Just for the perverse fuck of it, i sit upstairs in a new venue on "Boxing Day." I wanted to sample the effect atmosphere has on my digits and language - the wine and meal, though more expensive did not translate into finer quality · that is not a complaint, it is the cost of exploration. The real cost, though is to the proprietor for losing a customer. How fucking sad that our human experience is parsed by profit into - get in, get out, how many tables can i fill? not, who are you - what do you do, what are you searching for in this “valle lacrymarum”?, etc., etc., questions of the "King Customer" that used to be commonplace, but with rare exceptions are now subsumed into some twisted corporate notion that there is a “lingua franca” for customer service - a one size fits all. The roast i’m sure was succulent when the owner tasted it, but by the time i gnawed on it, was tough as shoe leather. Initially when asked by the server, "how was your meal,?" i made with the zipper across my mouth; yet when the poor man responsible for serving the “ideal portion” upon which his job depended, i advised him to practice what his native skill had taught him about serving tender meat · it is more certain to me daily that i am going to “hell.”
Ironically in the hapless holiday workers haste to create a “foreign” ambience, Bob Dylan’s xmas album was put on a loop, something not dissimilar to fingernails on the old style chalkboard. It is this sort of stricture that is choking the human experience from our collective enjoyment, employees deprived of personal initiative in service of the god of profit sucks every inclination at exploration or having fun from the working experience. This is only more so amplified in a city which has banked its entire wherewithal on a restaurant economy. So you now have the foreign owned eateries catering to a captive demographic of 1,000 foreig-born appetites within a population of 800,00o locals possessing a culinary expertise 600 years old within a culture 3,000+ years old and the two cannot communicate, because each is waiting for the flood gates of tourism to open and magically free up the mighty god of profit which caused this myopic lack of communication in the first place.
I am an interloper and it may there is no place on the planet the digital overlords will allow my voice to be heard. They are a cowardly lot hiding inside the "push technology of texting tribes and fb cliques they don’t possess the hair on their faces to own up to, rather sending their Artificial Intelligence (AI) thug to front for them. I could give a fuck and accept that i am an anachronism within a paradigm being overlaid on a dying planet. I spit on the narrow thinking of that paradigm and those who dare not confront my spoken word, much less allow my written word the light of day. Still, like the ancient “voice in the wilderness” i have no choice if i mean to die with my eyes wide open; my ears unplugged with my mouth shut but to press on. I can feel the hell hounds at my hells even with the short ride i took today under the last of the evaporating cloud cover - the heat of the coming summer could be felt as clear as your hand next to a toaster while reaching for cooked bread on a brisk morning.
Come this summer, i do not want to be where i am; i did not want to be where i am after the first rain; i do not want to go where i have slated myself to move and so am stuck in the great in between. Or not stuck, but patiently waiting for that ineffable indication of direction the universe gives those who listen. I have for too long believed that destination is someplace i can pick, not much different than the fictional belief i can pick who to care for or be cared for by. The problem with trying to support this restaurant dense community, i have one stomach and prefer my own cooking, so when i do go out, it tends to be in well-worn paths. For too long i’d given that behavior a negative weight, but now am trying to accept it as part of the unique makeup of my repertoire of responses to my world.
Like writing, if i knew what i was going to write, that might make it more simple to work each day - just sit down and execute the words · I do not know what is to come out of my mind onto what in another time might have been described as “paper,” but now can only be conceived of as aether. If i had my way i’d just sit and visit with others, but so few are comfortable in that exploratory give and take between souls that occasions for deep communication become more and more rare. The challenge is of course coming to grips with my responsibility for that dearth of human exchange. It wasn’t until recently that someone i loved platonically for a long time, only to discover i could not share a house with until after i had moved back in many years later - asked during one of our many conversations, which i highly valued, if i was aware that people might be afraid of me. Since i was a frightened man-child in the streets of NYC trying to affect “scary,” it had not occurred to me. However, many decades later walking through certain neighborhoods of East L.A. when youths no longer gave way to my stride did i understand that demeanor is as fungible as clarity - where before i could not frame a simple clear sentence, i now grip ideas as though my life depended on it, and where once i’d have never ceded ground, i routinely veer out of the way · go figure.
jts 26/12/2020
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