Doodles

the kid played with his small gi joe soldier. he had just the one gi joe and no enemy soldiers so he had to use a stick in their place. he found that the stick naturally beat the gi joe but then found himself bored and needed to break the stick himself and start over. there were no other boys he could play with beause the other boys his age wanted to punch and kick and otherwise do things he wasn’t interested in. he liked to play catch and play games. but not touch. not fight. not tease. ...

Even before the plane levels off and the seatbelt sign dings off, the middle aged Chinese woman sitting next to me is socializing with her friends. She thinks nothing to lean across my “space” to hand a snack to a friend sitting in front of me. Her voice is loud and it is hard for me to imagine her as a young woman. On my left is a large white man who looks to be in his mid fifties and his snoring slightly. The person in front of him as fully reclined his seat as has the person in front of me. I feel trapped, like a mouse must feel in a a glue trap. The thing is I want to pee. Need to pee. I’ve been holding it in for about two hours now – the flight sat on the runway for 90 minutes – and my bladder is about to burst. I check the barf bag in the seat back to see if it has a waterproof lining. It does not. I wonder why they still stock these on planes, do people really get air sick anymore. I mean, this plane, a 747 seats something like 400 passengers and weights a gizillion pounds. I squeeze my legs together a bit and try to listen to the Chinese conversing all around me. Their language sounds nothing like my learning mp3s. I decide to practice and say to my ritalin staved Chinese neighbor, “ni hao” which means hello. She smiles and responds in perfect English “Hi, first time to China?”. I take out the book I purchased specifically for the flight, Nicholas Spark’s The Notebook. I’m a voracious reader but with my work schedule this past year and my life blowing up the way it did, I haven’t touched a book. I am so excited to finally have time for a good read. I get 30 pages into and I am bored. At 50 pages anger sets in and I put the book down. I pick up the vomit bag, pull out my pen, and begin to write: > _Came home a little bit early last night, shed not a tear when turning out the light, no I don’t hurt like I used too… _ And I was off filling up every inch of the puke bag and then the inside cover pages of that horrible book. I stopped just short of writing on the notes page of the in-flight magazine. The words coming out like the anger of a teenage girl, fast and furious and I must say amazingly connected. But, I have a confession. The first sentence is the beginning of a Kelly Willis song called Not Forgotten You. It’s a trick I use when my anger compels me to write but said anger does not allow my brain to lay word on paper. I’ve been using this trick a lot lately. As I was tearing up the barf bag into small pieces the American man sitting next to me asked if everything was ok. I said yes, and that wasn’t a lie because I felt much better now. He then asked if I had taken Jesus as my savior and I told him no I hadn’t but that I had recently learned that Jesus has a pet cow – a pet baby cow – and I’ve been wondering if Jesus was really a Hindu. He said that wasn’t funny and I said I wasn’t trying to be funny and I could tell he was extremely angry and wanted to spit on me or maybe hit me. Instead, he took a deep breath, got up and walked towards the bathroom. I followed him. When he exited the restroom and saw me ready to enter he started to smile, thought better of it, and brushed past me. Maybe he was embarrassed about the stank he left behind. When I got back to my seat, I tried to step over the rotund American and accidentally stepped on his toe. How was I to know he had an ingrown toenail. The next nine hours to Beijing were not a lot of fun. I was written out, the in flight movies were horrible and barely visible, and the food a cross between healthy choice and Alpo. The Chinese woman spoke to me from time to time at seemingly random intervals. It was like having a five minute conversation spread out over five hours. > Her: “What’s your name? ...

I wake up on the floor lying in a nest of my two remaining blankets. The floor is hard and cold and left my left shoulder and hip feel a bit numb, like frozen jello. I get up, shower and throw my washcloth, soap, razor, and toothpaste into the large plastic lying in in the center of the living room. One last trip to the trash bins out back, tossing the remnants of this apartment including the blankets. Then I’m back inside, taking one last look at place. This small, small place with the young Korean girls next door playing their college music and the couple who make love life clockwork above. I didn’t know a man could finish for that long. I walk into my kitchen, the one without an electrical outlet and no ambient light. I take a final wizz in the bathroom. I look at where my futon used to be and thought of happier days, and then think about sadder days. I feel a clustering of tears but before they splatter throw on my backpack and lug my suitcase out the front door. Door locked, keys slide into the manager’s box, and I’m out of the building. Across 51st street and up to the safer BART station, Rockridge, wheeling the suitcase the whole way. I fantasize about a phone call from someone, anyone, trying to convince me to stay. But there is no one, and if there was a someone, our time has long since past. I made sure my friends know my parents were taking me to the airport and I made sure my parents know my friends were taking me. I’m not sure why I did this, outside of it is my nature. My recoil to the thought of anyone doing something for me is only secondary to the recoil of asking someone for help and being rejected. I am moving to Beijing in order to write. No one understands this since I have never published anything before. But it’s not that I don’t write. I write every day. Have been since I was thirteen when I tried to talk to my dad about nothing all that important but more importantly as an adult and he still treated me as a child. He could only talk down to me or tune me out. So I tuned into a notebook, drawing and writing my way through high school, then college, then work. I have cases of journals which no one knew about and no one ever saw, except for a soul or two that I let in. Three friends at a time, no more, I would say. But if truth be told, it wasn’t the difficulty of finding three worthy friends, it was the difficulty of finding three interested people. Jane was one of the few interested and worthy, at least I thought so, and then she became disinterested but still worthy and then over time I realized she was neither worthy or interested. Yet this realization did me no good. I had fantasies of turning my notebooks into Augustan Burroughs esq memoirs but I lacked both the patient and his talent. I somehow helped the sheer volume of my writing would somehow make up for a sheer lack of talent. I couldn’t take my notebooks with me to Beijing and I didn’t trust anyone with them, so I had them digitized by strangers and stored on a portable hard disk I’m taking with me. After they were digitized I tossed them in the recycle bin, more for the words than the paper. The United line at SFO is crazy busy with what appears to be ill suited luggage and ill suited couples. The ill suited luggage is of the form of square boxes held together with string and duck tape. The ill suited couples are middle age white men with slightly younger, but worn, Chinese women. Who am I to say, right? I mean it could be perfectly fine luggage. Finally my turn in line and I worry that my one way ticket will cause me some special scrutiny and at first these seems so, but in fact it was just because the attendant could not locate my visa. Given that my passport had never been used before I wouldn’t think it would be that hard. My visa in order – officially I was going to teach English – my bag was checked and my boarding pass printed. Coach, row 33, middle seat. On through the security gate, a mother of three trying to keep her kids from causing an Airport evacuation. There is a large troop of 60ish women waiting for the flight 888 to Beijing. They are talking about making sure they brought toilet paper since restrooms in China were famous for being paper free. I wondered if this was true. They call my row and I line up with my fellow travelers when an elderly Chinese couple walks directly to the front of the line. The women taking the tickets points them back to the line, which only seems to harden their resolve and after a couple of times of being told “no, wait your turn” they simply try the other line where the attendant lets them pass. I board the plan without looking back. Never look back. I am going to be a writer. A published writer. An an English teacher. ...

The foreigner leaves the temple and walks west on a small alley near Chaoyang Nei Nan Xiao Jie . Leaves the temple with the singing monks who sing on the hour and the foreigner was lucky enough to be there on one. Leave the temple with the painted roof above the Buddha because the real roof was taken to America in the 1930s and is on display in some museum in Chicago. The foreigner walks west and stays on this small alley even as he crosses the six lane boulevards. He walks west and hears the small vendors peddling their bicycle carts calling out their goods. The foreigner’s chinese is poor and he doesn’t know most of the words for the goods they are selling, but he knows some. ...

I’m running past The Place and then past Silk street and then onto Chang-an Jie. My body feels old, stiff, and heavy. The Beijing night air is much like myself, cold and thick with pollution and while a strong wind may clear the skies for a few days, there is no escaping the return of the soot. I have an image of myself running like my daughter runs – free and light and smiling. I try to pick up my pace but there is no pace to pick up, only an ache here and an ache here. I feel only satisfaction in pushing myself but I am unable to get myself to a joyous exhaustion. Where are those days of youth when I could run until there was no more running to be had. Where no one would want to guard me when I played basketball because I would run them to death. I guess I don’t know where those days are but I sure know where they aren’t. ...

Today is the day before the day that was and is no more. Six years ago I was glad not to think about the money for two hours. It meant something in me was redeemable after all. Today, however, I am racing through the streets of Beijing. Racing through the cold night air, my eyes looking out for spots of black ice I might slip on. The air full of soot and exhaust and comes into my lungs cold and harsh, like any chinese cigarette. It is late and people are making there way home and mocking me. At intersections I am careful not to trust cars to stop. Drunken men are wandering the streets and I become part of their unreal reality. ...

Despite my efforts to moisten, the skin on the back of my hands cracks and bleeds, a victim of the harsh cold and dry Beijing winters. She awakes to a text message and stumbles out of bed to check it. The floor is cold and whatever warmth she felt while bundled alone under the covers is now gone. How she wishes she had placed the charger near the bed and could avoid this trip all together. She checks the message, it’s from her boss asking where she is. It’s 11am. She text messages back that she’s developed a cold and is spending the morning recovery. She’s been developing a lot of colds lately. ...

I’m in line, backpack strapped to my back, pushing my duffel bag with my feet, and pulling my carry-on toward the united airlines business class check in. I was too cheap, or too sane, to pay $3 for a luggage cart. Sanity or disturbance is an argument I often have with myself. I check in the duffel bag, check in the carry on, and leave the counter with just my back pack and boarding pass. As I walk towards the gate, I see a vaguely familiar face. A bit older, a bit thinner, quite a bit more worn. But yes, it is her, Mary. My first instinct is to bolt pass her, pretend I don’t see her, as I often do when I see an person from my past. But I’m trying to get past my past – so to speak – and make my past, my past and not let my past be my future. So to speak. ...

I’m sitting in the back of a vintage Volvo, wearing my oversized gray hoodie with the hood down. We are heading towards downtown portland, to some chick restaurant for people too cool to be chick. My childhood friend is driving, his caucasian wife if in the passenger seat. he’s asking me how my parents are, but instead of describing how they are I describe what it was like for me to spend the previous weekend with my parents. Always answer the more interesting question, I heard once, and in most cases I am more interested in myself. ...

She did not expect this. She was having lunch with an old classmate when the classmate’s husband called. “Oh, you are close by, why don’t you join us for lunch?” her friend said. She thought great, now she had to share lunch with the foreign husband of her classmate. For sure, he would be one of those laowai so full of himself for no good reason at all. Probably old as sin too. And she would need to speak some English, those damn laowai’s could be very talkative. ...