Happy New Year, I Liked a Boxing Movie.

Happy New Year!
I came back from Seattle night before last, the thirtieth of December 2005. I divided a week between Seattle and my mom and my Dad in Spokane. I did some really really lame booking for my tickets, and the stupid MT A was on strike so I decided to get up really early and share a cab with Monica Frisell and try to go standby on her flight. I got to JFK at six…no go on the standby. So my flight left at eleven, to Atlanta. I did a lot of waiting at the airport. I went and laid down on the benches in the café and slept. It was not restful. I was, in the end, glad, even with the four hour layover that I hadn’t gotten on monica’s flight because I sat next to the most extraordinary child. He was nine, and so poised it was incredible. I had seen him with his mom on the tarmac, and asked him if he wanted me to switch with her. He said “No, that’s ok. Don’t worry she’ll be keeping an eye on me over the seats.” We hit it off immediately. He was obviously a frequent flier, informing me that in first class they have water waiting for you and the seats recline all the way, that he always tries to get the little latch that holds up the tray table as straight as possible, and that if I fell asleep he would close the window shade so the light wouldn’t bother me. He said he was so excited to see his brothers in Atlanta, and I asked if his parents lived there (as an aside, I really tied one on last night, this is taking me forever to write. Not my finest hour.) He said that no, his parents are dead, and the woman several rows ahead of him who he calls mom is actually his grandmother. I didn’t want to pry, I mean it’s a little kid for godssakes, but he offered that he had never really known them, his mother had been killed as a pedestrian by being hit by two cars. I told him how lucky he was to have someone who took as good care of him as his grandma does. He was so well dressed, and so well spoken. She spends a lot of time and energy on him. She came back to our seats to check on him and bring him a book, a maximizing your potential type book called “Your Best Life.” She had book marked chapter thirteen for him to read; Programming the Computer of the Mind. Ok? Nine. He picked up this weird science magazine that was in the seat pocket in front of him and read a couple of paragraphs of a very difficult scientific article about membrane permeability that he had no understanding of but could read the words without hesitation. He told me that his brother was weird and was still living at home and never went to school and talked funny, like “what up dog?” I pointed out to him that his mom’s death might be harder on his brother since he was older when she died. He said that’s what his grandmother said too. I told him he was a very unique little person and it was going to be an important challenge for him to remain loving to people who had less perspective and a poorer mental proclivity that he. He agreed. We had a picnic of oranges, peanuts and granola bars and drank spicy V8 with lemon, both of our favorite airplane beverage. He asked how it works when there is a phone number that spells a word, how do you dial a word? I showed him on my cell phone and he was like oh! And promptly spelled his whole name on the keypad. I wanted to keep in touch so bad, but couldn’t really ask the kid for his phone number, it just didn’t seem right, so I asked his grandma when we deplaned if I could give him my address and we could be pen pals, I had suggested it on the plane and he seemed really excited about it. I really hope he writes. I then had four hours to cool my jets in the ATL airport, where they have soul food, yum. Candied yams are directly descended from ambrosia. I also saw a handsome g-d down brother wearing a shirt with the WB logo, which I thought was weird, but on further inspection, it said above it “If you see da police…Warn-A-Brother!” Just hilarious. On the flight from ATL to seattle, my suspicions (roused by my enjoyment of the Harry Potter movie,) that I may be losing my edge, were confirmed by two hours of riveted attention and feelings of near PATRIOTISM (gasp!) generated by the Russell Crowe vehicle Cinderella Man. It is so unlikely that I would even try watching a boxing movie, so much more unlikely that I would watch the whole thing and a near impossibility that I would love it and yet all three happened. It took place in the depression and made me feel so nostalgic (probably more so since I wasnt alive yet) for a time that despite terrible hardships people believed in something more, and believed in each other and in their country. Before we had been betrayed by our government so many times that faith in government can be achieved only through total ignorance and denial of the truth. James Braddock’s strength of character and even more, the amount of joy and pride that his success infused into such an abjectly poor community is in stark contrast to our entertainers and public figures now who rise to the top through as much debauchery and immorality as they can pack into a five minute video. I want to feel proud of being an american, I do. I feel robbed that I cant even say the word patriotism without a sneer. At the end of the flight the other two people in the row and started chatting, an elderly woman with a british accent and a middle aged African American woman from Alabama. Through our talking it came out that the elderly woman directly next to me was a british citizen who moved to france at 14 to help the allied forces fight the Germans. She was caught by the Nazis and placed in an internment camp for three years. She remembers hearing prisoners crying for their mamas as they were burned to death and having all of her friends and bunkmates rounded up and put in a cattle truck and taken away never to return. She said she was never scared. Never questioned her dedication to the right thing. She sounded so proud and her struggle for a Europe she could be proud of and her belief that her death would be worth it only sharpened the contrast between her generation and mine, or at least her and me. I wonder what I would do in that situation...would I risk it all or would I try to save my ass and the asses of those near and dear. Not that I would have been able to help anyone else in WWII, I would have been the first on in a cattle car wearing the felt star (im a poet and I dont even know it!) But now, its a different "enemy" and I am hardly doing my best to fight the power. Hmm.
Ariel picked me up from the airport and we went to 611 supreme creperie for a lovely salade niscoise and a strong coffee nudge. Aside from a marathon thrifting spree in Spokane, the trip was pretty uneventful. I spent a lot of time with family. It was strange to be a visitor in my hometown, not as strange as I thought maybe I just haven’t been gone long enough. The rain still sucks, the traffic is still terrible, and there still isn’t anywhere to eat after nine. M’kay? I definitely didn’t make the most of my trip, there were several businessy and paperworky things I really should have done. Argh. My flight back was filled with members of the seattle expat network in NYC. Casey Kelbaugh and I traded seats around so we could sit next to each other. It was fun, we sync-ed up our mini tvs and watched Wedding Crashers together. Good times. The flight was laternhell, and there was a crazy nut woman sitting behind us who was eating french fries (serious social no no to eat pungantly fragrant foods in closed quarters, deep fried plane air is super rancid) and alternating deep exasperated breaths wiht loud curseword exclamations of the F variety. THe guy next to me was a very weird young asian guy with long and VERY greasy hair held back in a rhinestone butterfly clip and long fingernails. I tried to get some recognition from hime that the woman behind us was screaming cursewords basically into his ear, but no dice. I dont think he spoke any english and he didnt do ANYTHING on the flight. No music, no tv, no sleep and no reading. Just stared straight ahead into the back of the seat in front of him, occasionally watching the plane's slow progression over the midwest on the monitor when it flashed on automatically. Creep-ay. Then it took an hour to get my luggage, that really sucked.
I am watching CIN, the Carribean entertainment and information network, right now. Its great. They have this high school quiz show that is not to be believed. They ask the most crazy difficult questions, on all topics. The physics questions are amazing, and immediately followed by a clip of a Jay Z song the kids have to name, or a shot of Gary Payton they have to identify. The girls move fluidly from math, to pop culture, to bible knowledge to Jamaican history. Impressive! Not to mention the gospel reggae jingles advertising Jamaican phone cards, and a stay in school propaganda video featuring Red Rat (of tight up skirt fame) and his kids singing: “unu better respect unu elders…stay in school, learn to read, learn unu abc’s, exercise inna PE…” A whole new world of specialty programming.
My brain power is starting to come back from my Bushmills partial coma, last night was fun. We went to Arshad’s new years party, trying to redeem himself from the Halloween fiasco, it was fun. I rang in 2006 with Pablo, Mahdis and Mahroo. Ive know Pablo for 17 years. Wow. Then to tribeca for a party of Mahdis' hip and gorgeous Iranian friends, by which time I was already getting tired. It was nice, a lot of black and a lot of madonna, some olives. Then we went to Bushwick to a party of some young kids from the Bronx that we met at a bar called Pianos a month or so ago. By the time we got there at like three everyone was way too drunk and mostly concerned with a young lady who was in the unconscious throes of alcohol poisoning and by the time we left was being loaded, covered in vomit (a good sign) into an ambulance on a stretcher… and I just remembered that one of the paramedics took some time to try to hit on me and Mahroo and Mahdis as we passed by. Wow. Professionalism at its best.
Hey, check it out. I just relived the night with Mads who told me that what actually went down was this: As we were leaving, I was standing over said unconscious drunk girl watching them load her into the ambulance making pronouncements like "Oh yeah, its alcohol poisoning, just like I thought, yep. She'll be alright. Load 'er right in there, there you go!" Then the paramedic guy asks me how I'm doing and I say something to the effect of "Nothing a little party wont fix! How you doin'? I love a man in uniform!"at which time he's like "oh yeah? what are you doin later" and starts following us to the car. Mahdis had to redirect him back to the girl on the stretcher in the ambulance. We then went to a diner, at which time I drank a cup of coffee and promptly fell asleep on Pablo's shoulder. I am a real peice of work. I cant beleive Im preserving this for posterity. My Bubba reads this damn thing! Hi Bub! Arntcha proud? With stories like this, who needs great-grandkids? Another Update: Mahdis has informed me that it gets better! It wasnt a paramedic, but one of New York's finest! A police officer! I have no fear! And he no propriety! In seattle I would have been under arrest, no bail. Crime: distracting a police officer, ten years in Walla Walla, no time off for good behavior.
So, I got up to go to work this morning, hating it, hating jet lag, dragged myself all the way there and read the closed Jan 1 and 2 sign on the door. LAME. Bought a bunch of t shirts at the gap instead and took Mahroo to the airport, processed how annoyed Mahdis was with me for acting like an asshole on New Years and then laughing about it, now here I am and Im about to hit the ol sack and start it all again tomorrow. God Willing.