building codes. I still consider it sharing, when you live in trailer in someone’s driveway or in someone’s basement that you have to walk through their living room to get to. Besides, as you can imagine, these places almost universally, had no view, no light and windows that were so tiny or close to walls they may as well have been painted over. After looking for a few days, I expanded the price range on the search. Suddenly, I seemed to have a few more options, but I still wasn’t seeing anything that looked very good. I decided to go and check out everything that wasn’t an in-law unit anyway. One place is out in the Richmond with its endless rows of houses and torrential leaden skies and notable obscurity. There is no picture for the rental. Just a sentence or two, written in hurried capitals. “APARTMENT FOR RENT. 1,400. STUDIO. CALL FROM 9-5 TO VIEW.” I’m not very enticed by the ad, and on the way over I’m starting to wonder why I crossed town to see this place that’s not going to be worth my while. My fears are confirmed when I step up to the address I had been given that morning. For the last twenty blocks or so, all the houses had been in a straight row. Nothing tucked away in the back or half-sunken into the ground. I am now standing in front of a gate and way back behind it there’s a little building, almost hunkered down in the shadows of the larger homes on either side of it. It’s going to be another closet with a sunless view of the underside of some much more affluent person’s porch. Seeing no one around I go through the gate and head toward the building, I’m thinking to myself, maybe I can just take a quick glance and get the hell out of here to not waste any more of my time. I see that, once I’m inside, the building has a certain antiquated charm. It only looks small compared to all the new houses around it, which they build too large anyway. The interior reminds me of an old house that someone has taken good care of in the Midwest. There’s more light in the building than you’d expect. The landlord meets me as I’m coming back down the stairs. “Oh, y’ found it already, did y’?” His brogue is pretty thick and his bright red face is welcoming. “T’will y’ see the unit?” I’m hoping he’s going to lead the way upstairs but he reaches behind me and unlocks the door that I’m standing in front of. “First floor in the back,” I think to myself, “there’s no way there’s any light back there.” He opens the door, the place is being painted, that’s the first thing I notice, but almost immediately after, the window, the huge bay window and the little patio area behind it. “Would we get to use that?” I ask pointing to the patio outside the window. “I can’t see who else ‘t be using ‘t,” the landlord replies quite matter-of-factly. A patio of our own, a large window, it’s more than I’d even expected. I fill out the application right there. A few days pass in anticipation as to whether my credit scores will be good enough and when I’d almost given up the idea of living in such a nice place, the landlord calls me and Gina and I go over to sign the lease. Before we’ve even moved in, in fact, almost right after I’d signed the year-long lease, I began to wonder how this was going to work financially. I finish my cigarette out in the cold and open the door to head back inside. With the screen door in my hand I pause before opening the main door. The great thing about going out into the cold is being able to return to a warm house. As long as you can do that you can dispel any gloomy thoughts. I linger in the doorway a second longer, watching the bright and cold stars and thinking about how nice it’ll be to have my own place to watch them from. I just might have to pick up a few more hours a week to be able to afford the vantage

The Creation of a Myth

I. It will take me awhile to become fully American again, I think. While going all over the city to show up for vacuous interviews, I remembered an Armenian restaurant that I had been to once or twice, never actually to eat, only to say ‘hello’ to the owners who are, obviously, Armenian. I accidentally, met these people years ago, when I first returned from Armenia. There’s actually nothing to suggest that the restaurant is Armenian in anyway. It is merely another nondescript Mediterranean place on the outside. When I first returned to California, I went to this place because a friend of mine was working there. She had said that she thought the owners might have been Armenian. I obviously didn’t put too much stock in this because I’ve been introduced to all kinds of Albanians, Kurds and other Middle Eastern people over the years that acquaintances of mine had thought were Armenian. It’s very awkward approaching them with a hearty ‘Barev!’ only to me started at blankly. Of course, knowing that on the other end your friend has told this person that you speak their language; they’re waiting for you to say something intelligible, in Abkhazian or whatever, but getting nothing but gibberish. I was happy to find that the owner, when he came out was indeed Armenian. I think I started the conversation by saying something like “neretsek, bites inchu kilikia-i gaijur chunek stegh? Ays kotayk lav@ chi” (Excuse me, but why do you not have Kilikia beer here? This Kotayk is terrible!). I think he was really surprised to hear some un-Armenian-looking guy suddenly berating him in eastern Armenian (the diaspora speak the western dialect, for the most part) about his choice of Armenian beer selection. It was the beer selection that tipped me off initially that he was Armenian. If you weren’t Armenian, I don’t think you would ever go to the trouble of tracking down Armenian beer to serve. I think it’s a point of pride, even at the best Armenian places; I can’t imagine anyone orders that stuff, at least not more than once. After I explained that I had a preference to Kilikia because I drank a lot of it in Armenia, and in the states all I could find was this terribly sweet Kotayk that was nothing like the Armenian original, we began to talk about what I’d been doing in Armenia. I had only been back for a few months after living there for over two years. It was the first time I conversed face-to-face with someone in Armenian since I had left, and if I had had a few drinks before going over there I probably would’ve been pretty close to tears. The owner and I had a nice conversation. He’s had things to do, but he kept darting back over to the bar where I was sitting to ask if I needed anything. I wouldn’t have to pay, he said. I kept telling him ‘no’ and he kept asking. It was very much like being back in Armenia. Eventually, I decided to get back to my friends. I thanked the manager and started to go out. He yelled after me to come by any time I’m back in town. Since then, I’ve been back once or twice for a Kotayk, still no Kilikia. It occurred to me to stop by the place while job hunting, but I’d been trying for years to stop into a café where I used to work and see the owner there. We always missed each other. Owners are very elusive people. I decided to call instead. See if I could set something up. When the phone began ringing, I realized I had no idea what I was trying to set up. “Hello,” bright sing-song waitress voice. “Yeah, uh, hello, is the owner there?” “Can I ask who is calling, please?” “Uhhh, yeah, um, well, I met him a few years ago, uh, I used to live in Armenia and he and I spoke to each other. I’m actually looking for a job now and, uh, I thought I’d see if he, um, could talk to me.” “Well he’s not in now, but I’m the front-of-the-house manager, if you’ve got a resume why don’t you drop it off with me in the morning.” ‘Yeah, sure’ I thought,’ just so you can get a look at the weirdo who just made the strangest call to your restaurant. Maybe his resume will be equally amusing: experience: I once talked with your boss.’ I wasn’t even going to go in the next day. In fact, I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t ended up being way too early for another interview that I had out in the Marina. The interview was at 1 and I wasn’t particularly thrilled about it. It was 11 and I was already out in front of the café where it was to take place. It was an incredibly bland kind of place. I had applied for the job because the ad made it seem like the café was in the middle of the Presidio park. I had pictured some little forest ranger’s station that had been converted into a café, a place that few customers ever found, but that was preserved in complete tranquility, sunlight filtering through the pine boughs and that sort of thing. The reality was a concrete block of a building on the marina green that had a nice view of the Golden Gate Bridge, but almost no other redeemable qualities. As I sat in front of this place whiling away the time until my interview I suddenly remembered the phone call I had made, and how I had told that manager that I would be in before noon. I had my bike with me and decided to drop by, I certainly had time. The front-of-the-house manager was actually really nice. Perhaps she had mentioned the strange phone call to the owner and he had actually shown some interest. Every time I have gone into a business looking for work I feel odd. I am not there for the customary activity of buying something. I am there to ask for something and it makes me feel like a bum. In asking for a job, one essentially has to look at the employees and say, “I want what you have.” No one every responds well to this statement, no matter the context. The odd feeling descended on me as I asked for the manager. She came out and looked over my resume, very briefly, mentioning a delivery job. Hmmm. I hadn’t expected that, but OK. She says the owner’s not in, but that his son is. She went and got him. He comes out speaking Armenian; I walk up to him speaking Armenian. We are happy to see each other, although we met only once before. I tell him I’m looking for work. He immediately offers me a shot at the delivery position. I have no experience with deliveries. He says it doesn’t matter. I don’t have a car. Again, it doesn’t matter. He says it’s only a couple of days a week. That seems to be the only catch. I walk out the door already beginning to think it over. It’s funny. Since I’ve been back here, I’ve applied to probably 30 cafes and have gone into interviews at a few of them. I’ve got a lot of experience in cafés—but I couldn’t manage to get a job at one of them. On the other hand, I’ve got absolutely no experience working as a delivery driver and now I’m doing it. I can’t help but to wonder if a bunch of guys with years of delivery experience applied to the job I have now and are currently at home, scratching their heads, trying to figure out why they never even got a call back. II. Between deliveries, my co-worker and I have lunch at the restaurant. It’s free, not even any of that 60% off stuff, it’s just free; also, I can take whatever I want, so it’s more like a free buffet. After we finish eating we have one more delivery to do and then it’s time to go home. After work, I stop by and see my friend at the bike shop where he works. I need a few things. When I get there he’s out for a smoke. We stand around and talk for a while. Then we go in and I tell him the things that I need. He gives them to me and we keep talking. After a while it seems slightly uncomfortable to continue the conversation because he’s now sitting behind the counter and I’m still standing in front of it. The customer/clerk relationship keeps trying to assert itself and interrupt out friendly banter. Every time the conversation fades, I find myself toying with the items on the counter, like, ‘you wanna’ ring me up for these?’ While he keeps looking everywhere but at the items on the counter. I finally take the hint and pocket the things. Before we part ways I ask, just to be sure, if he wanted anything. ‘No,’ he says. I go to pick up Gina from work. I’m waiting outside reading a comic book when she comes out with a whole bag of baking mixes. “What’re all those?” “Cookie, bread, pancake mixes, the owner gave me all this stuff to try.” She got about four big bags. All labeled ‘gluten-free!’ and ‘vegan!’ “That stuff looks like it would’ve been expensive.” “Yeah,” she says, “it would’ve been, but she just gave it to me.” I think for a moment before I ask her if she’s eaten already. “Yeah, I get my lunch for free every day, don’t you?” “Yeah,” I say, “yeah, I guess I do.” III. I haven’t really been driving regularly since I was about 17. When I lived in San Francisco years ago, my roommate Mikey had a car and we took turns going out to the Western Addition about twice a week to move the thing to a different parking spot. Other than that, I’ve only driven rental cars driving back and forth across the country before and after I left for the Peace Corps. Naturally, having a job for which the main duty is driving, I had a few concerns, the main one being parallel parking. “I used to be able to parallel park pretty well,” I told Gina the night before I was to go in and drive up to Marin county for my first day of deliveries. “But now I’m nervous about it. While I was driving around with my co-worker the only time he really had to parallel park was right in front of the restaurant. There’s only one spot there and it’s hemmed in pretty tight by other cars. You know how the parking is here in some places.” “Oh, you’ll be fine,” she tells me, much as she always does when I’m worried about something. The next day, I’m getting everything together for the deliveries with my boss. He tells me to go out and get the car, which was parked a few blocks away. “Just pull right up front here,” he tells me indicating the spot, which is barely a spot, wedged as it is between two rather large SUVs. I try not to really think about it as I’m getting the delivery car, but when I’m having trouble even getting out of the spot the car’s parked in, I start to feel less sure of myself. I pull up in front of the restaurant and the boss is already there on the sidewalk, motioning for me to park right between the two monster cars, completely oblivious to the fact that he’s going to have to fire me in a few minutes when he realizes that I can’t properly parallel park. I flash back to my first driver’s ed. test. When someone had told me that I didn’t need to worry about parallel parking because as long as you did OK on everything else it wouldn’t really matter. “OK, now let’s try the parallel parking section,” the instructor says. I groan and pull up along the orange cone. Somehow, as I’m backing up, I end up perpendicularly parked in the spot. I give him a nervous smile. “Let’s try it again,” he says. And I do, twice more until I’ve failed the test. I’m imagining my boss telling me something similar after two or three unsuccessful attempts to park the delivery truck. I’m right up against the car ahead of me. I sigh, and begin backing up. A minute later, I’m outside the car, beaming. Somehow it’s almost a perfect job. The truck is flush with the curb, almost a textbook example. Probably beginners’ luck, but who cares, for now, I act like it’s something I do all the time and I go inside to get the deliveries, hoping that the next time will be just as easy. IV. ‘I hate this place,’ I think to myself, ‘why do I keep coming back in here?’ Niles, California, a small town that’s sandwiched between two larger suburban towns, is the exception out here in the southern East Bay in that it’s got both a walkable downtown and stores that are smaller than warehouses. Niles itself is nice; it isn’t Niles I hate, not at all, it’s this bar, really the only bar near where Gina and I live. As far as I know, there are only two others within walking distance. One is to the north, and since we have to walk that way every day to get on public transportation, it’s not very appealing. The other is an almost perfect little place that seems to be exclusively Mexican. We once tried to order a few cans of Tecate in there. “Cuando vale la cerveza?” “Cinco.” “Cinco!? Cada una? Verdad? En las latas son cinco?” “Si.” “No, es demasiado.” The bartender was not in any way annoyed. She hadn’t actually opened the cans so she was still able to put them back, while giving us an inscrutable-kind of smile. One that could have either said, ‘stupid gringos; come in again and I’ll tell you the beers cost ten dollars!’ Or, ‘yeah, I guess these are expensive, but, hey, if people pay that much what are we going to do?’ I liked the place, and as we walked by it again last night, I thought about stopping in to see if the beers were still five dollars. But then I realized that I would feel like a moron if the same bartender came over and told me that the beers cost five dollars. If she remembered me, which was likely in an all-mexican bar, she’d probably wonder why I was asking the same question again. It’s not like I could reasonably expect the prices to have gone down within a few weeks. Thinking this, Gina and I walked past the Mexican place. There’s a little pizza place where one can get a Blue Moon for something like 4 dollars, but I didn’t feel like sitting in a pizza place. I wanted to feel like I had gone out and done something when I got back home. When we last had a beer at the pizza place, it was less memorable than stopping to have a soda or something. There didn’t seem to be any reason for us to be drinking a beer in this pizza place. It was a place for eating greasy meals and maybe lingering for a while after. It was a place to eat with your family, or a group of your friends. It was not a very good place have a single beer with your girlfriend on a Saturday night. It felt like even passersby were wondering why we didn’t just stay in and have a beer at home. We passed the pizza place as well, and I started to complain that I would’ve liked to have done something that night. Gina reminds me of my options. I don’t like the sound of them. There’s only one choice left, the biker bar. It’s coming up on the left. We’d been to the biker bar exactly twice before. The first time was great. Gina’s brother and sister and brother-in-law were all in town. We had ourselves only just moved in and hadn’t even been to Niles yet, when it was suggested that we go. We went to a nice restaurant and had a couple of beers and, since it’s been a while since we’d all seen each other, we decided to change the venue rather than call it a night when we paid the bill. After a couple of beers and some pleasant conversation, the biker bar wasn’t a bad place to find oneself. We ordered some more beers and were soon dancing to the ridiculous covers the band was playing. It was slightly ironic, but still we were dancing and enjoying ourselves a great deal. When we went home, I remember thinking to myself, OK, there seems to be a few places to go right down the street. About a week later, Gina and I went back by ourselves. It was lightly raining and the walk was somnolent, but relaxing. We talked about looking for jobs and the future. I opened the door for Gina knocking down a wall of sound that should’ve stayed intact. The door was practically blown off its hinges by bassy classic rock, slamming glasses and the raucous, shrill shouts of drunken, middle-aged women. Right away, I was annoyed. The bar didn’t have anything cheap, so I bought Miller High Life or something that had a slight malt-liquor taste to it. We sat down over in a corner. I couldn’t hear anything, everyone was yelling. Not like classic bar it’s-loud-in-here-I-have-to-yell-to-be-heard, but rather an I-think-I’m-just-going-to-yell-for-the-hell-of-it. Most of the yells were sharp, yippy almost and made me feel jumpy, like when someone comes up behind you and honks an air horn. I wanted to smoke. It’s the kind of place that still seems like it should be filled with smoke, even after the ban. You can’t take your beer outside; you can’t smoke inside. The only thing to do would be to leave the beer and go smoke, which didn’t make any sense. So I just stayed in there, feeling annoyed and drinking my beer as fast as I could without chugging the thing. We left the moment we were finished. On the way home I tried to explain what I had felt. “I don’t know what happened; I suddenly just felt extremely annoyed with everything going on in there. The way maybe a child or a cat will annoy when it does the same annoying thing over and over, only it was like a whole room full of people doing things like that.” “Yeah,” Gina said, “I know what you mean. It’s just sad, they’re all middle aged people acting like they’re teenagers.” “That’s not even what annoys me,” I added, “it’s like the whole collective feel of the place. It’s like it’s stupid, depressing and agitating all at the same time.” This talk went on for a while. I think by the time we had gotten home we agreed that we wouldn’t go back there again. And, accordingly, a few weeks later, here we were again, in front of the door. “Well,” I say with a sigh, “we might as well go in.” It’s even louder and more stupid in there than it was before. There’s lots of yelling, there’s a band playing that has too many songs with the phrase ‘hoochie-coo’ in them and this time we end up paying over five dollars apiece for our beers. Almost before we’ve sat down I’m irritated to the point where I can no longer possibly enjoy myself. I launch into some kind of invective against the place that I can’t seem to stop. When we left about ten minutes later, I felt an almost tangible sense of relief. The strange part is, as we walked back home I tried to think of what it was that really annoyed me so much about the place. I’ve been to plenty of places with bad music and people yelling, but whatever it is that upsets me about that place is much deeper, deeper an apparently ineffable.

Response to Whole Foods Job Inquiry

I came back home and found that the resume that I had sent to Whole Foods had been rejected and was almost immediately inundated by a wave of apathy. I went and raked some leaves up in the yard to get the shot to my self-esteem out of my mind, but it seems that it’s something on which I want to brood for a while. I want to brood on the whole farce that has been my job search since I’ve been back here. When we got back to the Bay I was resigned to live in the East Bay for a while. Rent was free, the area was quiet and we would be able to help out Gina’s family if they needed us. We got into town the Friday after Thanksgiving and I decided that it would be best to relax before going out to look for a job over the weekend. On Monday, I got all dressed up and set out toward Niles, which I had seen a little of over the weekend. Upon arriving in the townlet I found everything to be closed and figured that I would walk into Fremont proper and see what was available. Fremont, when I got down town, was little more than shopping complexes strung together down a double-wide boulevard. It reminded me a little of unwalkable suburban Detroit, only here there were bike lanes and sidewalks, albeit unused. I had only been back in the country about two weeks at this point so I was still enjoying the newness of the area. Personally, it was new, as in something I hadn’t experienced in a while and it was also new, as in brand new. Everything shone, everything smelled of fertilizer, warm plastic or new car smell. It was the America that people who don’t like America complain about or the America that tourists are happy to leave behind but also happy to return to. For me, ut was just another permutation of America. It didn’t represent the majority, nor could it be called an under-represented minority. I was still thrilled by the variety of stores and the variety of things they had inside them. On one corner there was a Safeway, a Trader Joe’s and the future site of a Whole Foods. Inside Safeway there are now something like 10 varieties of Wheat Thin cracker. I walked around for the morning into the afternoon walking toward businesses, peeking in, and usually walking away. It wasn’t the look of the places that deterred me, but rather the age of the employees. It’s much easier to work at a place you feel overqualified for when you’re in good company. In San Francisco and other large cities, grocery stores and cafes are usually full of twenty-somethings waiting for something else to come along. The job would really be a career and everyone who came in would know that you didn’t think of it as such. In Fremont, it felt like something more permanent. I would be working with a bunch of high-school students. Either they would try to promote me to management right away or I would remain a grocery stocker, happy, but annoyed that I hadn’t at least been offered the promotion so I could’ve turned it down. I dropped off one resume at a little café. The owner happened to be in and he gave me a little impromptu interview. I felt I did OK and after finding little else decided to go back home. That night, I decided to check out Craig’s List for the area. It hardly yielded anything: mostly driving jobs, very little service industry stuff. All the businesses hiring were chains and I could guess what the majority of their staff looked like. I checked in San Francisco, out of curiosity and found a flurry of jobs, mostly independent cafes in hip neighborhoods. I decided then that I would look for a job in San Francisco and that I would commute until we moved. It seemed like a good choice. I had once found a café job there with no experience within a week. If I moved my search over to the city I could be working within no time, or so I thought. The next day I began checking Craig’s List. I have been checking it ever since. Every day there are at least 3 new barista jobs posted. So far, I have applied to all of them. I’ve been called in for two interviews. Both of them ended with face-to-face encouragement and then an e-mail a day or two later that broke the news that I had not been selected. With so much café experience, I am surprised that I am having such a hard time convincing these people that I am qualified for the job. I could understand if there were a serious dearth of jobs, but with so many posted every day it seems like I would be the right guy for one of them. Most employers don’t even get back to me. I write concise cover letters for each position, attach my resume and then never hear anything back as though I had sent it into a void. And that’s how it’s beginning to feel, like a void. Whole Foods was a desperate act. I hadn’t really even considered it, but Gina mentioned maybe trying to get a job there. When I found a store that was hiring online, I decided to send in my resume. I wrote that I had complete availability, years of experience in customer service and knew my way around a cash register. ‘No,’ they said, ‘you’re not what we’re looking for.’ What are these people looking for? Do I need a PhD to work there? Should I have left the degrees out of my education section? The promptness of the rejection made it even worse. I sent the application out this morning and had a rejection e-mail by 4 pm. They obviously saw something about my application that actually made it STAND OUT as unworthy. I don’t care about working at Whole Foods, and I’m actually not all that concerned about getting a café job, but dammit this does not bode well for getting any kind of professional work. Along with my café search, I have been applying for editing positions as well as internships. Often the requirements to apply for these jobs take me all morning to get together and/or write. Since I have begun applying for these jobs I haven’t heard a word back. You’d think that a local guy with complete availability and a Master’s degree would be qualified to work at an entry-level position for free, but no one has even bothered to tell me ‘thanks for trying.’ So, I’m back where I started again, practically addicted to Craig’s List, searching the classified about three times a day. New ideas keep popping into my head throughout the day and I want to rush back home and send an e-mail to a place I used to work, or send a Facebook message (a Facebook message fer shit’s sake!) to a Georgian restaurant that’s going to open in the Spring, just saying something like, ‘Gamerjobot, how about a job?’ Even now, I am consumed by the idea that perhaps I have missed a job posting in the time that it had taken me to write this. I don’t want to let the Whole Foods thing get me down, but I am tired of looking for jobs. I’d like to have some kind of work, so that I could continue the job hunt with a little more peace of mind.

The Way You Don't Look in The Rain

The ride back up doesn’t evoke any emotion. I didn’t think that it would so I’m not surprised. After what is beginning to feel like months of constant traveling, going back up to Arcata just feels like another long trip. The first few hours are engaging enough, but eventually, I tire of my book. I tire of being in the car and I start to feel annoyed that I decided to come up here. The further north we go, the more beautiful the scenery becomes and the more disinterested I feel. What I’m looking at is much more beautiful than a lot of what I’d seen in South America. The stands of pine sweeping up and down the remote hills induce a calm that is tinged with melancholy. I cannot look at an endless forest without feeling what it would be like to be lost in the middle of it somewhere. It’s a familiar feeling, yet I don’t pay it much attention. I concentrate more on the fact that it’s been four hours and we’re still in the car and how the road winds relentlessly and how I haven’t had a job since the beginning of October. Arriving in Arcata, there is only the relief that comes of arriving at a destination, and destination, after a long drive. I take a second to stretch in the garage and I look around a little. Yeah, it’s the old neighborhood; the last place I lived before I moved to Argentina. For a moment, I remember how I missed a few things when I left. The first month in Buenos Aires when I thought about the clerk at the grocery store and the hidden paths that surreptitiously connected neighborhoods. For a time, I had thought about these things a lot. Even after Gina came down and I had the most important part of my life in Northern California with me, she and I would still reminisce about the smells and the colors of certain trees at night. In the city of 12 million people, they were the memories that were unique to us and we kept them until we forgot what we needed them for. As I stood looking around, I only thought, ‘here is another place I have already been.’ I felt neither positive or negative about that. When I went to sleep the thought was still there, unchanged and almost oppressive. It’s always nice to have coffee ready and waiting in the morning. I waking up, I smelled the coffee in gradually cooling in the kitchen, a smell that had always reminded me of the early mornings of my childhood and, thus, of Christmas. I take a cup and settle into a chair. The sun had only recently come up. I have nothing to do. I contemplate reading and drinking coffee throughout the day. I don’t have to find a job here. There’s no reason to hurry into town; I know from experience that there’s not very much there. Everyone at my old job will be different. It will be awkward to go in and look around for the one familiar person. The sights will be more or less the same and thinking of going back to campus makes me feel ashamed that I have done nothing with the degree I earned there already over two years ago. I read on the couch for a while, listlessly drinking coffee. My concentration begins to bounce a little and by about eight I’m beginning to want a long walk for the air and for the introspection that I may find in it. Right now, I can’t even concentrate on this National Geographic article. Gina and her mom are going to a dentist appointment. I am going to take a walk. Outside, the fog is beginning to burn off. The smell is something that seems to clean everything. It provides all the satisfaction of throwing a bucket of mop water onto dusty concrete. Walking through the fading fog, I think it pulls at you a little as it evaporates; it’s a lifting kind of feeling. I begin to pay a little more attention. I pass the old house and decide to walk up the driveway and take a closer look. Without even trying to summon the memory, I remember riding my bike up this way and how happy I always felt to be returning. There is the sound of the bells on the front door. The feeling of ‘Honey, I’m home.’ There is the warm panel of light hanging in the dark and the wet stars always looking so new like the gauze that covered them for so long had finally been ripped away. I go back to the road and feel the nostalgia a little for the first time. I walk with that slow gait of recollection, in which you feel like you’re being ferried through a place. When I cross the major street and the sun is fully out, I start to feel welcomed. I feel the familiarity of the place, not as something mundane, but as something fruitful. The trees, the clop of my shoes on the sidewalk, the car exhaust in the morning, it’s like they all combine to make up one thing that I’d nearly forgotten about. At the end of Baldwin, my old street, the nuance becomes absolute and there, in front of my old house, there I am. The way I was. I’m looking at myself, writing on the front steps, having a beer on the curb, talking on the phone in the parking lot. I am sitting inside the room with the shag carpeting, writing my thesis, the books scattered around me. I begin to feel the cold air in the room and decide that it’s time for a break. I walk outside and am confronted by myself, standing there, watching all these scenes that have passed. There is a brief moment of irreconcilability and then we walk off together, my past and present selves, to view the town where we parted so long ago.