Sex, Trash, Candy

by Connor M, posted in Uncategorized

Watch a beautiful person doing something mundane. That is how humans fall in love with somebody, even temporarily. Music is the bridge, making those micro-enamorements stick.

The Tapas place in West Nashville is playing their dinner soundtrack, the Hermanos Gutierrez. They’re a Mexican slide guitar duo; sun drenched, wistful melodies that resolve with a small upturn, then fade like they’re walking down railroad tracks. The moment I heard them was the moment I knew there wouldn’t be any more tapas served without them as the soundtrack. The canvas swishing around wine glasses, noses, ears.

They’re lifting up the olive oil sheen, small candles, the tinkering silverware and hushed conversations. The patio breeze understands the assignment as the guitar melodies slide off the ceramic plates and out into the street.

You notice a beautiful woman eating tapas, listening to the Brothers, your brain circuitry is going to make the leap. It’s going to imprint that dripping cool beauty onto her silhouette from the other side of the dining room. She bites, covers her mouth, smiles at something her friend said.

She has dark hair in a tight bun, a few strands framing her high cheekbones, a little birth mark just above her lip. She is the set and setting, without having any idea how the sound’s mirage is bending around her, distorting reality.

I once watched a cook dragging out a fat bag of trash after a shift, hunched like a criminal, cigarette on his lips. It was also the first time I heard “Sex and Candy” by Marcy Playground. The heroine-drawled chorus snapped “I smell sex and can…” right as his oversized black feet clomped by me and he exhaled a puff of smoke. I conceded he was the coolest motherfucker on the planet for that millisecond of time. I had no choice.

It’s almost unfair how that works, how we don’t choose it or see it coming. Powerful songs are micro-time capsules into people’s psyches, stacked throughout life. Whatever they rode in on, the traumas, hopes, sex, candy, all come firing back. And if it’s the first time hearing it, it’s that liminal experience of seeing nostalgia form in real time. That woman became a tableau vivant.

The Hermanos Gutierrez were recording in some far-off studio, hands adorned with rings. They adjust the lap steel, pick at calloused fingers, hit record again and transmit directly to upscale dining rooms nationwide. The Marcy Playground found a melody over 3 chords, a perfect analog pool to splash around in. The temporal red carpet rolled out for junkies and cooks and pixie girlfriends to be immortalized in a million different minds for 10 precious seconds.

People’s faces are taking on impossible dimensions as the candle shadows grow taller, the waiters bend around tables without a sound. The wine grows a shade darker as the sun glints off the glass, refracting into my eyes.

Everyone else is locked in their experience, oblivious. I’m grateful.

A wink at the intersection

by Connor M, posted in City, People, Philosophical woo

Bringgg, bringgg, on the cot beside me. Like a little bird trapped in the sheets. A banner across the top of my phone “Malaria Meds”.

She looked up briefly, disinterested, professional, and carried on.

I giggled, only I knew the absurdity.

A little intersection of two parts of my brain, high-fiving in the red-light district alley. The horny, fresh haircut traveler finally giving in and the recreational germaphobe fresh from exploring un-sanitized regions of the world.

I’d gotten all my shots before Africa. Typhoid, Diphtheria-Tetanus, give me a lollipop. Careful with malaria, take Malarone daily, and seven days after you leave. I was by then several days past that window.

She keeps going, I look around the room at the low lights, feel the heavily scented air. Fiddle with the phone volume briefly.

Health abroad is one of my forever vigilances. The first mis-timed sneeze and I’m at the corner pharmacy. Paying a grinning doctor way too much to give me a Z-pac and send me back to the dusty streets.

Bringg, Bringgg. I grab the phone, finally silence it. Exhale.

She looks up at me, “Don’t worry, I’ll make sure you finish.” Maybe she thought it was my wife? Or the cosmos was randomly chiming in to wrap up this unsavory encounter?

I had strolled the Red-Light district a few times, a couple 50 euro notes burning holes in my pocket. Got back to the train car hostel, pop my pill, wondering when I was going to slip behind a curtain.

The two currents weaving through each other, health freak, horny guy, shadow selves in the forest. Never noticing each other until they were face to face.

Oh hey. They shake hands. My Id family reunion at the brothel.

We’re always at the intersection of some neuroses, fantasies, laundry.

Adrift in a Pacific garbage patch of junk food and overstimulation, or riding a swift current trying to keep a newborn alive, ignoring every other force for the moment.

The more you push one down the weirder places they pop up.

I’d googled all the rigorous health protocols that prostitutes undergo there, felt reassured. I made some loops, found different alleys.

The red glints on the cobblestones, foggy air, laughs of the high British tourists stumbling around with Heinekens. Churches from 1640, austere, having to look down at the oldest human desires they couldn’t wash away.

Eventually, I caught the eye of the most animated lady: big fake tits, easy smile and laugh, warm eyes. I felt like she cared. Rapport matters, in any business.

I walked in and she closed the curtain, triaged me like a field medic. Faint conversations of passersby in the alley.

“It’s more to touch,” she said, watching my eyes drift.

Now the phone reminder’s off, but the alarm echoed in my head.

I didn’t have a reminder that told me to go to a bar and try to chat up a cute traveler, or one in the busy hostel.

No alarm that said chill the fuck out you’re not going to get malaria 2 weeks after from a mosquito that got stuck in your carry-on.

Just these stale pathways rooted in me, twisted by loneliness, travel fatigue, adrift with my own paranoias, crossing paths.

What current pulls you? How many secrets up your sleeve don’t make it past the grocery line conversation.

Get a note that grandma is in the hospital while you’re chuffing up a mountain feeling alive.

Think you’re writing a novel in a coffee shop but you’re really just aura flirting with the girl in yoga pants. Wallowing in self-pity at a drive thru when the cashier with the Chia Pet hairline asks how your day is, and you stop to actually take a look.

Riding one wave until another knocks you back to center.

Horny/hypochondria. Odd bedfellows. They briefly winked at each other as I sat in that brothel. You realize how absurd you are right, Guy? See you soon.

Use the Sauces

by Connor M, posted in Uncategorized

Historically, I’m a get me enough food to survive kind of guy. I find the healthiest, most filling meal that requires the least amount of brain power. I’m too large to consider cute recipes and garnishes.

 Imagine going to the store and buying cilantro? There’s a war in Ukraine, the economy is teetering, and last year the president was almost assassinated. People are getting this garnish solely to put on their eggs? What the fuck.

There are 25 deviating thoughts and parallel universes between my initial desire and the moment I delicately place the cilantro across my eggs. Perhaps I don’t understand the satisfaction.

I am basic in the learned caveman sense, not the cheeseboard and sugary coffees sense.

I think Instagram is to blame for all the food pleasantries taking precedent in our nuanced lives. Aesthetic is Everything.

People buy cilantro. They do the cutesy sauces that require 20 minutes of prep. Then they eat and savor by a window with their sweet little knees tucked under their delicious rump. Yum.

I make plain eggs with salt, drink black coffee. Stretch my back. At night I cook up some vegetables and rice, pull rotisserie chicken off the bone like a Mongolian plainsman. Every once in a blue moon I’ll make a sauce.

It’s me just sassily dabbing in ingredients and tasting. It’s the fumes, the aesthetic wafting around me, umami! I have no idea what that means. I’d never be not hungry enough to stop and learn what umami means.

I wouldn’t go through an extra hour or prep work so I could sit tuck legged, take a pic, savor my food looking out the window. With my plants around. They’re indoor plants, watching outdoor plants, and also watching me eat with wilting jealousy.

I never used sauces; I found the most efficient way to feed myself when I was hungry. What is eating for? I’m a big fucking guy.

But there is value in using enough sauce. Using a variety. Throwing a sprinkle of cheese on top? Fuck me. I’ve only just begun this odyssey. Seeing the pleasureful experience in my mouth as important as the perfunctory task of feeding myself. Like a casual handjob while watching a mediocre movie. There is some intrigue, some spice to break up a mundane task.

Maybe I’m growing up. Or evolving. Salsa, a little cholula, avocado and cheese on my eggs makes me wake up like a deposed Mexican King. Or a surfer with a beautiful girlfriend.

4 eggs boiled, salt, I am a Soviet soldier. I am in the trenches of feeding, pooping, and sleeping. I am simply putting the sustenance in to fight another day, and my body responds in turn with tumultuous, military trumpets of gas. Slug my coffee, slam down those fucking eggs. I’ve told my body we are at war when we are simply sitting down to work from home.

I will start using enough sauce. I will not shy away from tickling my senses to remind myself that beauty can enter all my orifices. I will be here to greet it. Like savoring great sex, or a swim in a cold pond, or a bass line that sends tingles down your spine. Give your body messages that this corporeal slog is worth it. Let the caveman play with the fire. Use the sauces.

This Pig Will Ride

by Connor M, posted in Coast, Uncategorized

 I’m sitting in an air conditioned room of white and wood and concrete. Mid day and the jungle is beckoning to come in.

It’s been a lonely 4 days in Nicaragua. Wake up, check surf, maybe surf. Sit and read. Sit in AC. Get up and pee and start sweating and go back to AC. Scooter around for a bit. Walk the beach hoping to catch eyes with the beautiful German girl with the impossible figure. I first saw her and her friend having a very serious sounding conversation over corn and beans at a hostel restaurant.

Much of the world here is sun scorched, mangled, wrinkled, crushed plastic bottles on the highway. On the shoreline you see  her light blue eyes,  and perfect pale moon butt with thong riding right up it. The image cuts through the scenery like it should never have been here.

I’ve surfed 2.5 days. Today I ran in without thinking and got caught in a minor rip current.

I spent 15 minutes trying to zig-zag paddle in staying completely stationary until I decided to angle towards the rock where the current was weaker.

I looked to the shore and saw a surf instructor in his chair who couldn’t have given less of a shit. I waved a couple of times and pointed as if to ask where to go, panting and arms going numb. He looked straight ahead.

The guy who rented me the board today had pink eye from eating too much concha.

He seemed spiritually disturbed and  couldn’t sit still, so he decided he would go out and surf too, to cleanse his soul. Quickly leaving me to get my board ready.

Surf guys never like me at first. The random vacation gringo hate is palpable.

I’m tall, thickish, bearded. These are little shrimplets with shaggy hair and blackened tans smoking weed, watching YouTube, occasionally giving lessons to white girls on foamies.

The girls love them and I’m a bit jealous.

But they never like me. My first day I showed up to beginners bay full of coffee and eggs. I watched those little peelers in the early morning light and the colorful surfers already bobbing in the waves.

I put on my zinc sunscreen and asked if there was a bathroom. It’s a small bay with a couple surf shacks, I figured there might be one.  I told him I had to shit, he pointed me to a well with an enormous iguana hanging on the side. I  asked another girl who said there aren’t any. As the knot dug deeper in my stomach  I had to rush back home to not shit my pants.

When I got back somebody called me cerdo, “pig”.  I could hear the snickering.

They always come around. I’ll fuck up something, make a joke. Speak pretty good Spanish and ask slightly above  basic bitch questions. Then I’m in. It’s happened before.

In Ecuador I noodled on their little rusty guitar, and they showed me a riff. Then we played volleyball, and he gave me a haircut.

In Costa Rica my Spanish was lacking so it was mostly just sitting on the wood and nodding when it seemed appropriate. One guy said I had good style,  he would be watching me.

The non-auspicious start is a given. Nearly shitting myself scrambling around in face paint while they laid in hammocks.  But it only takes one good joke to see that little glimmer. They realize there is depth.

 However, when I was watching the waves, The pink eye guy pushed me aside and put a bucket where I was standing, signifying he wanted to do pull ups on the branch above me. I moved over, he huffed and just kept walking towards the ocean. I don’t think there was any winning him over in his state.

Other than him, I make slow inroads until they love the cerdo.


Post shit, I paddled out and caught two little peeling shoulders to  get back in the spirit.  Feel the world of ocean creep up and thrust my board. With that thrust I push down and rise up into the green, listening to the crash behind and around me as I trail off and turn. That indefinite moment of glide that feels so epic. From the shore it looks like a pig rolling down a little hill.

That short glide, and fall, and return to the sea. I flailed about, I was accepted, I was spit out in the white wash. I got back on my board  and joined the carousel again. This pig will ride.

Choose your American Dream

by Connor M, posted in People, Philosophical woo

It’s 9:58 pm Saturday night at a restaurant in downtown Nashville. The restaurant closes at 10:00 pm. A couple walks in wearing Savannah Bananas gear (the comedy baseball team). The lady is a tiny pixie haired shrew, and the man looks somewhere in the middle of Jabba the Hut and the Mucinex man. His poor knees buckle as he shuffles his belly to sit like a pregnant mother. I, the waiter, run over and tell them the kitchen closes in 2 minutes, so we’ll need to get their order as soon as possible.

This brings the dirtiest look I’ve ever seen from the man who complains to my manager he’s being rushed. She offers a free dessert and an eye roll when she walks away.

Instead of getting ready to close, the servers groan as the man settles in, drinking his sprite with diabetic fingers and a knowing grin.

Meanwhile, in the open-air kitchen 30 feet away from sloth and gluttony another drama is unfolding. There have been recent Immigration raids in the area, ICE is stopping foreign looking people at random and asking for papers. There had been 100 arrests, many already on the road to deportation. Panic is setting in amongst the undocumented kitchen staff.

This had been escalating for a few days. They’d been carpooling with white people, sneaking in through back doors. South Nashville (majority Latino) was a ghost town. All the recreational spaces were shut down, no more football, dance clubs, pop up celebrations. Just eerie silence and waiting. Word reached us that ICE was two streets away doing stops.

In the back of the kitchen was a mother and her son, a middle-aged woman from Guatemala, and 3 cooks in their 20’s, all with families. The sous chef paces back and forth to the front window looking out at any passing police cars. His eyes are welling with tears but he’s holding them back. A stoic leader is vital right now.

You can feel the silent terror just sitting on them like a blanket. They’ll be ready to run out the back door any minute. These people are working 14-hour days, living with 6 others in a house. The chef hasn’t seen his family from home in ten years. They risked their lives to get here to just scrape by and sacrifice so their kids might have a chance.

Out front, Jabba is eating his pizza thoughtfully. He considers the crust, shuffles his gut forward, asks for more ice and another sprite please. His casual tone broadcasting his inalienable right to comfort and relaxation. He side-eyes the chef when he comes up to look out the window. They’re the last table in an empty restaurant, still ordering food.

The front of house is standing there with eye daggers pointed at him.

The man had come from a comedy baseball game, the purest American form of leisure and absurdity. He came in entitled and ready to sit for as long as his bloated legs would hold him, savoring the opportunity to punish us for rushing him.

The 14-year-old dishwasher in the back, weighing all of 90 pounds is eating scraps, checking his mom’s phone. It took weeks for him to make eye contact, just the occasional wry smile. His worst fears were confirmed when his cousin was arrested last week. He and his mom took a few days to hide in their house. Now they can’t leave with customers here, can’t go outside while police lights blaze across the windows.

The Irony of the American dream playing out with vivid contrast. An entitled beast coming from a baseball game, not a care in the world. Eating himself to death because he’s allowed. A kitchen full of people working 60-hour weeks for minimum wage, clinging to each other in fear they’ll have their life swept away any moment.

Labored breath from both parties, 30 feet away from each other. Ask them what they think they deserve?

Truth in Dark Places (nsfw, safe for thought)

by Connor M, posted in Philosophical woo, Uncategorized

I had a comedy bit but I don’t have the stage presence to deliver it, so I’ll write it instead.

I noticed that when I used to watch porn, I wasn’t consuming it in the way they warn you about. I wasn’t watching increasingly sadistic, unrealistic fantasy stuff. There were no tentacles, orgies, no buffering anime tits. The reports of men going soft with their Wendy’s cook girlfriend because they’re using VR porn to bang 3 hookers in a hot tub in Cancun. That’s not me.

I found myself deep in the libraries of Pornhub scraping for scenarios that had just enough credibility to be real in my life. In some horrible alternate timeline, I could find myself in this exact POV (point-of-view) situation, living out this depravity for an inkling of sexual gratification.

I wanted post nut clarity like Joseph Smith discovering a shameful new religion. I wanted a life reckoning, the smells and sights and regret boners truly felt and earned.

One video stands out as a lighthouse in the dark. I found it some pages along the Pornhub shuffle. It’s grainy from the start. It opens with a neon PowerPoint message scrolling down the page, like Star Wars for the less fortunate.

“I went to help my mom’s friend …

wearing grey sweat pants…

she couldn’t resist”

Cut to:

Someone holding a phone aimed at a pale skinny stomach, recording down towards a tumbleweed. Looking up at the viewer is a woman of some 60 years.

You can see Fox News in the back, a dog wandering around. The cigarette smell has surely settled onto the clothes haphazardly falling out of the numerous dressers. Her papyrus skin glints in the camera light.

I watch this ready for my form of escapism, I want it to feel so grossly real that my body reacts.

————-

So, I create a scene in my head: I was working at a restaurant late with my older coworker. She has a fun personality and we flirt casually.

Her Corolla has been acting up recently, could I give her a ride home?

I hesitate but say sure why not. We make awkward talk on the way, when we arrive at her house she asks, “Want to stop in for a beer? I owe you one.”

And we have the set up my friends.

————-

We have the front lobe calculations that put me in sweatpants on that poorly fitted bed sheet.

I have to be able to see myself in the scenario, but more importantly, I have to be able to see the part of myself that is dark enough to go there. Porn as escapism must acknowledge our humanity, not rise above it into an unrecognizable fantasy realm. It’s the dirty “what-ifs” that simmer underneath and ache to be tapped.

In the near future, when nobody can get it up, there will still be those in the trenches seeking gritty realism.  

There will always be the frontiersmen finding sideways videos from hotel rooms, backs of cars, or rent controlled houses. The sex was so real and urgent and kinda gross that it had to happen. People living on the precipice of demise, rushing to act before their brain catches up with them. That’s how we got here.

Maybe we’ll pay more for that in the future, to get back to reality. AI is conditioning us to live in this false reality and seek things that we’ll never actually see; create images of ourselves and storylines that barely scratch the real. Are you really a sex god satisfying these single women in your area, or are you a pirate radio freak fucking before your body falls apart and your judgment kicks in? The ugliness, the futility, and living on the edge of ruin that’s required to feel fully alive sometimes. Slugging down the Oregon trail, haunting scratched home VHS that have gathered dust; masturbating regally, while the violinist plays and the ship sinks.

Did Cavemen write “You are enough” on the wall?

by Connor M, posted in Philosophical woo, Uncategorized

Did cavemen kill themselves or did writing really set that off? Being useful for a brief time was much more important than being meh for a long time.

Once vocabulary and writing and pictures from across the seas showed beautiful women and paradises you could never acquire, existential pangs had more bite.

Envy was only supposed to exist within arm’s reach, so you could aspire to it in the immediate. Now it’s largely on a screen.

Did cavemen have to write on the wall “You are enough”? or did they just get killed if they weren’t? Survival of the fittest is now survival of the fantasist, able to imagine you matter in the vast realm of modern society. Able to either tune out or create a reality that is sufficiently barricaded against your own inadequacies.

Nature does help. A long hike makes thoughts hit more like a breeze than a truck thudding into a wall. Getting out of the country, or into smaller places helps. In the city seeing a beautiful happy couple makes you want to kill yourself, bing boom, action reaction. But in nature the tranquility slows the instant gratification mind that craves answers. In nature, internal inadequacy and failure grows like moss so it can be observed, a natural arc of life and death.

I’ve had chances to let my thoughts mature in quiet places, both beautiful idea trees and dogshit saplings.  I sat in the jungle in Peru with no cell service for a few weeks. The heat seared my brain. My envy/inadequacy meter reset to my group of fellow travelers and the indigenous Machiguenga living off the grid supporting us.

Do they think about killing themselves? Does their envy get bottled into small village status wars- biggest fish, fastest boat, same race different track?

They see these travelers come in with loads of money and a lifetime of experiences, but those little seeds of despair aren’t planted. They watch us struggle with the heat and mosquitos and insects the size of our feet and just giggle. The immediacy outweighs the wide world they can’t really know. Our Instagram feeds don’t mean anything when you’re shitting in an outhouse and a moth lands on your face.

But even with their minimalist life, they still huddle into the one cell service spot to watch Tiktok as their eyes glaze over. I hope they can keep the envy within arm’s reach, like our ancestors did, tied to things they can touch, smell and fight for. Work out to look like your older uncle. Have the balls to ask out your neighbor, build her a house. Don’t check your feed.

No stupid questions

by Connor M, posted in People, Uncategorized

We get a day of full, complete, unrestricted questions. There are no faux pas on _____. No hate speech, no prying questions, no manners that are too uncouth.

Two men walk into the coffee shop. Their perfect beard lines, slightly upturned chin, light prance. Excuse me sir, I have to ask..

“Why do I always see a gay couple and try to suss out who is the bottom? Is there always a bottom? Is it a perfect representation of power balance in the world when two men can fluctuate between receiving and giving cock? The purest form of sex. Completely devoid of reproductive purposes, and solely for pleasure, is butt sex between two men, right? Hear me out.

No woman can know the feeling of penetrating an orifice, only of being penetrated. Meanwhile, both men know in the deepest sense what their partner is experiencing, and vice versa. Nuts a flying in gods face, for nary one baby born.

Is this the purest form of connection in our corporeal lives?

Is there some planet deep in the vast cosmos that is all gay men, with one queen bee for reproductive purposes? A society that flourishes free from the binaries of sex.

Less confusion, less unmatched furniture sets or dirty sidewalks. No more jihads carried out in the name of the unknowable beauty of women.

The circus act men go through to attract the opposite sex. The grinding, the sacrifices of health and better judgment. We cannot help but give our energy to their beauty and poise. But guys like yourselves can live a pure existence, intertwined and aligned in pursuit of pleasure and ascension?”

“Sir, here is your 20oz Americano.”

The two men paused, looked at each other, then me, winked with a wry smile and walked on. They had an answer, but they deferred this time.

Then I saw a woman with the most beautiful butt, bright eyes, and long shiny hair walk in with a somewhat hunched, dehydrated looking man with clean shoes and a nice watch. He bought them both coffees and avocado toast (gluten free bread you idiot), and they sat by the window.

She browsed her phone in silence while he looked out on the street. Soon she picked up a call, laughing and chatting while delicately putting bread morsels in her mouth with her chicken talon nails.

She carried on for 10 minutes while our morose friend sipped his Americano, watching the cars fly by. His face remained unchanged, but I felt all of his emotions play out behind his eyes.

It could have been a first date or 10 years into a marriage, you can tell when a dynamic is written and fulfilled immediately. She is hot enough that you can provide, sit silently, and be a doting partner because her immaculate prize swings in front of you at Kroger.

Maybe behind closed doors there is real depth and nurturing? These are two evolved and highly in sync people and I’m just projecting? But I do know opposites attract. The farther apart that two humans look physically, the more that money and a perfect body can call out and find each other in the dark. The bank account fills the wine glass for the round, bouncy butt and warm eye contact in the Italian restaurant. What could be better than her smiling at you genuinely? I could just be completely jealous and making this shit up. But I do know how a woman can steal your brain function quickly.

Is there a power balance here? Is it the perfect provider, providee balance, flower and bee that we need to keep the wheels turning? Would we be consumers, builders, warriors, or just hole up in our basements masturbating if women weren’t charming us.

But instead, you just watch her talk on the phone, hear her nails click on the keyboard. Pay for it all, because you can’t stand the thought of not being near this mundane magnetism. It doesn’t make any sense rationally.

Power dynamics, sex, God, coffee shops. It’s all a wash in the end when we’re old and grey and reminiscing. The delicate dance is gone.

 I’ve never had sex with a man. I’ve never walked behind a woman I’ve called my own who was blessed with ancestral perfection too pristine to not be doted on.

But you’ll never know if you don’t ask why? I’ve had a few too many Americanos. I’ve had a few too many thoughts that floated confidently into the ether without being challenged. I’ve projected my own shortcomings and insecurities on happy couples because of a jealous simmering. Is it even real? Now’s the day to ask. I walked up to the window where they sat.

“Excuse me, ma’am?”

Gravity Shifts and Grocery Stores

by Connor M, posted in People, Philosophical woo, Uncategorized

Kroger grocery store midday on a Tuesday. Winter still around in Nashville, you feel it most in the parking lot. The people who normally stroll through the parking lot like kings on parade are actually putting up a brisk pace. Trash tumbleweed and cold cigarette smoke hit you right before the sliding doors open. I started hearing a child shrieking behind me.

It’s the nervous high-pitched yelps a child might make on Christmas, mixed with some anxiety. It immediately sours my mood as I walk in the warm lobby. Why didn’t I hear a soothing mother’s voice hushing him? I head to the carrots, perturbed.

“Ah… Ahh Ah!” Little rapid fire blurts, then silence. They follow in behind me. Now it can be heard in the whole store. I turn around to see a little kid sitting in a cart. He can’t be more than 3 or 4, swinging legs dangling through the holes. His mother is overweight, looks like they’re struggling a bit, but she has a huge smile on her face. You can tell undefeatable energy when you see it. “AH, ahh”.. he bleats on.

She stands next to a man near the entrance. They’re beaming at each other for a moment, and she rapidly moves her hands to start talking in sign language. He nods and signs back.

They carry on, with the little child smoke alarm still going off. People skirt around them, confused. The two are locked in, their faces and hands show two friends catching up at a coffee shop. The child continues. I stood by the produce and watched for a beat too long.

 I’m a sensitive person, I will fully admit I suffer more from sounds, textures, and spatially and spiritually unaware people than others do. This odd little family juxtaposition entertained and annoyed me. I wonder what everyone else briskly moving by thought.

Does the mother know or simply not care? Is this child responding to never speaking out loud with anyone by just yelling out? Is this the rhino and the little bird on the savanna living in symbiosis to help each other? God smiled on this Deaf mother and her Siren son pairing.

Her warm, unconcerned smile could be a rare time he sees that reaction, this pairing couldn’t be out of randomness. The cosmic balance walking around Kroger looking at bananas.

We all go about our lives tumbling and yelling and butting heads or melding in with others, circling in orbit hoping to find our gravitation counterpoint. The romantic in me hopes I can find this partner by luck or action, the calm deaf person to my wailing boy. The antidote to occasional genius or madness with a warm, calm demeanor.

Meanwhile I’m strolling through Kroger head down, working, going to the gym. No drastic bends to the fabric of normality, trying to present as cool and collected.

Maybe I have to get so hot and uncomfortable that I let the steam out at the grocery store, or Twitter? I plow forward with everything on my sleeve. Everybody is broadcasting something; has some frequency that can complement and balance another. The mother and son some odd reminder that maybe there is a point to it. I try to pick up alterations in the daily life, later that day on the same busy road I saw another kind of shift.

Coffee Shop

That afternoon at the coffee shop. Homeless and drunks and hipsters all working away at something. It’s a place of quiet conversations and politeness, political correctness and funky couches that have their own Instagram account. I saw another glitch. A homeless lady walked into shop slamming the door behind her. She ignored every hello; how can I help you?

I looked up to see her, huge backpack slouching off the shoulder, burnt from head to toe and layered in heavy coats. She went to the counter, grabbed the bathroom key and strolled to the back to lock herself in. Some murmurs from the workers, a subtle smile to each other.

After a couple minutes, as simply as she came in, she walked out of the bathroom with the key, again ignoring the barista calling after her. This time all eyes left their bible studies group and almond lattes to follow her on her march. Like the aforementioned kings of the parking lot, she strolled right past everyone. “Ma’am!” She swung open the front door, stepped off the curb and onto the busy street. The barista charged after. He intercepted her as she was about to Frogger her way through traffic.

She was unaware of every person, custom, traffic law. She said nothing but had everyone’s attention for that brief period. We all sat in brief discomfort of her signal, slapped physically and olfactorily.

There was nobody there to offset her heavy presence, but she could have been on her way to meet her counterpoint on the other side of the road. She could be bulldozing normality and serving looks to wake us up from our mundane discomforts. Eventually she’ll run into traffic or a life changing opportunity.

Or do you just go down the middle and not need the balance? Be palatable. Work, drink, weather, football, complaints and aspirations that won’t turn any heads in the grocery store.

There’s people at grocery stores and coffee shops and street corners who are heavy walking billboards of harsh truths. Autistic infants, patient mothers, homeless women plowing into traffic. We’ll scramble to avoid looking at ugly realities.

The more fortunate polish their billboard every day, online and in real life. Annoyed by the yelling infant, buying craft beer, curating the same sheen in mind, body, and status.

The harsher your truth the more drastic the balance.

I have to figure out where my weight goes. All the dogshit humanity beneath my Republican haircut wants to breathe. It’ll pull and repel rather than just cling to a false self-image. I’m not an algorithm, despite how much optimization seems to build your prestige.

My ideas or sadness or joy will only matter if seen unfiltered.  When I walk into a room with only the weight of my presence and not my baggage, I’ll find a genuine conversation. Be the squealing infant when you need to say it, rather than burying it with dopamine hits. Grab the key and walk into traffic instead of pruning your eyebrows. No more diet coke friendships that feel good on the surface and make you sick. No more hiding the dark, let the light find it.

Okay with not understanding

by Connor M, posted in Mountain, People, Uncategorized

The dough-eyed love birds in Aladdin gear drift through alleyways under the looming Andes mountains and ripping winds. They sound like patchouli wind chimes, walking hand and hand, Arabian scarves over their mouth. Today isn’t a Tuesday- it’s day three of a Kambo cleanse, in the dry season, during a retrograde. Tomorrow will be a nice Temezcal to wash it down.

I walked by their tents by the river a number of times, the most bizarre display of new colonialism I’ve ever witnessed. French and Greek and German wanderers congregated on this “free” patch of land off a road to set up life.

Up a mountain road, amongst scrub brush and piney trees a small river runs under a bridge. The Wanderers took planes across the world. They packed buses, shuffled their hairy feet, and did piggyback rides giggling to arrive at this stream. They found the perfect grassy patch, stripped and hung their clothes up. Sometimes you’ll catch a breast glint in the sun, hear them howl at the moon on clear nights.

During the day, Peruvian construction workers on the road watch the Wanderers stumble out of the woods to slink down to the town for a day of spiritual loitering. The workers are are plowing and graveling that turn to ensure smooth passage for the local cholas going up and down with their goods. The workers barely look up as the Wanders move past.

They’re perfectly tanned, rustic body-odored, bowing as they squeeze into the town bus. Little Peruvian babies stare up at them from their mothers’ laps. The bare skin, the trinkets, their disarming smiles are completely new sights.

I always wondered whether the Pisac Wanderers were as happy as their ostentatious greetings to one another. Sometimes the most elaborate weddings are because the marriage was never meant to work out, performance art. Kissing, soul gazing, hugs last so long they seem like soldiers returning from war.

However, I couldn’t fault the singing kirtans where they all congregated once a week. They were such joyous events. Bundled together on pillows, singing in unison, making sure to always touch. Watching them I saw youth and hope and unfiltered joy that’s hard to find in America sometimes, so I was probably jealous.

I tried to extract meaning and depth, to see them as young hedonistic Theroux’s living the way we were meant to. They have tan and the crust of earth in every orifice of their body, except their perfect teeth. There had to be deeper earthly wisdom to accompany that. But so many conversations I found myself lost in platitudes, spiritual puff.

They would be delivering a monologue of the previous night’s ritual chemical unwinding, the drama and beauty and unimaginable smells. I’m nodding but lose track. I continue to eat my apple, watching a dog look for somewhere shit in the alley. Mhm. Let’s hug, transfer good energy and carry on.

What was left after the exploring the daily chemical rabbit holes and astrological visions?

I was the sober, slightly older guy enchanted by their bounce and vigor, but I usally felt a bit lost and alone at the end of the day. My bananas would end up missing, somebody didn’t flush. I imagine they may have felt the same disillusionment were it not for the cuddle puddles and living in tents together.

Sometimes they got a little too deep.

One night an older couple came over for a rapé ceremony (pronounced “rah-peh”). During this, my friend  would blow a very strong tobacco powder through a horn directly into their sinuses. It induces a temporary but powerful head rush, sometimes vomiting, sometimes deities.

The couple arrived as my friend was setting up the space. They were grey, late 50s, smile lines all over, with Quebecois accents. They had deerskin or other woodland creature clothes, feathers in the hair. These were lifelong wanderers of the cosmos not recent converts. They had the patient, knowing grin that you hope to have at some point in your aged wisdom, without letting it become a scowl.

They sat upon their pillows. The candles were lit and intentions were whispered. My friend began by reading a short offering. Then the woman positioned herself upright, signaled she was ready. The horn went directly in her nose, and a loud “whoosh” sent the powder flying into her brain.

What ensued would have been considered a psychotic break depending on where and when it took place. She began shaking, in a wave from stomach up to her head. Fits that seemed to go up and down as the powder settled in her cavities.

Then began the voices. Glossalalia as they call in Southern Baptist traditions. The woman sat inches from my friend chanting a completely unintelligible language, but with all the inflections and tone of a deep confessional. 30 seconds of rabid speech, followed by a pause, then an inflection. Then on she went. We sat in silence.

I was just told there was a community dinner tonight. I should have known better. I was at the dinner table with 2 of the other girls, admittedly giggling like them. They looked to me for reassurance but I was dumbstruck.

For minutes she sat carrying on this conversation with my friend. Her eyes were closed and my friend held her hand and just kept nodding her head, not daring to turn back to look at the stunned group behind her. I couldn’t gauge whether she was freaking out, or found herself some sort of prophet to get this reaction. Head to head, hands intertwined they sat cross legged locked in this communication.

In the midst of this, 3 faces appeared at the window. Two guys and a girl of the tribe had just finished a day long peyote journey walking through the mountains. Inti, the bearded leader, came in and sprung to action. He sat next to my friend and rubbed the older lady’s back reassuredly. The other two came and sat with us, similarly amused and terrified.

Eventually it subsided, the lady and her husband spoke for a moment in hushed voices, a quick hug and that was that.

From ages 21 to 60 in this room together, witnessing an utterly bizarre spiritual /demonic moment together.

Being clear-headed is an alienating experience. But there’s being sober at a bar with drunks talking about football. Then there’s sitting at a kitchen table in the mountains of Peru with mostly strangers from all over the world, watching an elderly woman speaking in tongues. Here they elevated the game.

The Wanderers arrived fresh faced. They get older and snort spices that make them speak in tongues. They fight against the Urubamba winds and travelers gut until the money or motivation runs out, then they’re kicked up with the dust and carried away. Like clockwork the next group will creep out by the riverside. The Peruvian road workers will see them and have a puzzled look, but it passes in a second and they continue moving the gravel. They don’t give it another thought, perhaps they’re on to something.

As I write this, across the busy main street is a man with his pants around his thighs, sitting on the sidewalk sideways with his balls draped over the curb. Cars are zooming by in both directions. People to his right can’t see his sack, but my angle from the coffee shop across the street somehow offered this blessed view. Next door to him at the laundromat, theres a little kid running around outside next to her dad. Ballsack man waves, the dad waves back.

Maybe it’s better not know. Maybe I just take awareness too seriously. So I travel to a random mountain town In Peru, watch my elders snort spice, and my brain tries to put a nice bow on an otherwise inexplicable family drug dinner night. Awareness costs more in the end.

The Peruvian Road workers don’t try to figure out why the Wanderers are there. The dad is too tired to walk by the homeless man and see his balls taking a siesta against the curb. I’m sitting somewhere in the middle with the same choice. Maybe it’s better not to ask.