The Chinese take-out place is a store in a shopping center near my house. It has been there as long as I can remember. I’ve gotten to know the faces of the people who work there and until recently they never seemed to age, but I’m slowly seeing lines appear on faces where lines didn’t exist before. They must think the same thing about me.
The woman who answers the phone and works the register speaks heavily accented English so that I’m just able to understand her. We are always very friendly and she knows me by name. I asked her name once and she told me, but I forgot it. Sometimes we are more friendly than others. When I used to come in by myself she would ask how my Mom was. Now she asks how my fiancé is.
She is always there when I am, an ever-present always working part of my life. I’ve never seen her outside of the store, but I can’t imagine her as not being a part of my life. She has made my dinner at least once a week for most of my life. That means that she has made my dinner more than I’ve made it for myself. If she disappeared I would miss her, but I doubt that I'll ever have a conversation with her about anything other than Chinese food or the weather. She is very good at her job and meticulous when it comes to ordering. She’s not demanding, but she means business and gets the job done and she gets it done well.
I’ll never forget the only day she ever seemed different. I don’t remember if I was with anyone or what I ordered, but I remember that she had an extra bounce in her step and her smile was ear to ear. I wondered why and she told me, everybody else in line, and probably anybody that would listen. She had fought hard and now her boss gave her two days off a week. I don’t remember which two days they were, but they were during the week and not weekends. She only got off one of those days before. It might have been Monday and Tuesday.
Maybe it’s because I don’t enjoy being at work, maybe it’s because she works harder than I ever have, maybe it’s because she made me feel too rich, but I felt guilty. What made her happiest is what I take for granted. She never had those days that I waste and think I deserve off for no other reason than that I am alive. Now, after two decades of serving my Chinese food, after serving me my dinner for twenty years, she is finally entitled to two days off a week. Who the fuck am I?
Does she have a family? Children? How much does she get paid to work at the Chinese take-out place? Are there people that she wants to share the weekends with? Are there people that she’s torn away from on Saturday and Sunday morning so that she can take my order for a General Tso’s combination platter?
Maybe the heart of all these questions is this: Why do I get so sad when confronted with people who get so excited about the things I take for granted?
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Thursday, March 26, 2009
I often wonder what Gwen Stefani thinks of the song Glycerine.
When I see pictures in magazines of Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale, it makes me think of Kurt and Courtney. I’m torn between thinking two different ways. Do Gavin and Gwen embody everything that they could have become, or are they merely sellouts in the shadow of greatness?
Friday, March 20, 2009
Poetry
Poetry Introduction
Poetry is the heart and soul of America. From Walt Whitman to Robert Frost to Allen Ginsberg to untold millions, poetry has been a moral compass and an inspiration to our country. Its power lay in the belief that every man has a voice and every man has the opportunity to exercise that voice. What has come out of those voices has been at times both frightening and mystifying. But the underlying theme remains the same: We are a nation of people doing the best we can with the time that we have.
In the past few years I have called into question the above. What role does poetry have anymore in a country pushed forward by technology and financial gain? In my lifetime, since 1984, I am not aware of any traditional poetry being created that has shaped the American imagination. Perhaps I am looking in the wrong place. Perhaps what has shaped the American imagination has been wrongly labeled.
Poetry has been taken out of the hands of the people and put into the hands of academics. Thus signaled the death of poetry. Then came rock'n'roll. Then came punk rock. Then came hip-hop and a thousand other assorted musical varieties and the poetry was given a beat and music behind it and it was packaged for the masses. The academics ignored it as true poetry but there is a large number of Americans who would disagree with them. While at Georgetown University's English department I joined a year-long poetry seminar. The professor leading the seminar told us that his poetry consisted of arranging sculpture size letters into words in a public park. Of our first two guest lecturers, one was a poet who wrote in gibberish and screams and the other wrote poems using only one word. I thought of "Imagine" by Lennon, "Dock 'O the Bay" by Otis Redding, "Round Here" by Adam Durowitz and promptly left the class. Though some of the poetry from contemporary music is bad and some of it is pure pop, like all poetry there are shining gems that inspire the American imagination and will continue to inspire for generations to come.
This inspiration of America is what I have always, with hopefully some success, tried to tap into. The America that I know looks different from the poets from the past, but it is still the same place with the same ideals. Now, as the world is getting smaller and countries are opening themselves up to the world, there may be a cultural movement as strong as the American cultural movement. We are now all global citizens, whether we like it or not or believe it or not, the whole world is now our shared community. With this shared community will come a shared culture.
I am happy to be alive at a time when a shared world culture will come into fruition. It will be exciting to see if it comes first in the form of a viral video spread on the internet or through a marketing campaign organized by a large multi-national company. My guess is that it will be a combination of the two. There is a lot to be learned from the old-way of doing things, but now is also the time to bring in change. Old technologies and outdated systems must be forgotten. We, I, must embrace the new technology as a new way of reaching goals. Technology is a means to an end, not an end in itself. What this new "end" will be is both exciting and scary and I intend to make my mark upon it. It is now the time to throw out that which is detrimental not only to ourselves but also to our community, our shared planet.
Come what may, 150 years from now everyone you know on this planet will be dead. What kind of community will they inherit and what will they think about us, their ancestors. Will our legacy be infrastructure? Governmental organizations that provide for the worlds well-being? A system of government that can include everyone and be as fair to the poorest man as to the richest man? New technologies that will allow machines to do the work of humans?
I hope that my generation's legacy will be its words and its ideas. War, organized violence for the benefit of one group over another, may become a thing of the past. Violence is as human a trait as love, but the systematic killing over "thing" or material objects and ideas can end. Justice is just another term for revenge, so I do not wish justice for the world, I only wish it peace. If we can ingrain an idea like that into the world through our words, we will give our grandchildren's generation the greatest gift the planet has ever received. Sometime in the not so distant future as our species leaves this planet in search of new adventures, let them look on now as the turning point when we banded together in hopes of a better tomorrow. Let us create now the society that we hope they will take with them to distant worlds where they will set up their new societies and cultures. If life on other planets does exist, let us start being the culture we would like to show them. We should strive to be the people, the countries, and the planet that we want to be, not continue acting as what we are. Unless you are happy with the current situation, in which case you will find yourself in disagreement with me. One of my favorite fictional presidents said, "We cannot be separated by our differences anymore, we must unite in our common interests."
Remember, there is only one richest man in the world, but there are unspoken masses of people who have nothing. And you can't have less than nothing. I have never seen a copy of Forbes lowest 500. I wonder if there is a world's poorest man. If there is I would like him to meet the world's richest man to see what they have in common. What is their shared humanity? I have confused myself to think that I am living in the rich man's world, but now is the time of democracy. Now is the time of numbers and the numbers are not in favor of the richest of the rich. The goal is not to bring everyone into a middle class lifestyle, the goal is to give everyone that opportunity to provide for their families and provide en environment for the pursuit of happiness, prosperity, and advancement. One of the inalienable rights not propagated by the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence, but is as natural to every person on the Earth as eating and drinking, is preparing to make the world a better place for our children and their children. Remember, both the world's richest man and the poorest men all once pushed their head through a vagina. We all suckled at our mother's breast and we all cried for food. It is what happened afterwards that has separated us into different castes. If we concentrate on the children and their lives, those castes will disappear.
One of my favorite books is 101 American Poems. It is a book that is full of life and meaning and spans 200 years of American history. It shows the hopes and dreams of a people struggling for an identity in the world, from "Two Roads Diverged" to "Casey at the Bat" to "My Soul is old like the Rivers." My hope for the poetry that follows is that it straddles the line between old American poetry and a new global poetry. After all, we are all just different stanzas in a poem called Earth.
Poetry is the heart and soul of America. From Walt Whitman to Robert Frost to Allen Ginsberg to untold millions, poetry has been a moral compass and an inspiration to our country. Its power lay in the belief that every man has a voice and every man has the opportunity to exercise that voice. What has come out of those voices has been at times both frightening and mystifying. But the underlying theme remains the same: We are a nation of people doing the best we can with the time that we have.
In the past few years I have called into question the above. What role does poetry have anymore in a country pushed forward by technology and financial gain? In my lifetime, since 1984, I am not aware of any traditional poetry being created that has shaped the American imagination. Perhaps I am looking in the wrong place. Perhaps what has shaped the American imagination has been wrongly labeled.
Poetry has been taken out of the hands of the people and put into the hands of academics. Thus signaled the death of poetry. Then came rock'n'roll. Then came punk rock. Then came hip-hop and a thousand other assorted musical varieties and the poetry was given a beat and music behind it and it was packaged for the masses. The academics ignored it as true poetry but there is a large number of Americans who would disagree with them. While at Georgetown University's English department I joined a year-long poetry seminar. The professor leading the seminar told us that his poetry consisted of arranging sculpture size letters into words in a public park. Of our first two guest lecturers, one was a poet who wrote in gibberish and screams and the other wrote poems using only one word. I thought of "Imagine" by Lennon, "Dock 'O the Bay" by Otis Redding, "Round Here" by Adam Durowitz and promptly left the class. Though some of the poetry from contemporary music is bad and some of it is pure pop, like all poetry there are shining gems that inspire the American imagination and will continue to inspire for generations to come.
This inspiration of America is what I have always, with hopefully some success, tried to tap into. The America that I know looks different from the poets from the past, but it is still the same place with the same ideals. Now, as the world is getting smaller and countries are opening themselves up to the world, there may be a cultural movement as strong as the American cultural movement. We are now all global citizens, whether we like it or not or believe it or not, the whole world is now our shared community. With this shared community will come a shared culture.
I am happy to be alive at a time when a shared world culture will come into fruition. It will be exciting to see if it comes first in the form of a viral video spread on the internet or through a marketing campaign organized by a large multi-national company. My guess is that it will be a combination of the two. There is a lot to be learned from the old-way of doing things, but now is also the time to bring in change. Old technologies and outdated systems must be forgotten. We, I, must embrace the new technology as a new way of reaching goals. Technology is a means to an end, not an end in itself. What this new "end" will be is both exciting and scary and I intend to make my mark upon it. It is now the time to throw out that which is detrimental not only to ourselves but also to our community, our shared planet.
Come what may, 150 years from now everyone you know on this planet will be dead. What kind of community will they inherit and what will they think about us, their ancestors. Will our legacy be infrastructure? Governmental organizations that provide for the worlds well-being? A system of government that can include everyone and be as fair to the poorest man as to the richest man? New technologies that will allow machines to do the work of humans?
I hope that my generation's legacy will be its words and its ideas. War, organized violence for the benefit of one group over another, may become a thing of the past. Violence is as human a trait as love, but the systematic killing over "thing" or material objects and ideas can end. Justice is just another term for revenge, so I do not wish justice for the world, I only wish it peace. If we can ingrain an idea like that into the world through our words, we will give our grandchildren's generation the greatest gift the planet has ever received. Sometime in the not so distant future as our species leaves this planet in search of new adventures, let them look on now as the turning point when we banded together in hopes of a better tomorrow. Let us create now the society that we hope they will take with them to distant worlds where they will set up their new societies and cultures. If life on other planets does exist, let us start being the culture we would like to show them. We should strive to be the people, the countries, and the planet that we want to be, not continue acting as what we are. Unless you are happy with the current situation, in which case you will find yourself in disagreement with me. One of my favorite fictional presidents said, "We cannot be separated by our differences anymore, we must unite in our common interests."
Remember, there is only one richest man in the world, but there are unspoken masses of people who have nothing. And you can't have less than nothing. I have never seen a copy of Forbes lowest 500. I wonder if there is a world's poorest man. If there is I would like him to meet the world's richest man to see what they have in common. What is their shared humanity? I have confused myself to think that I am living in the rich man's world, but now is the time of democracy. Now is the time of numbers and the numbers are not in favor of the richest of the rich. The goal is not to bring everyone into a middle class lifestyle, the goal is to give everyone that opportunity to provide for their families and provide en environment for the pursuit of happiness, prosperity, and advancement. One of the inalienable rights not propagated by the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence, but is as natural to every person on the Earth as eating and drinking, is preparing to make the world a better place for our children and their children. Remember, both the world's richest man and the poorest men all once pushed their head through a vagina. We all suckled at our mother's breast and we all cried for food. It is what happened afterwards that has separated us into different castes. If we concentrate on the children and their lives, those castes will disappear.
One of my favorite books is 101 American Poems. It is a book that is full of life and meaning and spans 200 years of American history. It shows the hopes and dreams of a people struggling for an identity in the world, from "Two Roads Diverged" to "Casey at the Bat" to "My Soul is old like the Rivers." My hope for the poetry that follows is that it straddles the line between old American poetry and a new global poetry. After all, we are all just different stanzas in a poem called Earth.
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