Laugh - it's good for you... forget all about shoe coupons... red stamps... and gas rationing... and that lonely ache in your heart every night waiting for First Class Private G.I. Joe to come home safely.  That's the kind of picture I like to take... it's funny, people will laugh and have a good time when they have money for a ticket.  I even laughed myself... and forgot all about my inferiority complexes.

She was a lovely lady, with a romantic mind and such a sweet mocking mouth.  Her romantic mind was like the tiny boxes, one within the other, that come from the puzzling East; however many you discover there is always one more; and her sweet mocking mouth had one kiss on it that Wendy could never get, though there it was, perfectly conspicuous in the right-hand corner.

Summer arrived a month ago with blue skies and clean breezes. It's a cause for celebration.  Nights spent on the tar roof drinking beer, encircled by the faint fire fly glow of christmas lights.  The city is a distant presence on the skyline residing over us like a constellation.  We've bought lawn chairs with cup holders in their fabric arms that we sit on while musing over small thoughts and ghost stories.  There is no fence on the edge of the roof because it is not meant for entertaining but the danger adds an element of novelty and thrill.  

I've moved out of my parents house to a three-story apartment building in Park Slope.  It's a new freedom.  I have my own neighborhood.  I have my own neighbors. I have my own apartment (which I share with two roommates) and most importantly I have my own room.  Now I sit in my new room and write with the help of a few sips of whiskey and old tunes blasting through my speakers.  The day is beautiful outside but having no where to go to escape my own thoughts, I sit here and I try to write.  I try to recapture my old story telling skills.  My teachers used to say I was good at this.  But why?  Right now it escapes me.  There is no plot that jumps to mind.  Maybe it was too much whiskey, or maybe it was too little.  Better luck later, maybe.

My job is helping people keep promises.  It is a grueling endeavor, at times even torturous and I never feel fulfilled.  I exist in a world outside the waking realm where inner consciousness and dreams reside; where peoples internal tide pushes them to action or inaction.  I have thought of myself at times like the moon, or a mastermind.  I create the roar of the ocean you hear in a conch shell; in essence I am you, but you are not me.  I am the pulse, the motion, the flow, the hope, the fear, the perseverance.  But I am not G-dly, nor am I human.  And do not get me wrong, I am not proud.  I just do my job.  I help people keep promises.  Promises to catch the 3:54 train at Penn. Station, to pick their child up from daycare, to make a chocolate birthday cake with vanilla icing, to clean the house and do the dishes, to keep a child alive who is dying from cancer, to work on that book, to steal money from a neighbor, to visit a grandmother who sits alone in the nursing home, to find clean water and food, to tell the truth, to never tell anyone, to reconnect, to protect and cherish and love and hate and kill and die.  It goes on and I am there, seeing it through.

Mr. Head awakened to discover that the room was full of moonlight. He sat up and stared at the floor boards the color of silver and then at the ticking on his pillow, which might have been brocade, and after a second, he saw half of the moon five feet away in his shaving mirror, paused as if it were waiting for his permission to enter. It rolled forward and cast a dignifying light on everything. The straight chair against the wall looked stiff and attentive as if it were awaiting an order and Mr. Head's trousers, hanging to the back of it, had an almost noble air, like the garment some great man had just flung to his servant; but the face on the moon was a grave one. It gazed across the room and out the window where it floated over the horse stall and appeared to contemplate itself with the look of a young man who sees his old age before him.

Mr. Head could have said to it that age was a choice blessing and that only with years does a man enter into that calm understanding of life that makes him a suitable guide for the young. This, at least, had been his own experience.

Now, however, time (having no further use for me) is running out.  I will soon be thirty-one years old.  Perhaps.  If my crumbling, over-used body permits.  But I have no hope of saving my life, nor can I count on having even a thousand nights and a night.  I must work fast, faster than Scheherazade, if I am to end up meaning - yes, meaning- something.  I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.

"Chopping things is my least favorite part of cooking," she said.

We stood in the kitchen as I sliced a red onion with some difficulty. All our knives are dull and we don't have a cutting board. Every time the knife would get past the resistance created by the thick middle of the onion it would chop down on our linoleum countertop making an abrupt noise that at first made me jump.

 "I like chopping things," I said. "It's so repetitive, and kind of therapeutic. You can just zone out and listen to your thoughts."
"Yea, zone out with a butchers knife in your hand," she laughed, while adding bits of sausage to the frying pan.
We were making a breakfast slop: sausages, onions, and green peppers, with eggs scrambled in. I call it a slop because once all the ingredients were added it looked like a brown lumpy mush. As we cooked the morning summer sun hazily light up our kitchen and we could hear cicadas humming outside our window with the breeze.

  (The sound of cicadas embodies summer in all its lackadaisical bliss: slow mornings, long walks, green trees, beach grass, refreshing breezes, warm sun, hot pavement, subway rides to the beach, watermelon juice, lightening storms, high tide, carnival rides, margaritas, sunblock smell, barbeques, fire pits, nights on the roof, meteor showers, long drives with the windows down, sand dunes, cold soups, life guard chairs and on and on and on. Summer. Season of languid, aimless, felicity.) 

Eating our breakfast we laughed at its unappetizing appearance while asserting that it tasted fine. It did.  Soon after we'd finished eating, she left for work and I sat in the kitchen, sipping coffee.

I wondered what it meant to be so content to do nothing.  Probably, I thought, it means nothing at all; or maybe it means I'm happy.

Holding glasses of vino tinto, they gazed across the bay, speculating about the silence under the sea. "Seaweeds swaying like palm trees," they all agreed, "quiet as the grave."

Tonight I saw a three legged bijon frise; it was missing its right hind leg. The dog jumped up on me when I entered my apartments elevator. I pet it before turning to its owner and saying, "He has three legs." The owner was a slightly overweight, middle aged woman who had on clear, chunky 80s reading glasses. She nodded at my comment lethargically. "He's very cute though," I said, apologetically. Before they exited the elevator I wondered if I'd said the wrong thing.

"How would I describe myself? Well. My name is Yoni and I like to fuck."

"What do you think your strongest mental skill is?"
"Disassociating."

I'm a kindergarden teacher for asian kids. All their parents work at the chinese dumpling factory next door.

Tasha Story

I took my driving test a few months ago. I was nervous but the roads in Buffalo are completely empty so it's really easy to drive. Everything was going smoothly, and then I got to an intersection and in front of me a huge funeral procession passing. I turned to my instructor and said, "There's a funeral procession." She said, "Oh! Good eye." There hadn't been any other cars on the road during the whole driving test. We sat there silently for 15 minutes, waiting for it to pass.

"Oh you want to see the gazelles, do you mister? Well, you've got three gazelles right here in the car!"
There were three women in the car.
"But can they dance the way a gazelle can?"
"But of course! Even better than a gazelle."
"We'll have to see about that."

You know, I get up at five every morning, I work from morning till evening, I am always dealing with money--my own and other people's--and I see what people are like. You've only got to begin to do anything to find out how few honest, honourable people there are. Sometimes, when I can't sleep, I think: "Oh Lord, you've given us huge forests, infinite fields, and endless horizons, and we, living here, ought really to be giants."

You are the wolf and I am the moon.

Once a kid was making fun of me ceaselessly during class. This had gone on all year, and I was fed up. I got up from my seat, sharpened my pencil in one of those old school sharpeners that made you turn the little knob, and as I was walking back to my desk, I stabbed him as hard as I could with my pencil. He screamed. It was the most satisfying sound I'd heard in a while.

He said his upsidedown tear drop tattoos under his eye meant that he had two children. Being the father to two children is not the opposite of killing two people, but hey. I asked him what the kids names were. He said "Peanut and Butter." If they had a girl they were going to name her Jam or Jelly. He said he always wanted a girl, but instead he got two boys. "Girls are smart, boys are dumb," he said.