Day Forty-Six

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.”