revisions
some vignettes for the leftovers, written in a hurry .
[1. HOW]
Sunday shines and slouches over the food truck, emblem of Austin, where locals bask in the conviction that they invented the concept. Probably all places overrun by people fistfighting to overpay to live there think themselves the center of the universe. Austin, playscape for the foodies and techies grafting themselves onto the hills, less weird by the hour.
The customers keep coming; the numbers stretch and don’t cease. The trick is learning to let it wash over you. You exist to these people in thirty-second snippets. You will be forgotten before they’ve digested. Avoid staring directly into the sun. Infinity is a terrible thing and comes in different sizes. Eating is the only form of expertise some people will ever attain.
Sadistic summers and tardy autumns; eighty degrees on Christmas some years, sweating through festive pajamas. Bats, brisket, Willie Nelson, college football, concussions in burnt orange, the rent soaring, the tech bubbling, the new glass spires perverting his skyline. How many mouths does it take to maul a reputation?
He'd been here all his life and these things had never struck him as particularly defining, but you can’t control the nicknames you’re given. Personally, he orders the trailer park trashy at Torchy’s and Taco Joint is a must if you’re hungover and Fresas might sell the best queso in the city but melted Velveeta with cheap salsa and guacamole well-limed is best consumed while sweaty, after little league, home-made; and it is much, much better.
How can I help you?
The man ordering at the window has Owen Wilson’s mouth; he leads with his teeth. The couple argues in front of their toddler in perfectly pleasant tones but the eyes give it away—flaying each other like spelling out w a l k in front of a dog. This one is Swedish, pale, blonde. He orders the yogurt. His translucence runs up and over him. This one is pushed up against the window like a pitbull or one of those breeds that are mostly pressed to the front of their face, the kind that never lets go once their molars are in you. The man a the table over yonder gestures wildly with the back of his hands, waving like he’s delivering the gospel. He is saved from afar.
Bovine consumption. Mindless mastication. The eyes dull when the gums shift into gear, glazing over like a reptile’s second eyelid, gazing at something in the fading middle distance: they see nothing; they see their next meal and their last.
The trick is in finding the dusty inattention needed to tolerate the everyday. We eat in groups to distance ourselves from the death dormant in square meals. The old man with no wedding ring sits at a table for one. The woman does not like to sleep alone; she suggests dessert.
[2. ODD]
She moved through life with a finger to her throat, checking, always checking the pulse of herself, fingering for confirmation that she was the sum of their impressions, certain that she’d been figured out, that she was a fraud and they knew it, that she was failing to deliver the Goods, that she was an outline of an outline of a former self, that she had skipped a beat and that that silence just then, yes, was her fault, she just knew it from the angle of that glance; and no awkwardness could be abided so she avoided it like death, babbled it into submission, frothed and chattered before the fact of her expiration and potential discovery, and maybe if she ever fell quiet she would simply fade away. Could they tell how hard she was trying to not try hard?
[3. i]
When speaking on the phone my father likes to call you by your name as many times as possible. He will ask you for it if you don’t volunteer it and he is very charming when he lets people teach him something because people love to talk about themselves more than just about anything. This is the point of Paul Stone.
[4. CAN]
You are walking from point A to point B on the set of a high-budget movie, an extra on a vector. You are here by somewhat murky circumstances. You are a background character with no lines. That’s your role. The rest of the scene overwhelms and goes on largely without you. Lights, booms, setpieces, PAs and fruit baskets and conspicuously attractive people acting out normalcy. Walk from point A to point B.
Action.
Okay walk walk walk left right stay on the balls of your feet swing your arms left right swing swing swing but why do they swing like that what is this pointless flapping walk swing walk and should I flex while pumping walk walk oh god where are my eyes walk how’s my neck walk can they see my bulging forehead vein swing walk how much should I tilt my head what even is walking walk walk how fast is too fast and when does it become a trot fuck am I even watching where I’m going? How do I do this normally?
Cut.
“Who walks like that?”
“Sir? It was a great take. The subtle slow-pan, the sexual tension perfectly--”
“No no, not that. In the back Who walks like that? What is that?”
The heat of the action dies down. The manyfaced organism resets itself to repeat: cyclical places, lights, cameras. This involves some reordering of the talent’s looks, some tailoring and powdering. A woman from the makeup crew crosses the set--black functional pants, hair tucked up impatiently, an unmade face fixed on the task of remaking the actors. Proceeding across the stage, merely arriving there.
“There! That’s how you walk.”
[5. HAVE]
The trick was that some of them would see you as the help and prod plastic at you before getting back to what was real to them.
The trick was that folks would rather wait in line to order than wait for the food they’ve just ordered. Maybe you get hungrier once the idea is made tangible, something on which to hang that nameless yearning, some point-source font of the felt.
This one is chatty; this one has the biggest gauges I’ve ever seen. This one laughs a little too hard at my prepackaged joke. This one tucks a small radicality into his gentle insistence that, against all odds, he is not alone.
The first step to curing mania is admitting that you are manic. I cannot detect body odor from here, nor can I rule it out.
Down and out in automotive foodservice.
[6. ALL THIS]
“Who died while giving birth to my dad.”
“I mean, you can’t just pull out anime on a first date.”
“I said I didn’t have three thousand dollars!”
“You are mean when you’re drunk” / “I was such a bitch, I feel so bad” / “She was so sad.” / “Well, you needed to do something to show ‘I’m loud and I don’t give a fuck.’”
“But then where do I sleep, like…”
“And somehow it’s all my fault.”
“It’s just kind of the same story.”
“He said he was on the precipice of a moral failure--because of burnout, essentially.”
“I became unsure of myself.”
“When I’m creating the story in my head, the good part is coming up.”
[7. INSIDE]
This thing picks apart your best-laid justifications. She has believed herself intrinsically unworthy; she has believed that her mood ran down to her roots and read of rot. This thing picks apart facts you know to be true and futures you know to be possible and every last wispy insistence you cling to; you are overrun. She has hated silence and it has asked for more. This thing revises you.
And then, just for a moment, the mention of this not being her fault caused her to gasp, to reanimate, even though butofcourse she’s tried to tell herself the same thing God knows how many times. And now she’s cracking because she can feel again, and feel herself feeling herself again, and again feel beyond her flesh, and again feel herself within herself.
But soon and all at once it rears again, stasis quo resumed, and nothing lasts while on this earth. She can see the highwater mark where she rose and peaked and where the wave broke and rolled back; she finds entropy sopping in catalogs of humid grey. She has resumed herself.
And madness and inertia and the endless insults of the quotidian held illimitable dominion over all. There is a great deal to tell about the subtle darkness of what went wrong, but not now. She is the jumper from the burning building who fears the fall less than the flames.
She slips sweetly over the windowsill, and is still.
[8. ME]
There’s a can of Bud Lite in the porta-potty behind the truck. The really irredeemable part of it. No light of day, or God, in here. I’m writing this while sweating in the same potty—I closed the lid—and trying not to inhale the air I am humidifying. You’re not helping. The gurgling guts, brown and biomic. The trick was to hold your breath.
Please look me in the eye. I am saving up money for a future once seen and since clouded. Momentum rushes us along with a logic of its own, an unblinking mass. I hope to learn to look. The trick was to see water for what it was.
Hatch chilies, mascarpone, buttermilk buns, cilantro, mint, pork shoulder, the etceteras of lacquering lives frescoing this globalist mosaic; the black pepper, cumin, paprika, mustard, Arbol chili, coriander, grey salt, allspice, dill seed, nutmeg, Mexican oregano, cinnamon, red pepper flakes: the dust of nations powdering this simmering moment. The trick was to see the remarkability of the thing, all that was drawn and assembled to coordinate this all-consuming instant. We made it here just in time.
And of course it’s been me all along: all the pronouns and thin veils, all the stabs at saying something you’ll remember and take to-go and linger over at your leisure, maybe with the peripheral sense that I once lived and this was what it was like to be me and do you recognize anything familiar?
I am the chanting morning, the sunbaked skull. I am forever, if you are finding this now.
The trick was to never, ever despair.
[10. AND TO YOU IT’S JUST WORDS.]
I have ranted and hollered and wasted myself onto walls. I have written myself hoarse, and solved nothing, and have only blisters to show.
But I tried.