Places that Have Shaped My Ego
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The other day I came down with a bad fever; maybe the flu. I tried sleeping, big circles of thought, stuck in a loop of tyranny of the mind. Like Coltrane coming off of dope.
Then later on that day both my parents had left and I sat in their bathtub and I heard the 7:30 train whistle by my ear. It made me wish I was with my friend Cole along the tracks of gray gravel somewhere way up north. Like when me and my mom would travel up north. And big wooden terraces; rustic antiquated restaurants sat on hills. Above windy roads above white caps and the jagged California rocks. The rawness. Like the terraces and the restaurants, the built had succumbed to its environment. The Central Coast, somewhere that always drags me in. Maybe it drags everyone in from around here.
The sound of the train is that of deafened obsolescence. Not like the sound of the tea kettle that would snap you out of your ever so diminishing consciousness if falling asleep. It sounded numbed. Like it cried as it forced its way up to my house. Punctuating the distance of time like the note of the birds that sat on the fence outside of my room.
GRANDMA’S HOUSE
My grandma would make the same cookies and sometimes she also made lentil soup. And every Christmas we have crab. And you pick the crab apart and the dogs scurry under the table. Photos of a butler on the wall, comically sized. Knit bright blankets, chicness. White, pink, orange, anything but black. Her old house was dark and it was empty and it had a grand piano. I walked out to it once or stumbled when I was young. That house was like a trance. It had big golf courses, long driveways, white labs and grand pianos. One time I went in the hot tub with my mom. I was scared of the jets. TILES, orange colonial tiles separated by hacienda-like orange.
Adobe, all the houses were adobe and Spanish style.
SAND DOLLAR BEACH
Sand Dollar Beach is where I went with my dad one time. Criss-crossed I sat reading. Maybe I looked like some sort of mystic, because I brought the book everywhere. Uniformly cold like every other northern California beach. Sprinkled by misplacement.
Then the trees swayed like the silk on my moms dress. And the redwoods were angelic that night. They glowed. We were eating among them after a day at Sand Dollar Beach.
BORREGO SPRINGS
I went to the market in Borrego Springs and it was one to remember. My friend Taraak told me it reminded him of India. A place I longed to go. Layout of the market was suffocating. Rows of grayish meat, weird corners into open rooms. Like a gem of the eastern world in a former area of cattlemen and sheepherders. A Filipina woman maybe 30. She gave out senior discounts and scanned the grayish meat. Running off jitters, almost militant. And her daughter sat at the top of the ladder stocking the shelves. Listening to a self help podcast. That's why my friend said it reminded him of India. It felt like somewhere we weren't supposed to be. Outside of our plot structure. Maybe it was the slightly hostile local attitude of the residents (the ones who weren't tourists). The grayish meat would stare back at you and bewilder your belonging in the small sheltered town.
Then we biked over to a church and swung on the swings and playground next to it. It was desolate and the wind would shoot up between the cracks in the white picket fence between the graves. And the wind and the dust kept hitting when you came to the altar. Green and yellow oranges around the fence. The graves lay flat as Jesus and the sun watched over them. And the desert hills with yucca rest behind it. A scene. A fragment of time. Rows of desolation and wind rummaged through the town. Classically the desert.
The antique barn was two huge metal storage containers of impermanence and transience. It was run by veterans and it lies right next to the church. It was Memorial Day that day we went to the antique barn. And we sat and watched as an aged man with a visor sat on a lawn chair and cried into his knees. His wife rubbed his back.
Feral dogs playing in Quito, Ecuador, Town Square. This photo was taken in Quito Town Square in front of the Carondelet Palace (c.1570), the official residence of the President of Ecuador. The man, oblivious to the dogs playing behind him, told me he was waiting for a friend. He said he meets his friends weekly at that exact place to discuss politics.
QUITO, ECUADOR
And there was Quito, Ecuador, which was poverty grazed with remnants of colonialism. And the houses breathed and sat as they waited for the men to return from the array of randomness and capital which consisted of every street corner. The mountains also watched. Electronic repair shops, guinea pigs spinning, and steamed vegetables. An old man with a paper boy hat smoked a cigarette and read a political magazine. After every drag he'd pop in a tiny mint
and have a sip of tea. He sat there calmly and unaware of the two mangy dogs that played aggressively in the patched dirt and grass behind him. And in the middle of that square a Japanese cherry blossom tree sat. It sat in the middle of unkempt grass and dark concrete and smooth gridded gray blocks of street. At midday a light would beam down. A constant fluidity. And the kids that bit at your ankle to buy one of their bracelets or paintings would walk home to the breathing sheds. And they would eat plantains and meat off of plastic plates. Before returning to the chaos, to the cathedrals with millions worth of gold and the beggars and the natives and the whites. And the suffering and the awe.
Then one day I got lost in the dreariness in the town of Banos. There you will capture random moments of home. Like an American woman in her mid 20s sitting on a street corner backpacking and waiting. And at the deep corners of the hip bars they unraveled like they always wanted to in midwestern America.
It all evoked the essence of someone who used to be here. Like the white affluent threads that sometimes pop into your peripheral. They were beams of threads that spread across the stifling overcrowdedness of the city. A deviation from the normal function of the eye.
