Part 1: What Rankled

Stinking Bishop is a soft, creamy cheese from the U.K, made from the milk of Gloucester cattle:

It is also liquefied death in the nose. Old flyblown duck embryos. Warm hippo eye stuffed with fermented melon rind.

When I was six or seven, while walking to 7-11 to buy candy and Garbage Pail Kids, I decided to take a detour through a gravel ditch running parallel to a newly-built shopping center. Suddenly, before my nostrils had even registered what was happening, I reeled, and I saw at my feet, against the blinding-white sunstruck gravel stones, a pale, wet, hairless flesh-lump.

It was a baby bird. It had fallen from its nest and was boiling under the south Florida summer sun, eyes crammed with crawling things.

What I smelled at that moment — that’s basically what catching a waft of this cheese is like.

Odor aside (if one can, even intellectually, shift aside a sensation as brutish as this cheese’s funk), the taste actually offers layered savor: flan, nuttiness, traces of buttery caramel. My senses were confused trying to match up malevolent odor to nuanced taste. But since my senses like all that jostle, I was happy to be lost in the reek/flavor disconnect.

That pleasure didn’t last long though, as the nose coda hit about 5 seconds after the bite: coming back up through the palate and nostrils, haunting the mouth like a nightmare haunts a freshly awoken mind. It was at this point that the briefly-inviting flavor was totally ambushed by the reek. I put my knife down & left the rest of the wedge I had cut untouched: I’d been bested by the Bishop. My tongue hadn’t lolled in enough gutters to lap up & love curd like this.

I drank some water, I drank some lemonade. I ate some mustard on celery. I ate an orange. I bit into an orange peel.

Five more minutes passed. I glanced back at the Bishop. I got nervous. I fidgeted.

Then, automatically, as if in a trance, I reached over and ate the rest of the cheese in one bite.
   

Part 2: Why I Stay with Stink

What’s wrong with me? I wondered, as I sat there rolling creamy horror around in my mouth.

 (Read More . . .)

7 pm, work’s over, the subway platform’s stinking, boiling & rattling with jackhammers, a train arrives, it’s full and clearly seatless, I let it pass, another comes, haggard curds of humanity ooze out, I slip in fast and gratefully sink into seat, I settle in, air conditioning washes me, & I exhale.

And inevitably it’s happened: I find myself directly facing or seated beside some reeking, twitch-gripped, leering, sweating, muttering man or woman (usually man) on my hourlong subway ride home. Sometimes I get up and move, sometimes I don’t. If I don’t, it’s because I’m kept rooted by inertia, pride, masochism, exhaustion, or an abiding hope that the squirmy gremlin that’s unsettling me to the spine is just some normal schmuck who’s suffering from indigestion and/or my own warped & mottled outlook on fellow humans.

Would it help to survey faces before I take my seat? No — the sly dogs, they surprise me. They muster just enough poise & discipline to look like average, work-day-defeated middle-aged sighing subway-serfs like me — until the doors close, at which point the facade’s gone and they triumphantly collapse into the truth of their nail-biting, eye-darting, crack-jittery, randomly-cackling writhey selves.

I remember a 20-something to my left, staring at his filthy nails, picking them with clicking noises, looking at everyone around him intently, otherwise dressed neatly & normal-seeming; occasionally, in the midst of his disturbing spasms (fits that suggested some kind of allover-body itch), rubbing his shoulder into mine, and soon doing so deliberately, in what seemed like almost sexually physical appeal.

I remember a humid, damp-browed crone sitting next to me at the Port Authority 1 stop, cocooned in a black puffy nylon coat in the middle of spring, immediately setting her witch gaze on me as I sat and read the paper, saying, over and over again in what would’ve been a rich & sensuous slavic accent had the circumstances been different, shaking her head for dramatic effect: “It’s no good, NO GOOD what you do to yourself.” Stare, pause, headshake, repeat.

And I remember an old, bearded homeless man who would sporadically stamp his foot HARD on the floor, an enormous black & bulging garbage bag held protectively at his side like some alien, orificeless, insensate beast-pet. He’d utter something gnomic, vaguely threatening, stare out the window, and then petrify, remaining absolutely still. Time would pass. Hope would arise in our hearts, tentatively. Until FUCKING SLAM the next thunderous heel crashed down, more violent muttering, splintering conversation into dead shards. That loveliness lasted from 59th to 125th.

Oh, and lest I forget one vital detail, it was obvious to all seated nearby that gorgonzola-stuffed mackerel-carcasses were jammed deeeeeeeeep in the pockets of his sweatpants.

But where is my compassion? Where is my empathy? Here are people trapped in dire straits, whether streetlocked, disabled, mentally-disrupted, emotionally-taken-apart. They mean me no harm. They are suffering more than I am, ever will perhaps, ever could. And yet here I am, privileged & whining about having to occasionally endure them. What the hell is wrong with me? They deserve a handout, or some compassion, not a wordy web-post.

I used to excoriate myself in just such a way for my recoil, disgust, irritation. I used to really lay into myself for failures of understanding around these kinds of encounters. But gradually I started accepting and owning my responses, and realizing that empathy doesn’t preclude frustration. New York, after all, poses pretty serious social challenges to some of us: we’re thrust into each other cheek & jowl, from dawn to dusk, wedged & pressed & forced to accept the kind of proximity that doesn’t come second nature to us introverts and/or transplants (I’m from Florida). Most of the country (for better or worse) lives at a remove from others: sprawl is the rule, not the exception. New York, on the other hand, for all its splendor & beauty & opportunity, is a goddamned fetid warren of flesh, and you can’t get away from that aspect of it if you live, work & love here. You’re going to run smack into it, in all its vast array, in all its bewildering catalogue of souls.

So, given what we have to face, is it so wrong to have our reactions? What’s more New York than being blunt about what thrills us, annoys us, delights us, disgusts? All this compress of skin & face is burden, and if it ease it at all to allow ourselves mutter & groan about that compression’s occasional extremities — someone deranged, lecherous, menacing, reeking, explosive, insulting, insinuating, deranged, invasive; whether rich or poor, black or white, male or female, young or old — then why the fuck not? We can & should have our understanding, compassion, awareness of everyone’s circumstance — AND we can be gagging, fuming & ready to switch cars the next time a gorgonzola-pants lumbers near and starts stomping imaginary roaches.
   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008

(part 1)
   
   

Let’s put it another way. There’s a hall.

There was one entrance to this hall, and there will be one exit, way up ahead. Right now behind you there is a stream — it was once a trickle — but it’s miles behind, and maybe it won’t ever reach your feet.

We are all born with this stream in tow. We are all born to try and outrun it. The stream is yourself, which you flee from. The Hall is your life.

But right now, you can barely hear the stream. And when you start to hear it in muffle & murmur, you get antsy. And you drink, you shoot up, you watch bad movies, you eat a box of doughnuts, you masturbate, you go out in crowds, you stay at the office til every one’s gone, you call up 10 friends in a row, you read 20 blogs and bookmark 30 more. Anything to stop the slow creep of that splashing rushing noise. And it works for awhile. You’re fine. You forget it’s behind you.

Now, at this point, you have choices. You can run harder and harder as the years pass to keep outrunning it. Run & do whatever you need to to distract you from all that wild pour gaining on your heels.

Or you could do what few of us ever do: stop running.

Stop running, turn around, stand still. Let it hit you, the years’ mass of it all. Stream to canal to river. It’ll hurt when it hits. It might bring you to the brink of drowning. But it won’t be as bad as if you waited til the end. At least this way you’ll end up being carried along by it, joining it in one forward & integrated motion. You and the river. You and the parts of you you have never been able to look in the face. And it will carry you to that final Door, without violent rush or blow, & you will unlock it and feel the river’s firm nudge forward, and you will flow out with the water into your soft final splash and float & drift to whatever shore.

The graceful motion of you as the river’s vessel is what it feels like to own up to yourself, face yourself, your fears, integrate with the parts of you that you most hate to feel and encounter and live with. It’s not easy at first. But you will spend the rest of your life in — and end it with — peace. And what comes after will be peaceful too, beyond measure. The soul come to terms with itself.

But you won’t choose that will you? You won’t ever turn to face the water. You’ll say you will, but you won’t. Years will pass, and more and more often you’ll hear it clearly, unmuffled, unmurmured. Stream to canal to river. Ignored and shouted over. Louder. Undeniable.

It’s chasing you now. The racing lures you’ve chosen don’t work so well — they don’t help you to outrun it any faster. The smack and booze and flesh. You even recognize what you’ve done in setting up your own racing rabbits, but you’re too weak or stubborn to change it at this point.

And then the little river grows to a wider, deeper one. Now it fills the corridor fully like a truck, bearing down on you. You still have time to face it, minimize the impact. But you don’t. You let your last chance slip. You just keep running. You run and let it gather momentum. Run down your last few years, trailing flood & fury. All that river is a lifetime, splashing & resentful that you’ve failed to acknowledge it. Kept your back to it.

Now you’ve dropped your bottle. You’ve dropped your pills. You’ve dropped your cellphone, your hypo, your laptop, your sweets. Now you’re running just so you can reach that exit. That silver locked door. And your iron key in your sweating shaking palm. You race right up to the door, banging your forehead against it, fumbling with the key. Dropping it.

Almost there. The pursuing roar of you popping your ears to permanent still. And just as you set your key level with the keyhole, just as your shaking hand focuses grip, your wave will shore, will embrace your life gratefully, will explode you. It will twist you to nothing with endless cold fists. You will break to foam.

And that Last Door will fly off its hinges with a crack but you won’t softly sail out into some last bath of peace. You will drip over the lip of the spout of your life like slime from a gutter.You will disperse in droplets and dry up as you fall apart to mist. And whatever follows this life we know will be to you your long black cipher of wasted scatter.
   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008

Give me more pocks. Give me the ones with maps on their skins. Give me the ones that wear freckles, nodes, weird sinkholes & dimples. Give me anything but plastic, smooth, resiny, Red Delicious lacquer. Give me fewer apples, give me more mottles and dapples.

They feel better in my palm. That satisfying gruffness of texture. Greeting the hand like a wool mitten. Supermarket Granny Smiths are inert in the palm like a cold steel handle.

The first few times I visited the Inwood farmer’s market, I made my new friends: the Golden Russet, The Stayman Winesap, the mysterious apples with only 3 digit numbers for names. I’d recently read Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire, still wild over the part where he visits the apple orchard to end all apple orchards: some vast biteable catalogue of endless variety & shape, with apples little bigger than walnuts, apples that tasted like oranges and pears, apples with strange wild feral flavors and wrinkled skins like prunes (I’m paraphrasing loosely from memory). And now here they were in front of me, cousins of the ones he’d written of, heaped pell-mell in wooden crates, stems still on, cratered, pitted, unkempt and brazen. Their supermarket sisters elsewhere in tidy rows, tired and vacant like well-dressed children on SSRIs.

I walked the market stand, watched them. Every one was a personality. Some sassy ones, some cowed ones, some martyrs, some firebrands, some braggarts. One had what looked like a bad rash. Little peppery indentations tinged red around the stem. I was afraid to bite it. And when I did I saw that the red had suffused the white flesh beneath, as if a wound. My girlfriend told me later that hail could cause this, when the apple was first forming. The taste was unaffected, but watching the subterranean patterns formed by the hailrash transformed how I ate. I marveled at the designs while I chewed, seeing the pink wound-roots of this apple’s history.

Golden Russet became my favorite. Its flavor was crisp and subtle and always only flirted with sour and sweet, could never commit, just weaved around taste buds leaving trails of honey and almond and walnut behind. It clove in even wedges from the tooth, as if built for biting. I can imagine its taste and touch now, as vividly as when I had one months ago, which I almost can never do with food.

Mottles and dapples, so many of them. Those weird magic blends of flavors, complex and lingering, all bred away to the blunt blow on the tongue of Red Delicious and Granny Smiths. And all that rich wild topography of appleskin sieved and filtered and winnowed down to familiar cheap flashy supermarket wax-sheen.

I had always thought all this was silly. People crowing about varieties of apple, squash, oyster. Wine. Whatever. Seemed indulgent, idle, snobbish. Neo-hippyish and offensively granola. Ponytailed prissiness. But then you taste or experience something that wakes you up. Makes you revel in your senses, reminds you you have a tongue, a nose, sense organs built to know and hold so much more than you had realized was out there.

Like when you first try yoga and you feel some weird part of your back or thigh light up and crackle with pain-pleasure, some backwoods territory of your body you never even knew existed. And you stop, you take a breath, and you think: “shit, I live in this thing, and how much of it am I really aware of?” Even a lowly little apple can make you feel the same way, can cause you to marvel at how broad sensory experience can be and how much within it there is to sample — and how much of it that unpredictable variety people actively seek to curtail.

Nature is so vast, yet we choose to cull and promote such a small swath of it. As if resenting its enormity, its reckless variety. Whether it’s flowers, tomatoes, apples, anything that can grow and be consumed — we try to control and shape and create a demand, and anything wild and untameable & strange — anything that isn’t easily marketable — we shove away until we forget it ever existed. It’s part of what we do as humans, and must do — and at its best, it’s a beautiful act of harmonious tending and shaping (think Bonsai). At its worst, it’s petty and fearful; small-minded and profit-thralled.

We think we know Nature, its growths and types & creatures and patterns, but none of us ever will, even those of us who want to. Most of us only know the safe and manageable images of it we’ve created from it or forced upon it. Like growing up thinking all deers are Bambis, all elephants Dumbos, and only animals in cute hallmark cards are worth trying to save.
    

(broken)	(unbroken)	(broken)

Nature will save itself. Nature always innovates — in flower terms, “breaks” — whether tulip or apple or superflu. It wreaks wildness out of the shapes we impose, expect, plan for. And this is why we love it and are troubled by it. Its gorgeous chaos & defiance.
   
   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008

Before you were an addict, you were a fugitive.

That running, that shivering scurry, was and always will be the sole precondition for what you do.

There is no end to the shapes your running takes. Run with food in your mouth, whiskey in your throat, anonymous flesh on your monitor; run with video games, coffee, sex, run with your work, run with your hobbies, run with your prayer; run with laughter, run with noise, run with nature; run with mobs; run in caves. Run with anything you want, anything will do.

Because what you choose to run with is unimportant. Your infinite options aren’t good or bad — they’re neutral. You, the addict, you’re measured not by whether you drink, fuck, sleep, talk, work or eat. You’re known only by whether you seize and pervert these things into instruments of escape; whether you make these things your greyhound’s rabbits — your racing lures. For your wet jaws to snap after and your paws to tear gouges for.

But what’s pursuing you? What’s on your addict’s heels?

Always only one thing. Always only the never-hurrying,
always steady,
measured step & echoing footfall of
inevitable you.
   
   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008

C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008

                  

   

It has become evolutionary at this point to admire and worship our man-made, synthetic versions of nature and ourselves — while also denigrating/ignoring the original reality from which they came.

As animals and plants become extinct, our fascination and even preference for artificial representations of them [stuffed animals, cute photoshopped hallmarky dogs and cats, remarkably life-like fake plants] dominate. It’s easy to see why — we can extract from the originals all that makes them safe and easy and forgo the figurative thorns (fake plants that don’t stink, rot, have imperfect petals, aphids; stuffed animals or robo-animals that aren’t temperamental, biting, are perfectly obedient, have no excretory functions, are docile, and are able to receive passively all our fantasies and projections).

We weren’t content to extend absolute mastery over nature. Now, annoyed with captive nature’s occasional recalcitrance, or just plain annoying Otherness, we scrap it and make it in our own image, like Gods.

The most fascinating aspect of all this is how it turns inward, upon ourselves. Unable to accept the beauty of variation and imperfection, we will turn to human simulacra more and more — there are already on the market incredibly expensive and highly-lifelike female sex-dummies. Genetics, cosmetic surgery, these aren’t innocent practices, over time they embed this idea in the collective unconscious: “we will not tolerate our own variation and that of others. we will airbrush ourselves and others to make everyone safer to everyone else’s eyes and sensibilities. there is something ugly and frightening about people who don’t conform to our safe expectations, and it’s our duty to remedy this”. And the more people internalize this script, the more they seek to externalize it and inflict it on others.

This is all born of fear. It is a kind of self-directed fascism, an inability to tolerate nuance and variation, a hunger for the imposition of strict standards for what is appealing and what is not.

I was in the grocery store the other day, buying a wee load of fruits and veggies. I was in the same kind of mood I always am when I come home from work: a little peeved, ready to get home and fix myself a drink and put on sonic youth. I’m sure it showed.

Anyway, as I was being rung up I noticed the cashier: she seemed down at the mouth, surly. I recognized her; she was always like that. Then I noticed the bagger, a new dude, some 40 or 50 year old guy, bald, sweetcheeked, kindly. I could tell by his patter and body language that he was keeping up his valiant good humor in the face of the cashier’s bitterness. A little checkout line cold war.

Anyway, all that shit I sussed out unconsciously and it led me to smile at him and say: “Hey there, how you doin?”. His response was immediate. He smiled with enthusiasm, we exchanged small talk (”wish this rain would stop” “cant wait to go home”), and I truly had the sense that I’d lifted this man’s spirits.

Meanwhile the cashier was still harrumphy. She said something under her breath to him about “hurrying up” as he was putting my stuff away. The bagger maintained his composure and said something like “yes, well, I’m going to double bag for this young man since he took the time to be nice”. I was touched. It was so direct and simple and honest and I was mildly shaken by it. I collected my food, said a few more things to the bagger, and left, moved.

On the walk home, I was a little perplexed. Why had that encounter left me so touched? Was it that I helped combat the cashier’s grumpiness by assisting the bagger in this little unspoken temporary alliance we’d formed? Was I pleased to realize the effect a little smiling talk had on the guy? Was I happy to have someone else assess me in such a positive light, and — despite the crusty way I was feeling that night, and despite the way I feel about myself in general — be able to summarize me as a happy, “nice” young man?

A little bit of all that I guess. All I know is it started with a simple, unconscious decision to smile instead of remain emotionally aloof. I felt such a powerful sense of the direct impact you can have on people in your day to day life. All with the subtlest of modulations of your voice & face. The rest of the day I sat with myself thinking: what the fuck? Why don’t I do this more often? Direct, face to face contact that leaves everyone involved feeling bolstered and glad.

But here I am fucking blogging about it instead of going about and trying to make it happen more.

C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008

   
          

   
   
Here’s a report of 20th Century Fox having unfavorable movie reviews yanked from You Tube.

Is anyone surprised? The net makes truth & opinion so much easier to access, so ubiquitous, it’s inevitable that it be corrupted and stymied by those with the will and force to do so.

The net, welcomed with so much teary-eyed idealism in its early years, and now in its accelerated, endlessly-fractalled adolescence presenting all sorts of pains and frustrations to those with something to suppress or revise — be it corporation that can’t handle criticism or individual who is embarrassed or alarmed to find traces, ghosts, echoes of him/herself on the net (I think of coworkers of mine who get contorted in endless knots of conscience over harmless pictures added to their profiles and which they now realize can be viewed by a mistakenly-added manager or boss).

The net makes you accountable. The net holds a mirror right up to you. It’s going to intensify as info about people and entities/companies/corporations continues to burgeon; data mining/exchanging in the medical and marketing and social networking sectors is astonishingly widespread. And if you’re not ready to own up, the net doesn’t give a fuck. You’re either going to have to accept yourself as individual or entity or do what Fox is doing here, and scrub very hard with the biggest steel-wool brush you can find until the spots are out. In vain of course, since in the time it took you to scratch out one blemish, ten thousand more appeared. Whack-a-mole in an endless prairie with a billion new squinty critic-bloggers for every fifty you bash. Pointless cyber-crusades against armies of deathless data.

In a way, Fox is only doing what most of us do in the small sphere of our own lives — redact until the story’s right, photoshop away until that Facebook shot looks perfect. They just looks even more villainous because, well, they’re 20th century Fox.

Obviously the stakes are higher when a corporation with more power and resources than an individual uses its clout and dollars to suppress truth. This is more momentous and damaging than when an individual tries to bowdlerize their wikipedia entry.

Still, the underlying assumptions tie both acts together: truth is mutable, is a function of what can be spun, shown, suppressed; surface-truth (what we present to be the case) trumps actual truth (what is actually the case).

How often have you, in your own life, tried to edit your story? How many sentences restructured, whole passages struck? How subtle the tweak, how skillful the erasure, or how crude the demolition? If there was a Wikipedia entry about you full of everything you’ve done, would you do your level best to edit until the reportage turned into fable? Until all events which could provoke criticism were excised? Or would you look at yourself full in the mirror, flaws and all, and own yourself, take responsibility for all you are?

Let’s rail & rail often against 20th century Fox and any other corporation or company that seeks to silence opposition through cowardly suppressive measures. But let’s also consider our own complicity in this culture of selective presentation, of endless redaction, of failure to own up to and accept ourselves with integrity. We may find that even in the age of deathless data we, like Fox, still imagine we can and should run from ourselves, scramble in futility like people trying to dodge raindrops in a thunderstorm.