CHEEKY

Pinch my cheek. The one on my face. Let's say the left one. Pinch it hard and pull it harder. Now you can see into the side of my mouth. The inside of my cheek resembles an archway or a wet tunnel. The teeth on the side of my mouth line up nicer than the front ones. They curve backwards, twist upward into the back gums of my mouth, wind into the entryway of my throat. Take a knife or something like one. Just something clean and sharp. Still firmly pinching my cheek, slice a clean line, close to, parallel to, my teeth. If done correctly, you will have cleanly removed the majority of my left cheek. Prepare a bowl of flour (mixed with salt and pepper) and a bowl of beat eggs. Heat a generously oiled pan to medium high. Dredge the cheek twice over. For added texture you can do an additional dredging into bread crumbs but, considering the fatty softness of the cheek, this may not be appealing to you. Once dredged, place in pan and fry on each side for approximately 5-8 minutes or until evenly browned on each side. Serve cheek with raw vegetables and grains.

Feed me some of my cheek. Feel free to ease it into the cut up side of the mouth where the cheek once was. If my teeth have experienced pain induced lockjaw, be sure to use a thin wedge to pry my mouth open. Once pried, you may have to manually simulate chewing by taking hold of my chin and upper lip and then pulling the mouth open and shut. Doing so, notice when the cheek has been satisfactorily chewed and then massage my throat until swallowing occurs.

Feed yourself some of the cheek. Note the gummy resistance and the balanced textures that the different sides of the cheek offer. On the one hand, you have my skin nicely crisped and on the other you have my pink inner flesh, tender and buttery to both the knife and the tongue. I will supervise your ingestion of the cheek. There should be a substantial amount of blood flowing out of my mouth, disregard this, such bleeding is to be expected when severing the cheek. I may have occasion to wince during your meal. This could be due to a number of factors. The consumption of my own cheek may have made me nauseous. In this case, make sure to provide enough space between each other, as in the off chance that I vomit, you will not be splattered upon. It may be due to the severity of my injury. In such a case, a firm pat upon the back will not only encourage me to endure such trauma but may also inspire me to accept the permanence of my deformity, the sham that is regeneration, the justice behind the losing of my cheek, the acceptance of your own mouth's enjoyment in consuming parts of my own, etc.

Little effort or emphasis should be needed to make me understand the uselessness of my own pain or the unimportance of living without my formerly attached cheek. In fact, treat your meal as an opportunity to import upon me the meaning of this new lot in life. To do so you must initiate a nonverbal stance. This stance should convey your own delight with this meal of cheek, the very nourishment you are receiving from my severed me. Establish brutal, unwavering eye contact. Slowly chew a large piece of the cheek. Be sure to maintain a visual correspondence with me. If I appear overcome with the absence of my cheek (ie fainting) then you should simply prod the wounded side of my mouth with either a fork or knife; doing so will certainly jolt me to attention. Having renewed my attention, proceed to visually reinforce what you are eating. Slide chewed up portions of my cheek out of your mouth, as though you were sticking your own tongue out to tease. Lean towards my eyes and noisily chomp down on the cheek, be sure to not swallow right away. Instead, play with the cheek, smack your lips, roll it around in your mouth. If I seem both cognizant and distressed then you are succeeding in your nonverbal correspondence with me. Move to the other senses for further reinforcement. Place your mouth on my nose in the fashion of a suction cup. Breathe into my nose. There is no need to confirm that I am smelling the freshly seared cheek, as long as my eyes are open then I am certainly smelling it. Now the ears. Place your mouth beside either of my ears, perhaps the left as it is closer to the removal site and will aid me in connecting the stimulus with the recent cheek extraction. Chew noisily, mingling the blood of the cheek with your saliva to add a liquid like squelch to every chew. Chew voraciously, getting closer and closer to my ear. If so compelled, feel free to swab my inner ear with either your tongue or a portion of my cheek. Staining my ear with cheek juice or even just your spittle will create a nice streak that once dried will help trigger my memories of this very meal.

By now you will have finished the majority of the meal. Look to me to confirm if I am properly dazed yet mildly aware. Sop up the remaining bits of cheek with your accompanying grains. Pat me once more upon the back. Jolt my mouth hole once more in a sharp and conclusive fashion. Burp. Get up from the table and walk to the nearest bathroom in order to take a nice, rounded shit.

There's Something Afoot with this Whole Living

I've been reading about Roberto Clemente and Bruce Lee this morning. Two people whose bodies shaped their careers, their celebrity. But then they died. They vanished in their thirties. Bruce-32, Roberto-38. They died roughly a year apart. You could say that they were imported celebrities. They earned paychecks thanks to Americans. Roberto, an exceptional baseball player in most every dimension of the game. Bruce, the ultimate hybrid of martial arts master and film star. As I pull up their wikipedia and indulge in their chronicles, I look at the faces first. In their most famous photographs, both have an angled stare. Take a look:

Bruce's comes from a deadly stance, a pounce in waiting, that confident form revealed in his shirtless, muscle-bound body. He snickers, feints with his hands in eagerness, bounces on his feet. Roberto looks like a leader. His brow somewhat furrowed, reaching towards something unrealized, there's contemplation and doubt here, I feel like this kind of image is the template for the OBAMA HOPE posters that managed to subtly weave a narrative of racial accomplishment and progression in the striking firmness of a minority claiming their rightful place as leaders/shapers of a new reality. Roberto's proportions are beautiful, the flare of his nose, the curving of his lips, his balanced eyebrows and ears. Bruce's face doesn't want to be beautiful. The puffiness of his face suggests more muscles lurking underneath, as if his cheeks were as equally prepared to parry a blow as his forearms. His pursed lips are deadly, prepared; they've sized you up and a judgment has been cast, he knows how to mete it out and his closed lips to do not need to speak the finality of what he is about to do to you. I can't imagine having to bear to look at this face alone, to solely receive the fullness of it.

Roberto was dedicated to supporting the hardships of his people, Puerto Rican or otherwise. His people remain those who face hardships with action, with dedication. He died aboard a plane headed to bring supplies to people ravaged by an earthquake. He felt the need to go personally due to reports of misuse of goods that had previously been sent. He wanted to insure that those in need were able to get some support in their actual hands. Roberto's "charity" was no stunt, his involvement in the lives of others was an established choice throughout his professional career.

Bruce appears to have been more intensely involved in his own regiment, as well as his family. The intense regard he had for his body was proven in his mindset, he openly shared his philosophy of personal refinement, which required a life of dedication in diet, exercise, mentality, and action. He seems to have taken the mastery, the completeness of his existence as his most sacred rite. While it is certainly valid to call this into question considering his steady stream of television and film work, I believe the magnetism, the widespread identification with Lee came from something fundamental in the way he had shaped himself, the body and attitude he possessed. It inspired a certain kind of control/concentration, perhaps utterly masculine, but nonetheless, an energy was undeniably present in Lee. His bleak death, tied to the swelling of the brain, seems like an affront, or perhaps a vindication, to the physical specimen he truly was.

Athletic performance, especially the male-centric sports and combat side of it, seems to possess this insatiable taunting aspect, at least personally speaking. These people defy what you believe you are capable of with near disdain. While grief clearly surrounds the young young young deaths of both Roberto/Bruce, is there also a tinge of smugness? I would doubt with Roberto, considering the hero of good deeds he has been rightfully shaped as, but you know, the central element to both of these men was their bodily capabilities first and foremost. If they didn't have what it takes they would have been footnotes. Audiences have selective attention, you only get it if they understand you to deserve it. And that understanding is automatic, it's the sublime recognition of the gulf between you, the anonymous witness, and the celebrated performer. Everyone can experience degrees of success, but that fervent following, that establishment that some people can just become, through the forcefulness of their abilities, is something intoxicating. Humanity is most of all a social monstrosity: a constant barrage of communication, negotiation, sharing, performance, perspective after perspective. Those who receive near universal acclaim for some aspect of their being reveal a distillation of some feature of that very humanity, or so we think, and then, with its unruly jaws, that same quality of life, of breathing potential at all times, clamps down hard, obliterates what we once stood in awe of and it laughs, builds something new, and offers those alive something else to fawn over, get inspired by, and then maybe maybe grants you, the living, a chance to do you in front of someone else alive.

I love I love I love I love my little calendar

Rip through another day of the week. Insert it in the shredder and let the raccoon's teeth do their work. When you destroy a document with a shredder you are turning it into strands of spaghetti. I can open up the can, pour all those strands onto a nice nice ceramic plate and I can twirl them into something tasty. Look at everything that's happened in the last few hours, and I mean everything that happened just for you (you can't). I was sleeping, creating dream chunks. I was quietly shifting in a bed, all of me uncontrollable movement. Even awake I twitch. I fidget with breakfast. I rotate the wheels of a car, steer it someplace. I itch a pen onto the pad, I watch the striking gel of a pen streak solidify, stare back at me with a factual place in the world. But sometimes I get the chance to just shred all the paper with the ink. To abandon what was and to start anew, refresh the page like Kanye, click through the stream like I'm treading, looking for a foothold, a gap in the rocks I can shove my ankle into. Where I can be fastened, the water rushing past me, tightening the rock vice upon my ankle, the bone cleanly snapping, me floundering in joy.

(sings)
Ho dee hum, hee dum doe

Oh what to do? oh what?

There's a hole at the bottom of our guts
There's a hole at the bottom of our guts
There's a hole, there's a hole, there's a hole, there's a hole, there's a hole, there's a hole

(stop singing)

Come on summer! Come on you old dog, all laying on your side like, all panting! I need you up, need you foaming at the mouth! How else you gonna scare 'em all away! Come on you old dog you. Make me sweat when I get too close. You won't smell my hand, will you boy? Nah, you'll just snarl and foam some more. They want to hang a "Vacant" sign around your big old head, hang it off that loose furred head, that melon of yours laying in the dirt, like it got dropped from on high, like you got split all open, a whole mess of melon. I'm gonna call you Promethepup if you don't get up soon enough you dumb dog you! You bring the flame alright? You brought it before. We don't chain things up for that like they used to. Whatchoo waiting for? Vultures to come and rip you a new one? You damn dumb dog, I'm just standing here staring at the leash in my hand. It's as slack as you, you old fool. I'd kick you if I had the courage, but even at your worst I bet you got some spunk left, dontcha? I bet you wouldn't forgive me if my boot caught you, eh? You'd remember these boots alright, you'd come after 'em in the middle of summer and just tear 'em up. And there I'd be, shoeless, hopping through the hot tar of your summer streets, wailing and cursing your hotlicks. You miserable dog! I can see your eyes blink, your ears twitch when I'm talking to you. Now get on up. Go on, sink your teeth into me. Bite a big chunk out of me, anywhere you please. I need you, you horrible dog! I need that foam coming out of me. And then when it's all said and done, when you've bit right through me, when you've terrorized this town, made all the people cling to their porch banisters so hard they splinter themselves without even noticing, when you've shut the place up and made everyone thirsty enough to puke, well then you and I, we'll be together you ugly dog. We'll go pick a dusty street and just lay on down and wait for nothing much, wait for the panting to kick in like a dandy metronome. The kids will be too afraid to poke us. People will take other streets, longer ways. But first you got to get on up. I'm gonna stand over you summer dog until you do. I've got nothing better to do and that's fine with me. I can hear you breathing you dumb dog, there ain't no possum with me! You and me, we're in this together. This is all I got you see. Why if you don't get your damn self up, I'm gonna heft your mangy old body up and toss it into the nearest body of water I find. Bites and all dog! You hear!

Dream

I've retreated to google docs and article writing for the last month +++, but I thought I would share a free form reflection of last night's dream. Penned (keyed) this morning at work:

Dreaming about myself in a society in which I am part of a caste, a working class. That is to say: a group whose mental limitations are set, determined people who do a certain kind of work. This is sort of how the dream begins, with this knowledge that I am lesser, which makes sense considering I begin underground. There are several numbered subway like cars, it’s basically a metro station. Each platform has a large number above it. The subway trains themselves are unusual, very small, lacking a top, think a convertible mixed with one of those see-saw like railway carts from Historic Western US Trains, think bugs bunny. These little convertible like trains hold one person at a time. The person steps off the platform and onto the little cart, the cart zooms away. This whole boarding and zooming off to another station routine is quite the commotion. There are people everywhere, the little carts seem alive, quivering with energy, as though charging up, wiggling their butts before they pounce off down the rails. Everyone getting on the trains belongs to the same low grade worker class I belong to; we all appear to be wearing gray-ish jumpsuits, a blend between prison wear and the running jackets of the recently read Meeks. This is sort of when the dream starts to inhabit the Meeks themes, which I am unaware of until I wake. The rails that the carts ride upon aren’t really visible, instead they are like grooves of a moat filled with candy. Yes candy. The cart’s platform seems to hover above a river of candy, its wheels buried in the candy, perhaps driving along the bottom or just motoring through the candy channel. I approach the cart I know is designated for me, I seem to now recall that it is platform #10...maybe. As I board, I stare down at the candy surrounding the cart. I seem to lose my balance and my leg plunges into the candy. The texture of the candy is glistening, I am focusing on it. Cellophane style wrapping seems to cover most of what I see, transparent wrap revealing anonymous (i.e. brand-less), multicolored balls of hard candy flavor, or deep and bright wrapped up candies, bold colors like a general’s navy blue, Oz green, Sunny D yellow. You know. My leg sinks in and I am startled. The cart should burst off any second. I seem to get my leg out of the candy and right myself in time for the cart to take me where I need to go. I have no memory of the actual journey or my arrival in the place. Yet suddenly I am where I need to be. An old empty mansion. The kind of place that is faded in every way, where nothing appears dry; that is, everything resembles wetness, the air offering your breath the chunky taste of mold. I move through the rooms. This is my job, I sluggishly start to understand, to walk around the emptiness of our old civilization and to look for things, life, objects, just something to collect or even just to notice, to be there and to witness some inkling of the living past with my own eyes. That would be recording enough, that is what my society has assigned the lower class to do; become witnesses, memory-bearers. It is a strange feeling, I know this is the first time I have understood my function; I don’t seem that intrigued by the ramifications of this knowing and instead wander through room after room of this dreary place. I come into a bedroom. There is a man and a woman having sex on the bed, they are both naked. They appear to be ever so slightly Asian in their facial features. They are both fit and young. The woman has long black/brown hair. The sex is kind of missionary, the man is on top, but he is also holding the woman’s foot, fully stretching out her leg while he leans into her. I am sort of aroused, but at the same time, there isn’t anything amazingly vivid or erotic about these two. I almost feel like it is expected that I encounter this sex here in this mansion, I at least know these are the only two in here. They notice me. The man withdraws from the woman and looks right at me. He tells me that I can have sex with her if I like. He says something about them waiting here. He says something about her being ready to have sex with someone like me. What he means by someone like me is someone from my mentally inferior class. I make a few connections from this in the dream. I realize that these two are part of the society’s elite, privileged group, and I also realize that there are very few people left who are not considered part of my cart-hopping group, regardless these are the people I’ve been told to identify, these are the ones who told me to do it in the first place, maybe not these exact people, but they are part of the controlling group that built the carts, the candied river, the purpose behind the task that lead me here to this dingy house and room and to their fucking. They sort of seem amused with me, perhaps watching these connections furrowing all over my face. I don’t really know what happens after that. I may or may not have had sex with the woman, I don’t think I did...I know I didn’t want to, I know I felt disturbed by these people and what their being here indicated. I knew that finding theme was all there was to what I was doing, that was it, find them. My brain in the dream felt impossibly slumped, reduced to a trickle of thinking. I really did feel mentally inferior, fogged out. I don’t know where I ended up after that, I think I just drifted into the blankness of a dream ending, of sleep whiting out anything else there may have been to remember. As the distance from that blankness to waking consciousness closed, I could hear the faint scratching of Binky’s paw against the door of the bathroom, where I locked him in that night. It was one of the deeper sleeps I’ve had since living with the annoying cat.

The Thaw (Reclaim Your Miniature Public Sphere Young Writer)

When he awoke this morning he knew something had to give. To be honest, he felt really good, really composed. He had slept better than he cared to remember. No disorienting spill out of the bed, teetering on the hardwood floor as he tried to find the right footing, barely balancing forward in a stumble of lingering sleep wishes. No this morning he did it just right. He couldn't even grasp a single dream from that night's sinking. This was an oddity, a sign even. Usually his dreams would wrap around him like flickering corridors, pressing him into a narrow box. Think the mouse boxing the cats in Windows 95, Rodents Revenge, hankering for cheese that just gets replenished, holes that fill the room, a stomach that always ends up empty again. That's one way he may have summarized his dream remembrances. Tight corridors with black walls, chipped paint all over them, flaking off on him as they anaconda'd all the way around him. Elusive, but gripping, he would remember a dream like a tastebud trying to conjure what it was like when a single bite of something marched over it, and then plunged down the throat slide. His dreams were faint, and that disturbed him. He could related a few frayed odds and ends, but he would eventually have to just let it go. Let go of something that was always there, taunting him to remember it right, organize it correctly, as if there was some sort of sortable movement to a dream in the first place, as though it were some scrambled up letter with scraps of words surrounding the wastebasket. No, not this morning, this morning there was no dream to worry about. He tossed around in bed, treading through the sheets and mattress with a leisurely backstroke. The galfriend paced around with a quiet easing of floorboards, the dressing ritual, the readiness for work dance. He's unbelievably lucky to get to avoid this once a week, and still wind up with food on his plate. He smacked his lips with satisfaction of those nodreams, the no thing to worry about smack. He considered falling back to sleep, a trivial consideration, really just an affront to the fortunate lack of uncontrolled image. But the possibility of sleep soon vanished due to the insistence of a shit. It feels tremendous to have to shit this morning, he thought to himself. Instead of dreaming, his night turns had compounded a massive dump inside of him. It rolled up all of the temporal, edible possessions of the last x hours and offered itself up as a massive, memorable, perhaps more memorable than most eating, sort of shit. It felt like a tube, like he was pregnant with a tube, that connected his pelvic-anal region with his stomach, his intestines, his lungs. He quietly remarked to himself that it wasn't very often that one had the opportunity to admire how full of shit you are, and to understand it, to relish that it really was true, that you were utterly full of shit, and furthermore, that it was one concentrated entity. One novel tootsie roll that a kid would carry around a Sam's Club or Costco, like a piece of lumber, like a battering ram. He was still in bed, slowly rotating around, sizing up the internal dimensions, preparing to cork screw through this Thing (hey, it earned that T). He decided to dwell on yesterday's diet: three bowls of rice (white, sticky, grainy, the mortar) smothered in potatoes, thick fragrantly sweet onions, wide mushrooms that kept their distinct mushroom figure, and peas just for a sickening, swelled beads that pop in your mouth kind of twist. Imagine those popped peas streaking this titan of turd, like the psychedelic ground of a mud filled music fest where everyone must resort to more acid, more shrooms, more detachment. Good old peas. That was dinner, lunch happened too. Three pound fish burrito, go on and scale it. He dared himself to enjoy the sunshine of a lovely lunch breaks vis a vie a taco truck. No not a, he thought to himself with every steady bite of its luscious grilled white fish (oh ambiguity you haunt us, scorpion fish where are your pricks now??), cabbage, beans, a disturbing patchwork quilt of cheese, and more rice-mortar, no no not a truck, el camion is the, the end all. He imagines dragging wary relatives and innocents to this earthquake eruption of burrito, this fissure of the refried, he chuckles to himself on a park bench near the sun, mouth honking on that impossible tube of fish bliss, imagining him dragging people into an irresistible gouge in the culinary earth, where a mexican truck runs over your stomach's soul over and over again. This burrito defined the solidness, the singleness of his shit to be. Before that there was cereal, there was banana and orange. The murkiness of cow cream tempered by the erotic helplessness of banana and orange flesh, how can you not feel like you are fucking, like you are taking whatever comes your way, when you are peeling wide a fruit, when you are lapping up its juices, he remarks to himself. HOW? HOWWWW?

Enough, the poop made sense, sort of. He could run through its inspirations, its foundation, erection, and mystical completion. But only one sacred step could make it a reality here on this wet and wild earth. He rose from the bed, galfriend no longer in sight, no longer in smell for the horrors he was prepared to unleash upon the world of apartment 2. He did not need to stumble out of a dream and into a routine, he needed to brace himself for something that would shatter the mind of the birther. He needed to push, see, know, flush (smile).

This thaw for the public has now begun.