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| I'm sorry. I thought that distance was death and forgot that we were both still alive. I thought that those screams and squeals of televisions and stereos were a child's old nightmares. All these cracks in someone else's bathroom mittor and fists pounding on painted walls shaking broken picture frames echo with the doos we slammed in the might. I know your eyes were still there because I've seen them in a thousand faces and I've heard your mother's voice in ever lesson I learned to forget. I'm sorry because we reinvented family and it doesn't have any prefixes or hyphens. | Timothy Logan Carter
262 East Rienstra
Four or Five Years Ago |
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| Begun October 6, 2004 at #130. Italicized titles denote favorites and recommended readings.
154. Dave Eggers - How We Are Hungry
153. David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas
152. Haruki Murakami - Dance Dance Dance
151. George Saunders - Pastoralia
150. Denis Johnson - The Stars at Noon
149. Jonathan Lethem - Men and Cartoons
148. Dave Eggers - You Shall Know Our Velocity
147. William S. Burroughs - Junky
146. Raymond Carver - What We Talk about When We Talk about Love
145. Davy Rothbart - The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas
144. Tom Wolfe - The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
143. Jonathan Lethem - The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye: Stories
142. Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse Five
141. Charles Bukowski - The Most Beautiful Woman in Town & Other Stories
140. Langston Hughes - Short Stories
139. Mark Haddon - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
138. Joseph Heath, Andrew Potter - Nation of Rebels
137. Ray Loriga - Tokyo Doesn't Love Us Anymore
136. Jonathan Lethem - As She Climbed Across the Table
135. Jack Kerouac - On the Road
134. Bret Easton Ellis - The Informers
133. Denis Johnson - Resuscitation of a Hanged Man
132. Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49
131. Jeffery Deaver - The Blue Nowhere
130. Nick Toches - Cut Numbers
129. Don Delillo - Mao II
128. Denis Johnson - The Name of the World
127. Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
126. Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle
125. Nick Toches - In the Hand of Dante
124. DBC Pierre - Vernon God Little
123. Denis Johnson - Angels
122. Tobias Wolff - The Night in Question
121. Denis Johnson - Already Dead
120. Junot Díaz - Drown
119. Isaac Asimov - The Gods Themselves
118. Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
117. Chuck Palanhiuk - Stranger than Fiction
116. Koushun Takami - Battle Royale
115. Dan Brown - The DaVinci Code
114. T. C. Boyle - Drop City
113. Colson Whitehead - John Henry Days
112. Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude: a Novel
111. William Gibson - Neuromancer
110. Thom Jones - Cold Snap
109. Thom Jones - The Pugilist at Rest
108. Tim LaHaye & Jerry Jenkins - Glorious Appearing
107. Thom Jones - Sonny Liston was a Friend of Mine
106. Ken Kesey - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
105. Christopher Moore - Lamb
104. Isaac Asimov - Through the Eons
103. F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
102. Denis Johnson - Jesus' Son
101. Craig Clevenger - The Contortionist's Handbook
100. Clifford Pickover - The Paradox of God and the Science of Omniscience
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| And so a day about the house. Microwaving Grandma's left-overs for lunch, watching the history channel, folding laundry, and not reading my book. Tomorrow is so far away that I won't even think about work for another five hours, when it's about time to get ready for sleep. I can't bring my self to do any thing. | | |
| One morning after Mexico and my head still hums with a third world sympathy. I did my best to spread the wealth and happiness: sharing taxis, paying for Juan's tecate, returning an old beer bottle to buy Alejandra and her son some cookies, playing (and losing admirably) a game of chess with my father's landlord and such. I ran across the traffic trying to get back into the US on my way to the border crossing for pedestrians, got into my car and drove home without once touching an unpaved road. America the Beautiful.
Without any means of immediate contact with my father in case anything unexpected should occur I told him that I would wait for him on the US side at the Jack in the Box nearest the border. Once there I ordered a small drink, filled the cup with some ice and strawberry soda and waited. I finished my drink and waited some more. I chomped on the remaining ice cubes in my drink and continued to wait. I refilled my cup with Dr. Pepper and looked at the clock on my phone; I had waited for over half an hour, going on forty five minutes. I decided that if my father were not to show in an hour I would be going home. I watched the people come and eat and go and come and eat and go; I even noticed some of the patrons were also waiting for people, turning around every time the door opened just as I did. They all left before I did.
Soon enough a thinner, sweatier, smaller version of my father put his hand on my shoulder. He explained that the long wait was due to his lack of money, which meant that he had to take the burro (bus) from his mansion on the hills to Revolución and then hump it all the way across the border. He was just getting over a week long illness, which explained his poor state; laborers have a harder time than most working through an illness and an even harder time setting aside money for those times. Even though the decision to relocate to a forgien country in the first place was the idea that the lower cost of living would allow him to save money I didn't feel bad for the man, some times one cannot help but excuse the behavior his own father. We walked into Mexico.
Leading the way, my father proudly darted around corners and up stairs and down stairs and over bridges and around poor people and through crowds, and between tourists, stopping along the way to point out various places of interest (the Wax Museum of Tijuana, where my great-great grandmother once lived, the street corner where every mariachi band in all of Tijuana waited). At one point he asked if I had any smaller bills, saying that once we got into the country where he lived that the exchange rate would favor using pesos instead of American money, so we approached a five foot wide store in a row of buildings, little more than a glorified telephone booth with a desk, on which sat a calculator and two boxes of money, and I made ten dollars into something like one hundred eight pesos. My new found wealth was soon diminished after my father had me buy him a pack of Marlboro Milds (for about half the price one would pay were he one mile North) and catch the taxi to his apartment.
Though not a city of skyscrapers or great renown, Tijuana is just as large as any metropolis. From the back seat of the station wagon (taxi) we bounced around Centro, got on the road out of town, turned left into the hills over looking Playas and snaked our way through a maze of homes that could topple in a strong wind. The taxi's final stop on its route happens to be just a block (if there really is such a distinction in Mexico) from where my father lives. I kicked a rock down the dirt road leading to a freshly built apartment complex, shining conspicuously in the sun's last light amidst so many shacks. Dirty children played fútbol in the street leading to my father's house and one of them happened to be the son of my father's girlfriend. The girlfriend was waiting inside the first apartment, which my dad had been helping finish before coming to meet me in America. My father and the landlord were putting the final touches on the small, one room, apartment, installing the countertops on the bar and sink. As they huddled down to fasted screws and check the level I noticed a slight quirk seldom, if ever, seen in American buildings: the wall facing the street and its adjacent met at an angle obviously greater than ninety.
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The thought that popped into my head when I first saw this incredible photo was, "next time you're overcome with delusions of badassitude, remember this and say -- no you are not tough. This is tough." | | | |
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