Stand By Me

Writer:

Ray Brower’s body was found. But neighter our gang nor their gang got the credit. In the end we decided that an anonymous phone call was the best thing to do. We headed home. And although many thoughts raced through our minds we barely spoke. We walked through the night and made it back to Castle Rock a little past five o’clock on Sunday morning, the day before Labor Day. We’d only been gone two days, but somehow the town seemed different. Smaller.

As time went on we saw less and less of Teddy and Vern until eventually they became just two more faces in the halls. That happens sometimes. Friends come in and out of your life like busboys in a restaurant. I heard that Vern got married out of high school, had four kids and is now the forklift operator at Arsenal Lumberyard. Teddy tried several times to get into the Army but his eyes and his ear kept him out. The last I heard, he’d spent some time in jail. He was now doing odd jobs around Castle Rock.

Chris did get out. He enrolled in the college courses with me and although it was hard, he gutted it out like he always did. He went on to college and eventually became a lawyer. Last week he entered a fast food restaurant. Just ahead of him, two men got into an argument. One of them pulled a knife. Chris who would always make the best peace tried to break it up. He was stabbed in the throat. He died almost instantly.

Although I haven’t sen him in more than ten years, I know I’ll miss him forever. I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anybody?

columbus circle

thoughts, while waiting for the c train to take me uptown on the west side:

“where the fuck is this goddamn train? it’s soooo hot! ok, don’t move. don’t move. stand still and you will feel cool. LIES! where is the train?! where the hell is it coming from anyway? (looking at subway map)… goddamn it, BROOKLYN! i wouldn’t be waiting here for so goddamn long if there WAS no brooklyn!”

spidermen

dad: karen, did you see the news?

me: no, what is it?

dad: there’s a guy climbing the new york times building!

me: oh yeah, that happened earlier today. some french guy who goes around the world doing that sort of thing.

dad: no, it’s another guy.

me: no… it’s the french guy. i’m telling you, he does this professionally and he got caught this morning.

dad: it’s a second guy! he’s not a professional and he’s just climbing right now!

me: (getting up) shoot. i thought it was the french guy.

dad: i told you.

me: you know, the guy earlier had a bag of chalk with hiim.

dad: at least he was professional about it.

texas

when my parents first bought a second home in texas, i freaked out because in the end, it came down between texas and hawaii and for the love of god, texas won. i resisted to the idea of having to, eventually, fly down for family holidays in a state that represents a brand of politics that i don’t necessarily agree with. but i’m a mercurial little creature, so after my first visit, i gave houston a little room in my heart and after many visits that followed, i’ve officially become a lover of the lonestar state. ok, maybe that’s overreaching, but i like it and i enjoy my time there. the people are nicer, it’s cleaner, and when you order a taco salad, the people down there really live up to the “it’s bigger and better in texas,” by serving up a tortilla shell that’s bigger than your head.

and that, my friend, is magic.

this product contains bitterant

by bitterant, the manufacturer completely means some sort of chemical that’s just full-on bitter and count on me not to take it seriously at all.

rewind to this afternoon when i decided to clean my computers with compressed air. and i’m not going to lie– i love it. i love watching little bits of god-knows-what flying around because that just means it’s not in my keyboard anymore and yay! that means it’s clean! also, i quite enjoy the fact that the compressed air can, by some scientific miracle, becomes ridiculously cold, which makes cleaning out any sort of crevice with compressed air much more enjoyable in the summer months.

but given the fun times of earlier in the day, i’m now sitting here typing, licking my lips and thinking wtf, why on earth is my face bitter. i’ve washed twice already and it’s still BITTER BITTER BITTER. apparently they put a bitterant in the can in order to dissuade people from huffing and getting high. so this is what i get for going all compressed air happy with myself today. i’m officially bitter, people. it’s about high time! lol.

conversations

we had a civil conversation today. it usually starts with someone writing something completely random and it progresses into a disjointed string of words that work. and we sit and pretend that it’s a conversation. maybe this is what it was supposed to end up being in the end. i can’t complain– it’s sort of comfortable when we don’t venture into weird territory.

i also started a twitter account in order to satiate my need to randomly write things down. i figure it’s better to jot it down on the web then to actually write it down on a piece of paper. besides, i’m in the business of saving the earth, yo.

starbuckian effort

after class, i headed over to my sister’s, but not before checking out le pain quotidien. i decided after seeing the assortment of fruit tarts in the window that it would be a bad idea to wander in to look for sandwiches because knowing myself, i’d totally end up leaving with a huge loaf of bread that’d i’d declare was so worth it because you know, it’s german and artisan. i knew that i needed a coffee so i figured that i’d pick on up at the starbucks closer to my sister’s place. when i got there, something was wrong with the door and the flamboyant manager was yelling at one of the employees to leave the sugars alone so that he could do something about *wave right hand up and down* the growing line of customers.

so the method to their madness was to place an order with one person, pay at another and pick it up from the former sugar packet arranger who was now super barrista. problem was that super barrista couldn’t get a thing right. also, order girl asked me what i wanted five times. the first four times, i had no trouble muttering “grande, iced, non-fat latte.” by the fifth time, it came out “griced, non-fat latte.” they laughed. and i laughed. then i figured that i should probably get a sandwich with this drink because without any food in my system, i run the risk of having a caffeine-induced panic attack.

the wrap sandwich wasn’t so hot. i was attracted by the fact that it was labeled “veggie wrap with roasted tomato cream cheese” but that was a lie because there was barely any cream cheese and in the end, i ate rabbit food. though some would argue that it would qualify as upscale rabbit food being that there was some arugula thrown in for good measure.

a horse of course

so happy that i don’t have to hear about this horse and that horse and all sorts of obscure clown names for animals that are undeniably abused and overworked. SO OVER IT.

“it’s like home”

those three words make me hate the movie, garden state and i suppose i’ll stop that thought before i launch into a full-fledged written explanation of why, which, will only make me sad. and today i had coffee! and cleaned! and was energized! and did laundry! and vacuumed! and yes, a sense of order makes me happy.

i guess the point of this post is to sort of put it out there without actually putting it out there. it’s my way of letting my fingers type it out and figure it out while my mind sort of falls into some sort of nostalgic slideshow of the last few years. not being on instant messenger for the last week has really been a godsend. not to say that i haven’t gone on my computer, because i have– but only to check e-mail and watch AMAZING top chef reruns. seriously, whoever thought of youtube was a genius and even grander kudos to the guy who uploaded the top chef episodes. the only problem is that this show makes me feel hungry every two minutes and i have to admit, this is not good for the well-being of my ass. sad.

i’m been feeling better than usual. spring breakage allowed time to spend with people who matter. my sister and i hauled ass last week and walked around central park. i embarrassed her with my need to take photos every few minutes, but part of my younger sisterly prerequisites is to embarrass her to no end, so she’s used to it. now that we’ve matured (or not so much) into our personalities, we’ve been a little more open with one another. i guess we all had to go through the i-hate-you-because-you’re-related-to-me stage, though the hatred was sort of emitted more from her end of things. i finally told her that i thought her ex was really weird and she agreed. and that was the end of that. but something new i’ve learned about her: we share a disdain for large crowds and often pepper our conversations with, “i hate people.” we don’t really hate people, we just don’t like the annoying kind. and swarming because that sucks. in the end, it took about two hours before she found a spot where she was comfortable laying out the work-issued picnic blanket that turned out to be too short for my entire body. we had to move five minutes after finally picking a spot because she didn’t like how we were in the end zone of a football tossing game between two very uncoordinated children. she’s also not too fond of frisbees but that has more to do with getting dinged in the head with one in college, a casualty of super-ultimate-frisbee-playing asians. hell, we’re asian too but more of the indoorsy variety. we stuck to piano and reading. nerd burgers all around, man.

i never did the cliche trip to cancun spring break. one year i took off with a friend and spent a week in washington d.c. visiting every possible museum and monumnet. the glare of the sun off the marble gave us a tan and when we got back, people assumed we spent the break tanning at the beach. who wants a beach when you can see cherry blossoms and the constitution!? yup, TOTAL nerd burger. these days, i spend my off-days surrounded by things and people that i love. they make me laugh, they know me and there’s never any pressure to be something other than myself. it’s not like home. it just is.

hipster thuggery

never made it to the gym. shame on me. SHAME! but i made it to the mall, which was pretty uneventful in itself. i’ve been overspending lately, so i tried tons of stuff but walked away with a lipstick for mother dearest and lotion. good job. i suppose today was more of a sight-seeing adventure; a practice in the art of people-watching, and malls are pretty conducive for such a project. malls attract an odd mix of people and since i went around 2 pm, i was treated to full-viewing of today’s youth. from what i could see, the new thing in this neighborhood are hipster thugs.

hipster thugs: wearing insanely tight pants of the ROYGBIV variety, highlighter-neon nikes, randomly patterned linen scarves (that serve no real purpose along the lines of keeping you warm, but hey, let’s just drape that shit around the neck in a purposeful manner so as to look haphazard), studded (p)leather bling and in place of the sullen emo expression, a scowl that still screams “i can still fuck you up even if i’m wearing ridiculously tight pants.” if you’re really lucky, you’ll catch one completing the look with bright-colored plastic wannabe raybans that sort of resemble the funny glasses my mom would buy at the 99 cents store to stick into my birthday loot bags.

they’ve also managed to infiltrate my neighborhood starbucks. i suspect that they’re the badass mofos who steal the wood coffee stirrers to like, you know, fuck us all up with our inability to stir our coffee, because THAT’S BADASS! AND RAD! AND FUCK ALL OF YOU BECAUSE NOW YOU CAN’T INCORPORATE YOUR SPLENDA INTO YOUR DRINK, SO TAKE THAT! most of them come from the local junior high school, cut class and park their asses in the giant sofas by the sugar and milk table. i think i’d be more scared of them if i didn’t already know that at the end of the day, they go home and hug a stuffed animal, softly crying about how the nerd-worthy starbucks barista seemed really indifferent to their love advances, all the while thinking, must. get. tighter. pants. brighter. nikes. and. perhaps. a. faux-hawk.