Sole, pad, sole, pad, pit patter, pit patter along the
pavement.
My walk to work.
The same three streets, today the
addition of two alleys, the fastest route if I’m late.
Sometimes I long for my calves to burn
because of the intense incline of the road.
Sometimes I dream about the out of control sensation you get
when your body can’t keep up with your legs because of the downward slope and your
intense high from the fear of falling.
It feels as if the stage where I stand and play my life has no elevation
in sight.
I look over the mesa
trying to connect the synapses with dendrites but there are no boulders, no
tornados of relationships, no crushing career moments, no joyous moment with
friends, no glimpse of anything.
Flat like the chopsticks I lay down on the tables.
Flat like the wooden floor my mattress
lays upon.
There is a picture in
the restaurant of The Great Wall that their son took.
The Wall looks long and hard and twisted.
I dream of that picture sometimes and I wake up panting.
Does someone come and tell you when the
time has come that today is the today where life is now classified as
officially average?
Somewhere in
the file cabinets of whoever is keeping track of the
state
of souls, will lay my file, stuck in between lawyers of innocent men
wrongly accused and twelve time marathon runners,
File: SK 1991-2080 Life: Average Classification: Middle
I open the door to the restaurant
to Mrs. Yio tap, tap, tapping her watch with her bony finger; her eyes teary
from chopping onions. A few
strands of silvery gray hair run wild across her forehead, while others are
tight to her head with sweat. The
surrounding skin around her eyes is wrinkled but the black yeux are deep with
stories. I nod in remorse as I hang my coat and I do feel sorry. She hustles me extra hard all morning,
making me do double the work.
Later she rubs her finger along my ear as she swiftly walks by on her
way into the kitchen, most likely to yell at one of the chefs for not putting
enough sesame seed on the chicken feet.
That’s her way of saying she forgives you, and when I go to leave I find
a to go container of pork fried rice.
I don’t hate the Yios as much as I would like to. In fact, this pinhole in the wall of an
establishment has started to become the only place I feel comfortable and the
people inside my only friends.
I see Chenzo outside walking
bitterly with a dark whiskey bottle in hand.
He takes swigs in between telling me chopped stories of his
last few days.
He hadn’t come into
the restaurant and missed the first Thursday there in nearly a year.
To my surprise, I was actually
worried.
He asks if I want to go
Mellow Mushroom, a little Italian place
down the street that serves calzones with cheese oozing out
They let him sit there after hours and
he says he needs to talk so I agree.
When we sit he fumbles through his pocket and slides me a bunch of pages
that look as though they’ve been ripped from a library book titled,
A Thousand Plateaus-Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.
I’ve never heard of the authors but he says I should read it.
The garlic knots Chenzo orders come to
the table warm with steaming marinara sauce in a paper cup next to them.
I listen to Chenzo talk of his sister’s
illness as he swirls the knots in the red sauce ignoring the fact that it is
getting all over his fingers and under his nails.
of them.
Cheese stretches from my mouth to the counter as I watch a
waitress and her boyfriend share a pepperoni, giggling and brushing each
other’s hipbones under the table.
The guy tossing dough behind the counter has an
I’m-always-going-to-work-at-a-pizza-shop goatee.
I
crawl onto the padded mattress and flash my phone light on the pages Chenzo
gave me. I can’t help but wonder
if I come off as a little schizo, trying to figure out the reasoning behind him
giving me the pages. I wake to my
face stuck with sleep to one of the pages; my limbs sprawled awkwardly around
the bed. The page comes off easily and my blurry eyes come into focus on lines
Chenzo must have underlined with a pen he took from the receptionist.
“A plateau is always in the middle,
not at the beginning or the end. A
rhizome is made of plateaus. –Greg
Bateson
“The middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it
is where things pick up speed.”
There is a man that sits on the
crooked corner two blocks from my apartment, I’ve walked past him for a
fortnight, his eyes peering at peculiar trash, while I tap my worn sneakers
against the sidewalk, counting tips frenetically or staring into the
night. Two nights ago for the
first time, I saw him wearing a green tie instead of his usual dark
violet. I wondered where he got
it. I wondered what means it took
him to get it. I admired him as I
looked downward maybe even inward at myself and it suddenly felt different. The doorknob turned cleaner, my bed
warmer, the sun against the black road shined brighter into my eyes, burning
exquisitely as I walked down the street. 
The road feels good and rough; my
strides are strong as I walk home.
There is something about these streets that has gotten into me. Deep in my veins there is something
flowing now, flowing for the addictive energy I’ve found ever since the green
tie. I miss the places I’ve been
and the feelings I’ve felt, but I’m getting used to this feeling. The one I felt when I opened the door
panting, late due to a subway accident on fifth, tributaries flowing from my
watering hole temples, to find a pitcher of the most refreshing Chinese Ginseng
tea I’ve ever tasted laying on the table cloth one of the kid bus boys must
have done for me when he saw I wasn’t there. The same feeling that came when Vincenchi and the four other
people I walked on eggshells with for two months cooked beef stew with all the
food we could scrap together. It
was so good and someone made a joke almost everyone understood. 
